As a shaman, I have to expect the world of dreams to regularly supersede mundane reality. It is just part of the job. Saturday night was no different. It was a wonderfully boring day at deer camp. I had done some touch-ups on the utility shed, done a little squirrel hunting with #3 son, taken a nap, and done up a mess of ribs on the grill. I do Texas-style beef ribs modeled after my memories of Cooper’s BBQ in Llano– W’s favorite.

I checked the web before turning in: nothing on Drudge. Weather.com was predicting no rain for a week for Cincinnati as well as our patch out on the northern edge of the Bluegrass in Kentucky. After a month of spending weekends on the road and a hard summer at work, this had been the ideal way to decompress. We turned in about nine—too early to actually sleep, but Girlfriend and I just lay about listening to the late summer night noises and eventually drifted off.

Along about 2 AM, that perfect lull ended. I awoke for no apparent reason from a sound sleep. As I lay in bed, I saw a flash of lightning. I figured it was car lights—remember, no rain for a week. Then thunder rolled out over the ridges. That’s odd. It just could not be. I waited several minutes. There were a couple more flashes. The cattle on the neighboring farms took to lowing. Then, it happened.

They told me getting stung by a hornet was like getting hit with a baseball bat. I’d heard that since I was in short pants. Sure enough, the first time I got stung by a hornet, I immediately knew what had hit me. They were right. It does feel like a baseball bat. I had watched outdoor shows all my life. I knew exactly what it was; it just took a long while to believe what I was hearing. It was loud, it was close, it was clear. It was electric. It was an elk– One bugle, followed by three chelps. My guess is that it was within a few hundred yards of the house, and undoubtedly on my land. I sat up and listened for more, but that was it. Barney was up and at the windows in the flash, but all he did was peer through the screen and listen as I had.

In a while, I went out on the porch and listened some more. The cows were still going off now and then. The lightning and thunder were intermittent. What I was listening for was now gone, submerged back into the ocean of the night. While I was up, I closed up the truck windows and put a few tools in the shed and locked it back up. When I went in I fired up the PC and checked the weather radar. Sure enough, a large thunderstorm was moving through about 5 miles to the south. Mount Olivet and Cynthiana were getting pummeled, but we would probably get no rain until much later. I went back to bed and listened for a while before drifting back to sleep.

We had one elk through here a couple of years ago, came through about 5 miles to the south sporting a tracking collar. A few people saw it, and then it was gone. Every year now, we send in our $10 to the elk lottery for a once-in-a-lifetime chance at one of the 10 yearly elk tags. The elk are coming—more counties are getting included in the Elk Restoration Zone every year. Outside the zone, including my area, deer hunters can take an elk without even burning a deer tag. They just need to alert the wildlife officer so he can come out and inspect the carcass before processing.

So there you have it. The stuff dreams are made of—an elk in the backyard.

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