My chicken yard is adjacent to my garden. Usually this just serves to tease the little pea-brains, but last year at the end of the growing season, I threw open the gates to Valhalla. All of the birds that I had at the time loved it; they’d rampage through what was left of my tomatoes, pick bugs off the grapes, and scatter my compost pile from one end of the place to the other.

Of course, when it came time for planting season in the spring, we closed the gate again. Several of my more ornery hens resented this. Clip their wings all I wanted, they were still getting into that garden. Three feet of gate is nothing for a determined one-winged chicken. Since there were only a few of them, the havoc that they could wreak was minimal. They still take one bite off of each tomato that they can reach, and make dust baths among the peppers, and I still can’t keep compost in an actual pile. And they hide their eggs too. I’d find a nest here and there under plants and have to destroy those eggs. I didn’t know how old they were, so I didn’t want to crack one open and find it rotten.

But I hadn’t found a nest for at least a month. Since the usual suspects seem to be molting, I assumed that they’d just stopped laying. Now that they’re growing their feathers back, it’s time to start doing the old Easter Egg hunt again.

Until I walked out this evening to feed them. The usual naughty hen saw me coming through the fence, and high-tailed it back to her gate. Sometimes I squirt her with the hose when I catch her in the garden. All that’s taught her is to try not to be caught. Who says you can’t train a chicken? But after she’d left, I caught movement in the compost heap out of the corner of my eye.

Was I ever surprised to see, not only another hen, but a swarm of chickies bopping around her! Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen that particular hen in a while. I’m guessing now about three weeks, as that’s what it takes to hatch an egg. She has thirteen little ones with her, and her wings are spread out to try to give them all a place to hide. They must have just hatched, as some were still damp. She was taking them for their first walk! Had I known that she was broody, I would have set some food and water out for her to get to easily. I have no idea what she was drinking, as I don’t water the garden every day, but she was probably eating compost scraps. A hen can live quite well on those.

She was very happy to have an actual feeder and waterer, and crowded her babies around to show them. I set an empty dog crate with some shavings in it near where I found her, in case she wanted to hide in it, but I found her with her brood under the old dead Christmas tree that I just hadn’t cut into pieces yet. I guess it does make a good habitat; I originally put it out for the turkeys to shelter in.

It’s all very cute, and there’s nothing to liven up a dull day like surprise chickens. I assume that she’s not the only mother; the other two Easter Eggers and the Lakenvelder hen are all known to be naughty garden-layers. And the proud papas are probably both of my mature roosters. Big Red is clearly in the lineage of most of them, but it’s possible that Murray has a baby or two also. So the chicks are all half Wyandotte of one sort or another. It will be fun to watch them grow. She seems to be a good mama.

I’m trying very hard to refrain from going out and checking on them every fifteen minutes. I’m sure she’ll be fine. And it pays to have a sloppy garden!

Some of the best fun I had last weekend didn’t involve hunting at all. Instead of napping around camp when it was too hot for the deer to want to move, we trooped down to the creek below the meadow and went trout fishing instead.

Now, after my last fishing experience, I might have been dubious. But I was fortunately on solid ground the whole time, and if I happened to refrain from being vertical, it would be entirely my fault. So I was all for it.

I don’t have a ton of fishing on my resume at all. A little stream fishing with spinner baits, a little out of the bass boat, and a couple of deep sea trips are all that I’ve done. Shelley likes to fly fish though, and we brought tackle. Well, I thought we had; turns out that the rods in the locker in the camper shell were fly rods all right, but only one had a reel and that one was a spinner reel. And we didn’t have flies or bait or anything. No worries; Mike hooked us up with a couple of flies and Junior tied enough line to his rod to get the job done. So we went downstream and they went upstream and so began my lesson.

I’ve always liked poking around creeks, and it seems to me that fishing makes an excellent excuse for that. Even if you don’t get any fish. Junior gave me the basics of fly fishing with inadequate equipment. The fish were there, all right, tiny little wary things. They could see us and they were not impressed.

Eventually the early morning backed by the late night caught up with Junior, so he took a nap on the creek bank. I wondered how he was going to sleep with bugs crawling in his nose, but his business, not mine. My business was fishing!

I got a lot of nothing and kept moving downstream. Eventually I started getting nibbles on my soggy little fly. It was at that point that I realized that I’d neglected to ask Junior what to do if I got a bite. Does one set the hook in fly fishing? Would doing so fling a startled fish back over my head to land in the trees behind me? I guessed that I’d figure it out, one way or another, me and the fish.

The fish had other ideas. They knew damn well that I wanted to eat them, and they laughed their little fishy laughs at me as I tried to sneak up on them. Turns out that camouflage doesn’t work all that well on fish. Eventually I found a bit of a murky pool with a log hanging across it. I thought that would be as good a place as any to tease some fish with bits of metal and feather.  And they were nibbling there, and spitting the fly right back out, so that was fun.

Imagine my surprise, and that of the fish, when one of them failed to spit the hook back out. I’m sure she had intended to, but it got caught in her mouth. I’d accidentally hooked a fish!

OK, great, now what? Shelley had optimistically lent me her forceps to get hooks out, and I had those in my pocket along with a ziploc baggie for a creel. I managed to get my hands on the fish, who objected strenuously, and then I got the hook out of the fish. And then I promptly dropped the fish. Slippery boogers.

But fortunately I was still sitting on that log, so I got to recapture my trophy. I even managed to get the fish all bagged up and stuffed into my pocket where it continued to flop for an alarmingly long time. Fish had mangled my little fly, so I nipped it off the line and went to tie on a replacement fly. I didn’t remember the exact knot, but I’m good with knots, so I winged it. It was about then that I realized that this was a sport for which I might want to bring my reading glasses, as my arms aren’t quite long enough to see what I’m doing. But I got it done and happily dangled my fly in front of more, smarter fish for another hour or so before Junior found me. I proudly showed him my trophy and he cleaned it for me. I probably won’t be able to get away with asking for fish-cleaning lessons more than another dozen or two times, but he’s good-humored about it.

Shelley and Mike had caught three of the tiny creatures too, just enough for little appetizers before our elk entree that night. And yes, that size is legal to keep in that stream. She even cooked them up for us. I do think that this was the first fish that I’ve caught and then eaten on the same day. They’re even more delicious that way, and trout are pretty stinkin’ good to start with.

I have a feeling that I could really get into this hobby. Not in the yuppie way; I will be buying no waders and no fancy trout-fishing shoes, and the bad fly I tried to stick to my hat just fell off. But redneck trout fishing is right up my alley, I think. Junior has managed to procure me a fly rod with an actual reel and the heavier line on it, and found a creel for me in his dad’s garage. Since I’m not all that enthusiastic about bow hunting, this may distract me entirely from that sport, and I’m OK with that. Fish are delicious, after all.

I can understand the appeal of using a GPS to navigate to new and unfamiliar territory. I use it every now and then, now that I have a phone with it, to find things more quickly than I would be able to with a map. But I do still have a full set of maps in each vehicle, and a compass, and I pretty much know my North from my South anyway. Of course I do; those are really important skills to have in my particular hobbies, and I’ve always been fairly good at navigating by the seat of my pants.

Apparently the whole world doesn’t see navigation as a necessary life skill. Go figure; people with different priorities in life. Imagine that!

I can see how some people, probably city people but not exclusively so, might not have the need to develop this particular survival skill. I would presume that they know very well how to navigate in their chosen environment, which most likely would flummox me a little. I never know which lane to be in for the bridge, and I really have to pay attention to my stops on the rare occasions that I use public transit.

So there I was, sitting in camp yesterday, minding my own business reading a book. I must have an “ask directions” sort of face. First the people in the minivan went by, up a road I’d just come down. I snickered a little bit to Shelley, as that sure wasn’t a minivan sort of road. And no, I saw them figure that out and then back out. They drove by me and asked if the other road was good, and I told them that it was. They’d come in via the third direction, which involved fording a small creek, and the road I was on wasn’t on the Forest Service map. No biggie, and they had good humor about it.

Not twenty minutes later, here comes a car from the direction in which I’d sent the minivan. And not just a beater car, which one might expect to find in the mountains, on a dirt road, on the opening weekend of archery season. No, this was a spotless, new-looking little white car. They looked extremely relieved to see a human being, and stopped to ask me for directions too. I suggested that they might not want to go up either the four-wheel drive road or the creek crossing.

My jaw might still be dragging on the floor from my shock at hearing where they were trying to go. They had taken a series of spectacularly wrong turns on the way to Tenaya Lake. Which is on the east side of the Yosemite Park, and the highway they needed was at least an hour south of us. We were northwest of the park, closer to the Sonora Pass than the Tioga Pass. Where we were camped, we didn’t need four-wheel drive, but it’s not even a graveled road. In order to get as lost as they were, they had to make a series of compounding errors. I don’t know what started it, but somehow they’d managed to go from a perfectly paved highway onto progressively worse and less-paved roads. I happened to be sitting in a folding chair at the very last point that their Honda could have got to.

One would think that listening to one’s GPS when it tries to take you off the paved road might be a mistake, especially when one is trying to get between a regular town and a massive state park that one had been to the previous day. GPS units don’t work all that well in canyons sometimes, and as they would come out of one, it would probably recalculate a route for them, which they faithfully drove. But that stupid little machine brain refused to admit that it didn’t know what it was talking about, and they seemed not to recognize that they were not going in the right direction until very late in the game.

So I drug the Forest Service map back out. I had to guess at exactly where we were at myself, as our road wasn’t on it, but I know this country and can make a pretty good guess. I wrote down all of the turns for them, ironically on the back of their Yosemite entrance pass from the previous day. They still looked a little befuddled, so I finally gave up on that and just gave them the map, and drew the route on it in pen, with big marks on all of their turns. I told them that they’d have at least four hours of driving ahead of them, and that may have been a little liberal. After all, you can’t fling a car across some of those dirt roads anywhere near as fast as my truck can take them. But I did try to get across to them that this particular route would be on progressively better roads, and not to turn on any more dirt roads once they hit the gravel again. Oh, and I did check to see that they had drinking water, and they did, and snacks too.

To give them credit, they didn’t look like they were quite ready to kill each other yet. I can only imagine my husband or I getting us four hours’ worth of lost in a city and not having a rather high stress level. They couldn’t have seen very many people by the time they hit the gravel roads. I think that the wife was a little bit relieved that the human that they did find happened to be a woman and not some painted-up redneck man carrying a bow. Of course, the painted-up bow-carrying redneck men did walk back into camp just before the car got turned around and corroborated my directions, but who knows what they were thinking at that point.

I am still shaking my head. I have never met anyone so lost in my life, and I include in that number Big Jeff, who has no sense of direction and went downhill when he should have gone up and ended up at the highway instead of camp. At least he came trudging back into camp under his own power several hours later. Come to think of it, there was an early generation GPS involved in that incident too. Maybe the machines are out to get us. They’ll only eliminate those of us who can’t read maps.