This kind of stuff right here is where you’re most likely to pick up tick mites when moving through the woods. Grasses are the worst. I avoid them at all cost. In fact, if I was hiking through here, I’d walk up into the woods on the left and avoid those grass weeds altogether.
Tick mites, as we call ‘em around here, are teeny tiny little ticks that are about the size of the tip of a pin, so small they look like little dots. They will absolutely cover your feet and legs by the hundreds, or even thousands. They bite and cling on - which you will not even feel until later when you get into camp and start itching. Even after scraping them off your feet, the bites will drive a man (or woman) absolutely mad for a good week after.
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
