Well, she did it. Mocksie locked up tonight. After the entry on why she writes an online diary, I'm not surprised. I considered locking my own, to begin with. Here I am, a nestling with maybe 200 hits, many of which are from me, and I already find myself writing for an audience, instead of myself. Already I can look back at my entries, and know which are for me.

After the attention she recently received, I can only imagine how mocksie felt. I wish I could say more, but I'm new on Dland, and had only barely begun to read mocksie, or any of you for that matter. But I can say I have a glimmer of understanding about her latest entries. I just hope that none of the rest of you feel the need to follow her lead.

So, on with the new.

While channel surfing last night, we came across one of those "real life" dramas about folks in California that saved a deer fawn from its dead mother's belly, and I realized we are only a few weeks away from orphan season. It happens every spring, when well-meaning ignorant folks pick up antelope fawns, or deer fawns or elk calves, thinking them to be orphans. Only once in my experience were they true orphans, under circumstances similar to the California report.

After the decades of nature shows, I cannot believe there are still people out there who think momma hangs around and watches her baby. They don't folks! They will go miles away, well out of sight, and be gone for hours! And once the kind-hearted people pick the little critter up, its chance at a normal life is gone. Finito.

Usually the outcome is not good. But the sugar-sweet tale on Fox news brought back memories of one incident that worked out well.

It was Sunday night in May, a little before 11pm, and my girlfriend (now wife) and I had finished a long weekend of work. I had just gotten the steaks out of the broiler when the phone rang. It being orphan season, I knew what the call was going to be. Yep, some folks had picked up an "orphaned" elk calf off the forest and brought it into town. The cow elk was probably bleating across the mountain looking for her calf, but she'd never take it back now, with all the human smells on it. So the steaks went into the refrigerator, and we went out to collect a calf.

She was a sweetie, only a couple days old, but old enough to know how to kick. We headed for the state's rearing unit, almost two hours away, at a little before midnight. Bearing in mind the girlfriend had to be at work at 0800 the next morning, in a city 160 miles away.

GF tried holding the calf on her lap, which worked fine for the first 40 miles. Then the calf started to fight, trying to get up. GF finally let her go, and the calf shook herself and dropped down onto the floor of the cab. She circled several times, bleating, and finally ended up with her front half on the seat and her back end straddling the gearshift. Then we heard the tinkle.

Of course, she had to pee! Couldn't very well do that on someone's lap, now could we. You get quite a pool out of one little elk calf.

When she had finished her business, she joined us on the seat, but still wouldn't settle down. Finally figured out she was scared of the headlights bouncing off the reflector posts along the highway, all rushing in towards her. She eventually turned around, pressed herself against my side and rested her chin on my shoulder. No more bad rushing lights. She fell asleep that way, for the rest of the trip.

We dropped the calf off with Floyd at the unit, and then headed back home. Finally got to bed around 0530. We set the alarm for 0800, and my future wife woke up then, simply to call and let her boss know she wasn't coming in today. She told him the truth about why, too. Doubt if they had ever had anybody miss work before because they spent the night ferrying an elk calf around. Probably not since, either. We slept past noon.

I know that most of the wild animals brought into captivity don't have a happy ending, so I try not to ask about them afterwards. But she was such a good little calf. And I knew quite a few of our elk were being used in brucellosis research. So several years later, on another orphan run, I asked Floyd about our midnight delivery.

He remembered her, she grew up well. She was considered "surplus" to the state's needs, so when a request for animals for a zoo came in, she made the list. Our little calf, then a yearling, got shipped to a zoo.

A zoo in Taiwan.

Wow. I guess we won't visit.