Two days of meeting in Bighorn Town, in a high mountain valley less than an hour's drive from the Yellowstone country.

If you're going to spend two days in meetings, even with fellow wildlife professionals, high in the mountains during bitter cold winter days is a good time to do it.

Took notes, some of which will hopefully end up here, but not tonight. Need to get to sleep, as the helicopter may arrive tomorrow for the deer classification surveys (but it won't if it's windy, and it's supposed to be windy). Tonight you get a picture of yesterday's sunrise, when I was about halfway through a nearly four-hour drive.

And one story...

They had the usual fund raisers at our annual meeting banquet. A High/Low table, card deck raffles for a shotgun and an elk antler floor lamp, small item lotteries, a large silent auction for seven or eight wildlife prints (including two by Vivi), and several smaller silent auctions.

I and a federal friend, and a newer friend, one of the vets who helped so much during our dying elk crisis last spring (he presented the paper on it, was even kind enough to list me as a co-author), were standing by the table, bidding against each other on two prints.

Well, actually, I and the vet were competing for the gorgeous Teton sunrise print (a one-of-a-kind print that I would have bid more for if I had known), and he was also competing with the federal friend for the wonderfully matted and framed redhead decoy print.

The vet asked me to outbid him again on the Teton print, so's he'd have enough money to outbid the other fellow for the duck decoy print.

At this point I was startled to hear a man close behind me speak out loudly about "collusion" and "fraud" in the auction. Startled enough that I jumped back and jostled his arm fairly hard, almost spilling his drink on the table of auction items.

Yeah. It was the Governor.