Welcome to our monthly . . . no, that’s not right . . . quarterly . . . no . . . our much anticipated prayer letter!

I’ve never dedicated an issue of The Chronicles to anyone before, but I’d like to dedicate this one to Paul and Marian Taylor. Paul was responsible for cultivating my interest in bird watching, and I really miss the trips that I used to take with him and his wife, Marian, scouring the countryside for feathered critters. I thought of Paul a couple of days ago as I was walking to the house from the church when I heard a boreal chickadee in our backyard. I was excited because the only birds that I have seen or heard for the past three months have been common ravens. My field guide assures me that there are, indeed, other species that hang around here during the winter months, but I haven’t seen any. Don’t get me wrong– I appreciate ravens as much as the next guy. Ravens are pretty nice as far as trash-scavenging, raspy-voiced, debauched, depraved birds go, but they make me nervous. Okay, let’s face it: Ravens are the criminal underworld of the avian community. Ravens are mentally unstable. While traveling through British Columbia on our way up here, I witnessed a brutal attack by a pair of ravens. The victim, you ask? An innocent gas pump. The birds repeatedly jumped up and attacked the pump with both taloned feet at the same time. They raised quite a racket. A man that witnessed the assault with me claimed that they were attacking their own reflections in the shiny aluminum sides of the pump; even if that’s true, the story illustrates the depth of their dementia. The attack continued for several hours. Every time a car pulled up to get gas, the ravens retreated to a nearby spruce tree to keep an eye on their target. As soon as the car pulled away, the murderous beasts went back to their ravaging. The pump survived, but will undoubtedly be scarred for life.

The plan for the next couple of years goes something like this: 1) Build our house this summer (it will actually be the first staff residence– when we retire it will stay with the camp– it will not be our personal property) 2) Build the lodge/kitchen/multi-purpose building in the summer of 2007. 3) Also begin having campers come the summer of 2007. (Conditions will be a bit primitive: cooking will be done in a tent; the kids will sleep in tents, etc.) 4) Build cabins for the kids in the summer of 2008. 5) Also begin construction on the chapel in the summer of 2008. 6) Begin Bible studies in surrounding villages as soon as we have the means and opportunity.

I’ve resumed work on our web site, www.craigsinalaska.org, and I will be adding to it in the next couple of weeks. One of the things I intend to add is a photo gallery, so keep an eye on the site. By the way, I made a rather disconcerting discovery yesterday. “Craigsinalaska” is not recognized by my spell checker (naturally), but do you know what is at the top of the list of suggested replacements? “Criminals.” Kind of makes me nervous.

Now for a couple of stories that I promised you around Thanksgiving: “Bear Attack!” and “Really Stupid Moose (redundant) Hunting Story.” First, “Bear Attack!”

I don’t recall whether or not I told you, but I took the kids camping a number of time towards the end of summer and in the fall. We set up a couple of tents about five miles outside of the village close to a nice sized lake. It’s a beautiful place, but we were warned that there were a lot of bears in that area. We weren’t too worried about the bears– we made sure that food was kept put away, made plenty of noise, etc., and the threat of a bear attack is generally greatly exaggerated. Besides that, we always went rather heavily armed, and I wouldn’t mind putting a bear in the freezer anyway (I’ll try anything once). To make a long story short, we had been away from the camp site for a couple of weeks, and Heidi and I decided to walk out to the lake to check on our camping gear. As we rounded the last bend of the clearing bordering our camp site, we should have been able to see the top of our tent over the tops of the bushes, but we couldn’t see anything. “Well,” I told Heidi, “Either someone found our stuff and stole it, or a bear has paid us a visit.” We cautiously approached the site, Smith & Wesson .500 magnum in hand, and discovered that we had, indeed, been visited by a bear. Our tent was shredded, the fiberglass poles had been bitten in two, our sleeping bags and pillows were chewed badly, and even our camp chairs had taken a beating. Rachael’s pillow was about half eaten. (Memo to self: remind Rachael not to use her vanilla scented body lotion before we camp in the future). Anyway, a lesson was learned (avoid vanilla-scented body lotion while camping in bear country), and if you were looking for a humorous story, I’m sorry, but I had a little trouble find anything funny about this one. I did wonder if the bear wondered how something that smelled so good could taste so terrible.

Now for “Really Stupid Moose (redundant) Hunting Story”

We waited. And waited. And waited. After a couple of hours we heard a shot that sounded like it was at least a mile away farther up the creek. After a pause, the shot was followed by two more quick shots. Now, if you’ve done much hunting, you probably realized that pattern sounds a lot like a missed shot at an unsuspecting moose, and then two more misses at a running, exceedingly suspicious moose. Either that or a man unsuccessfully trying to fight off an enraged grizzly. Now what was I supposed to do? If Gerald had a moose down, he was going to need help. If a bear had Gerald down, he was going to need help (Gerald, not the bear). If Gerald had missed, and was still trying to get within range to take another shot, he not only would not need help, but would probably be unhappy if I showed up unexpectedly.

Well, we were all back together, and I for one was greatly relieved. We got in the boat, and headed back downstream to find a better place to camp. We were traveling very slowly (navigating a shallow creek in the dark is a little risky) when we saw a large black blob on a sandbar. I was pretty sure the blob was a moose, and I was looking at it through the scope on my rifle, trying to see two things 1) Whether it was a moose or not, and 2) If it was a moose, whether it was a bull or not. I could finally tell that it was a moose, but I couldn’t see any headgear. I shouted to Gerald over the boat motor to ask if it looked like a bull to him, and he yelled back, “Yes! Shoot! Shoot!” Well, I still couldn’t see any antlers, or the cross-hairs on my scope for that matter, but my guide was telling me to shoot, so I shot. It was then that I realized that there were in fact three big black blobs on the sandbar. Two of the black blobs were sporting huge antlers, but the blob in the middle– the one at which I had fired– lacked the required appendages that would have rendered it legal game. (Fortunately, the darkness and the movement of the boat foiled me, and I missed) Gerald shifted into high gear and made a run at the moose– none of which seemed inclined to leave the area. As we roared toward them, the two bulls slowly climbed the bank, and headed off in two different directions across a meadow that had burned a year or two before. The cow held her ground until we ran up onto the sandbar about ten yards from her. Finally, she too wandered off in the general direction of the bulls. “Amazing,” I thought. “How stupid could the cow possibly be to stand there while she was being shot at, and run down by a motor boat?” Then the truth dawned upon me. The two bulls had been fighting over her– evidence of their scuffle was all over the sandbar. We, Gerald and I, had vanquished her suitors. I’m quite certain that she was looking at us thinking something like, “Well, you’re not what I expected, but here I am boys.”