Ducks and geese flew up and down the river all winter and the man who owned the sheep had given him and the other sheepherders a lot, an almost surrealistic amount, of 44:40 Winchester ammunition to keep the wolves away, though there weren’t any wolves in that country.

The owner of the sheep had a tremendous fear of wolves getting to his flock. It bordered on being ridiculous if you were to go by all the 44:40 ammunition he supplied his sheepherders.

Cameron heavily favoured this ammunition with his rifle that winter by shooting at the ducks and geese from a hillside about two hundred yards from the river. A 44:40 isn’t exactly the greatest bird gun in the world. It lets go with a huge slow-moving bullet like a fat man opening a door. Cameron wanted those kind of odds.

The long months of that family-debted-exile winter passed slowly day after day, shot after shot until it was finally spring and he had maybe fired a few thousand shots at those ducks and geese without hitting a single one of them.

Cameron loved to tell that story and thought it was very funny and always laughed during the telling. Cameron told that story just about as many times as he had fired at those birds years in front of and across the bridge of 1900 and up the decades of this century until he stopped talking.

Perfect California Day

I was walking down the railroad tracks outside of Monterey on Labor Day in 1965, watching the Sierra shoreline of the Pacific Ocean. It has always been a constant marvel to me how much the ocean along there is like a high Sierra river with a granite shore and fiercely-clear water and turns of green and blue with chandelier foam shining in and out of the rocks like the currents of a river high in the mountains.

It’s hard to believe that it’s the ocean along there if you don’t look up. Sometimes I like to think of that shore as a small river and carefully forget that it’s 11,000 miles to the other bank.

I went around a bend in the river and there were a dozen or so frog people having a picnic on a sandy little beach surrounded by granite rocks. They were all in black rubber suits. They were standing in a circle eating big slices of watermelon. Two of them were pretty girls who wore soft felt hats on top of their suits.

The frog people were of course all talking frog people talk. Often they were child-like and a summer of tadpole dialogue went by in the wind. Some of them had weird blue markings on the shoulders and down the arms of their suits like a brand-new blood system.