This is not really a story by Ruby. But she was walking with me, and we were the ones that didn’t mess with the bees.

This is one of our forests. In the wintertime, the skinny little creek that we cross on the wiggly log is usually a very loud and scary river. Nobody is allowed to go down to the river in the winter because if you are a dog and you don’t totally get it that it’s winter and you decided to leap in, you would DIE. But looky here. The river is a trickle and we can cross it on the wiggly log where usually we couldn’t even cross, even in summer. This is our drought.

When we walk, me and Ruby actually walk. This is known as going for a walk. If you were to ask Gustavo and Otterpop about going for a walk, Otterpop would start barking and Gustavo would start spinning in circles then once you were in the forest they would start running up the path and back to us on the path and up the path and back and so on and so forth. And sometimes off the path to a tree or up the hill or down the hill or to the creek and so on.

Me and Ruby would just be walking. Looking at trees and counting the rings. See the wide rings? A good rainy winter and the tree, it did grow. See the skinny rings? Not so much rain. And then one winter, the tree, it did fall down and somebody ripped through it with the chainsaw and now we can count the rings and measure it’s width.

We are having a super skinny ring drought winter and I am not even wearing a jacket. Ruby is cool having tree science. Because it’s going for a walk.

So when we were walking today Otterpop and Gustavo ran down to this tree. It’s a big old growther with a tree cave. Also known as a goosepen. Big enough to hold some calves or a towering stack of giant Costco toilet papers. Hard to tell in this photo but it’s one of the biggest ones in the forest. And while visiting it, Ottepop woke up the nest of bees. Or wasps. Or hornets. If it’s a bug with teeth I’m calling it a bee and so is Otterpop. Next thing I see, here goes Otterpop running by me 100mp with a bunch of bees attached to her back. And there goes Gustavo.

Lucky we’re heading back down towards the creek and by the time me and Ruby get down there, Otterpop’s on the other side looking pretty miserable and running in miserable circles of miserable. No sign of the G. I yell at Otterpop, “Come to me, I’ll help you!” and she comes swimming back across and puts her muddy pathetic wet tail dragging shaking self into my arms. Gustavo shows up then too. Lucky he didn’t get eaten by bees like her because he would have been in the next county by now. He was just going for a run with Otterpop. Ignorance is bliss. And then Otterpop had to walk her miserable pathetic muddy wet tail dragging self all the way back out the forest and she lives to see another day. Another day when probably, she will soon find herself some more bees.

Otterpop is always the one that the bees go for. Every single bee tree. Bees that usually sleep in the winter. Now they are all awake.