It was a treat. Ate a couple handfuls of huckleberries in the woods today. The reddish pink berries lit up the tree like a fireworks show on mushrooms. Do not see huckleberry bushes around here like you used to. Maybe it is just that I do not spend as much time in the woods as I did when I was a kid. When I was a kid I ate as many as I could without dying of diarrhea. Came close a couple times though. "Ma!" I would yell from the bathroom. "Call the doctor! I'm shitting myself to death!"
In the past the women of my tribe would have been in the woods collecting as many berries as they could carry away during the summer season. The berries would be dried or preserved in the liver oil of baby seals. If my tribe was particulary advanced the medicine man would have brewed up some of the berries into huckleberry beer.
The Hammer turned up her nose when I offered her a few in the palm of my hand. She had her treat a little later when she found a dead racoon kit well off the trail. Do not think she ate much of the long dead animal, which must have once been cute as Tiger Williams was to his mother. She just shook it like a wild dog.
You never know what you are going to find in the woods.
1 comment:
I was just talking about the woods last night. I don't mean the park woods. I mean the woods that were just there when I was a kid. It wasn't a park or a nature preserve or anything like that. There were just places where there were trees where nobody (grownups) bothered you. All of that shit has been fenced in now. When I go to the woods I mean a place that is owned by some branch of government. I never see anybody in those woods but grownups. I know there are places where homeless semi hippie kids go hide out in the woods. Nobody bothers them. I know they're there, because I talk to them, but I don't know where they are really. They are pretty smart aned don't leave trails back into the bushes. I used to live in the middle of about 100 acres of apple trees. Not really woods, but there were lots of hedgerows with blackberries. Sometimes I'd hear some assholes out in my yard picking blackberries. They weren't really assholes, but I would have to check them out to make sure they weren't about to set the orchard on fire or leave a pile of garbage next to my house. Maybe they were secretly members of a tribe that drinks blackberry beer.
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