[Red Bullets]

Alberta has had some very colorful characters. Those oldtimers liked to spin yarns about the early days...

Old Dave MacDougall reminisced about in the 1860's while camping in the foothills. He was alone and was out of provisions, starving and only had one bullet left. After several days of hunting with no luck he was getting weaker and finally he saw a flock of grouse all roosted on one branch in a tree by a creek. He took the shot and missed the birds but the bullet had split the branch the birds were sitting on and when the two pieces of the branch came back together it trapped all the grouses feet. As he was wringing the grouses necks one by one he accidentally slid into the creek. His pants were loose and held up by suspenders. When he was getting out of the creek he realized he a had a few fish in his pants, enough so that it popped the button off of his suspender. There was moose that was in the creek drinking and the button flew with such force it hit the moose in the eye blinding it. When Dave got out of the creek and emptied the fish from his pants. He was then able to grab his axe and kill the blind moose. Yep. That one bullet saved the day and the close call to starving.

Dave talked about a grizzly bear trap too. Find a tree with a hole in grizzly country and put honey in the hole in the tree. Then suspend a big boulder on a strong rope so it hangs in front of the hole in the tree with the honey in it. A bear would come along and discover the honey hole. The bear would push the rock out of the way and stick his head in the hole. The rock would swing back and hit the bear which would get the bear mad. He would hit the boulder harder and the boulder would swing back and smack the bear again. The bear gets so mad it hits the rock really hard and when the rock swings back it hits the bear in the head killing it.

And Dave made an interesting observation of how a woodpecker was so smart too. He noticed a woodpecker sitting and pecking at a flint rock on a cold day and that woodpecker pecked that rock so many times and so hard the rock would spark. Then the woodpecker would do a little shuffle over the spark to warm his feet.