06/07/2026
The morning mist off the garden beds always brought the heaviest scent of the year—the thick, musky warning of the mature male badger patrolling the base of the black walnut tree."Up the vines!" I called out to the children. Ground level was no place to be during the spring breeding season. The kids didn’t need stairs; they climbed like monkeys, using raw muscle, thick ropes, and twisting wild vines to haul themselves straight up into the canopy.Suspended high in the V-forks of the ancient tree were three old, rugged canoes, rigged upright exactly as if they were riding a river current. We had lashed them to the massive limbs using heavy marine rope secured with bands of stainless steel ties. Patched together with corrugated metal sheets, scrap tarps, and rough salvaged timber, our aerial camp looked less like a standard treehouse and more like a dense, improvised settlement built right into the branches.Safe inside the hull, the older children immediately went to work on their favorite spring game. They reached deep into the natural hollow of the walnut trunk and pulled out a hidden stash of a hundred smooth, curved pieces."The cats didn't find them!" one of the kids laughed, carefully balancing a raccoon baculum on top of a growing, precarious tower. The bacula made for an unpredictable and challenging stacking game, and keeping them stored in the tannin-rich hollow was the only way to keep the local felines from carrying them off.Suddenly, a low, guttural snarl vibrated through the bark from the shadow of the roots below. The massive badger had emerged from his burrow, baring his teeth as he caught our scent. But thirty feet up, wrapped in thick wool and insulated by raw, heavy raccoon pelts, the children just looked down from the edges of the canoes and kept on stacking, completely out of reach.
