Awake at Dawn

The sun is just breaking the horizon.  I try to remember where I am, my eyes don't want to open.  I can smell the earthy scents of damp ground.  I hear the quiet of a morning when the night insects become silent and the birds tentatively sing a note or two.

I am still struggling to open my eyes, as I snuggle deeper into my sleeping bag, hoping to drift back off into sweet dream land.  The fire still has hot coals from the last logs added hours ago. 

As I squint to look under my tipi lodge of canvas, I wonder if I am still dreaming or perhaps visiting a past life.  I suddenly feel like I am out on the western prairie, two hundred years ago.  The earthy smells fill my nose, the campfire ready for morning cooking and the quiet village not yet awake.   My heart soars as I see the black lumps in the distance.  "What is that?" my mind is asking?  It looks like buffalo grazing with the sunlight barely lighting the grasses on the plain.

local herd of buffalo, 2009

I struggle now, finding my bearings between something from the past and something that is happening in September 2012.  Unfortunately my logical brain has made the adjustment, I have found my glasses and I can see what looked like buffalo are my neighbors black Angus cattle grazing in a fenced field across the road. 

I am reluctant to return, so few glimpses of the past are shown.  I will not forget that moment, the sounds, the lodge, the fire, sleeping on the ground.  Were the long gone ancestors that roam our land giving me a picture of what was two hundred years ago?  I thank them this morning as I awake at dawn.