How Disappointing

Anyone who has spent any time in the forest with Mike has heard him comment, “Take a little sashay out into the woods.” Loggers, mushroom pickers, hunters and visitors to our woodlands, have heard the comment.

I cannot think of any other grown man to use the word sashay as he does. To me when I hear sashay, I think of ladies in dresses to their ankles and a pretty little bonnet on their head, with a debonair escort to promenade around the town square.

To Mike, sashay means getting off the main roads, animal trails, and skid paths, and into the heart of the forest. A sashay to Mike could be a trek 10 minutes to several hours, from a scramble up to a ridge or a 3 mile pack.

After 40 years together, I noticed that I picked up on the word also. I was out in the area where we had planted cedar trees a couple weeks ago and mentioned to my right-hand-helper that we needed to take a little sashay over to the trees to see if the elk had been in grazing on the seedlings.

To my surprise, we found that not only had the elk come in to nip off all the tender ends of the trees, some of them were completely pulled out of the ground and left for dead.

The spots where they had been pulled from left gaping holes in the earth while the roots dried from exposure to the elements.

All around the planting area, big old elk footy prints marred the ground and the vegetation that had been growing there was torn up or trampled into a muddy mess.

We had taken a chance on planting these seedlings without benefit of cages to protect the trees, but this destruction was a lot more than expected.

More on cages will be coming up in new stories.