The Spirits of Moose Creek – Book 1

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My Trip With Mom

“I had written to the tribal council requesting permission to go on to tribal land and photograph some of the wildlife. Joseph Running Wolf replied back giving me, well us, permission to do so.”

“Nice! I’m getting hungry. Can we eat now?” I asked, feeling my stomach growl.

“Yes Sanay, now get your jacket and camera.” Then Mom picked up her jacket and purse and we headed towards the Midnight Café.

As we walked along the wooden planked sidewalk, I was checking out the stores as we passed by. “Now there’s the hotel, then the general store and the post office is inside. It has a mannequin in the window too dressed in a parka and snow shoes. Ahh, the café.” I saw four other stores on the other side of the street and that was it. “We’re definitely in a small town.”

“Yes we are,” Mom chuckled.

As we walked into the café we heard, “Sit anywhere you like,” a young man called out as he walked toward us. I led Mom to a booth. The window looked directly at a huge snow-capped mountain. “Beautiful, isn’t she?” he continued standing at our table and looking at the mountain too. “They call her the Mountain of a Hundred Tears. Long ago a young village princess wanted to marry someone from

another tribe, but her father, the chief of the village, forbade it. So, she and her young man ran away up to the mountain where they were never seen again. In the summer, after the snow melts you can see her father’s face in the mountain’s rocks crying for his daughter.”

“Wow, that’s a beautiful story,” Mom remarked, taking a menu from him.

“Hi, my name is Rick. What may I get you ladies today?’

“We’ll both have hamburgers and ice tea,” I said, ordering for the both of us. Rick looked at Mom and she was nodding in agreement.

About 15 minutes later we had food. “This hamburger tastes awesome!” I said, watching Mom chewing her bite.

“It should be,” she replied, wiping her mouth. “This is fresh meat. It’s like getting milk from Wisconsin. It’s all home grown.”

“It almost tastes better than Uncle Tim’s,” I said, winking.

After dinner we walked outside and pulled out my camera. Then I took out the long-range lens and Mom helped me put them together. “What are you going to take a picture of?” she asked, holding my case.

“The mountain, I want to see the man.”

“Okay. Since it’s almost dusk you need to set the f-stop. Remember, it’s this dial here,” she said pointing to a small black dial with numbers on the left side of the camera’s body. “Set the f-stop to 2.8 to get a clear picture. Now set the ISO to 800. There’s still plenty of light. Great, you got it!”

Click. I took the picture. Then looking at the small screen on the back of the
camera’s body for the picture, I said, “It’s black! Hey, what happened?”

Chuckling, she replied, “You forgot to take off the lens cap.” After Mom removed it. “Okay try it again.”

I refocused the shot again and click! “That’s an awesome shot,” she said looking over my shoulder at the screen on the back of the camera. “We’ll put it onto
the computer when we get back to the room.”

“Okay. Thanks, you’re a great teacher.” As we walked into our room, I handed her my camera and she took out the black SD card, where all the pictures were stored,
from the side of my camera and put it into the slot on her laptop computer. I went into the bathroom to change.

As I came out I heard. “Hey Sanay, come over here. I want you to see this.”

“That’s my picture,” I said standing next to her as I looked at the computer screen too, “Wow! It came out great!”

“Yes, yes it did. You took a perfect shot. But what’s this? There’s a cloud over the mountain. Do you see it?”

“Yeah, I do.” I replied squinting to see it as she began to
enlarge the misty area near the right middle of the screen.

“Hey, those look kind of like faces,” she said as the area
became larger. “Here I’m going to add a couple of filters
and see if they make it any sharper.” After a few minutes, and a few imaging filter later she said, “Yes, they do look like faces, a man and a woman. I think they’re smiling at each other.”

“Yeah, and there’s an older man over here Mom. Look, he’s looking at them.” And I leaned over her shoulder to point to his face on the screen to the left the man and woman. After applying another filter, the picture was very clear. “Look Mom, the two are hugging. I wonder if these are the ones the man at the restaurant was telling us about?”

“Hmm, good question Sanay. I was wondering the same thing,” she replied,
concentrating on the computer screen. “We have a meeting with Joseph Running Wolf later this week. Perhaps he could shed some light on these images. “You know Sanay, I’m curious,” she continued as she took a green-colored SD card out of her purse and popped it into my camera. Then she laid my black one on the table by the computer. After she grabbed her camera and mine, I followed her outside and watched as she took a few pictures of the mountain. Then she changed the cameras and took a few more pictures. By now it was almost dark, so she had to use different settings.

“Now let’s take a look to see what we have,” Mom said, putting the blue card from her camera into the computer and pulling up the pictures.

“I don’t see the cloud,” I said looking at the computer screen as she zoomed into the mountain and scrolled around the picture.

“I don’t either, and I can barely make out the face of the old man. At least I think it’s his face.”

“Yeah, was it too dark?” Mom didn’t answer. She was too focused on what she was doing. She’s like that, if she’s focused on doing something she doesn’t really hear you. She then exchanged cards and put the black SD card in which I had used to take the picture “They’re still here, the faces,” she said unsure of what’s going on. Finally, she put in the green card from my camera, the one she took a picture with using my camera,

“It looks the same as the blue card had, no faces.” I said as she started to zoom in, looking for the cloud.

“You’re right! I don’t see any difference either, hmm? Both shots I took didn’t have any faces at all. We’ll have to take some more of the mountain tomorrow and see what happens. Maybe it was a fluke,” she said, shaking her head.

“A fluke?” I asked. “What’s that?”

“It’s when something usual happens only once and never again. It could be a
defect in the black SD card which caused it too. It’s hard to tell. I’ll put new cards in and we can try it again. Now let’s get ready for bed. Tomorrow we’ll find someone to help us navigate around and you can take some more fantastic pictures.”