Last weekend’s dog training session, mid-elevation pine forest, recalled years of working our search dogs in El Dorado’s old-time mining country. Here's a haibun for forest prospects:
O Fortuna
Luck, fortune – chance, or uncanny intervention beyond the seen and known? Or just hard work? My mind drifts. Luck of the Irish, phrase from our Gold Rush – Irish Creek mine (Georgetown Divide), Irish Mine (Rescue), Irish Slide (Grizzly Flat, Henry’s Diggins, where 49er placer prospects gave out or gave way c. 1949 to drift mining. Henry’s Diggins, our old search-dog training grounds. How fortunate we were, how blest, following our dogs over bear-clover under drift of breeze through ponderosa, incense cedar and oak, blue South County sky, our dogs following the drift of scent – head-high as if pulled by invisible thread – of the human we were looking for and,
from above, Raven
commenting on luck, labor,
the fortune of life.
~ Taylor Graham
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