Big Trees

          I've taken to saying outlandish things to strangers in bars. The other night I told a man that I liked hunting moose. When he pressed me for details about the type of gun I used, I replied "I use a musket, old school." I've learned that if you speak with conviction humans are apt to believe it.
          This part is true. I spent three days on a forty-nine acre ranch near Sequoia. The ranch had three springs that emptied into a swimming pond. There was a herd of goats with long menacing horns on their heads. The goats scared easily. Maybe they knew I was thinking of them as bowls of soup. There was a dog named Roxanne from the great Pyrenees mountains. She escorted us to our cabin at night to protect us from mountain lions and bears. We hiked near the ranch and came upon giant trees. Some of the trees were over three thousand years old. Fire couldn't kill them. Lightning had tried and failed. Loggers brought some of them down, but the trees were too big for them to move, so they lost money.
          There were Indian spirits, but talking about Indian spirits makes you sound like a lunatic so I didn't say a word. And if you yelled into the distance, the distance yelled back.