A Montana Moment

Home Sweet Home! We survived. Barely. We spent 9 days in Montana preparing Byron's father, Fred to go into a nursing home. Then, as you know, he passed away while we were driving back to Boise. So we turned around last week, and went back for the funeral. The ten hour drive-- each way-- was brutal with four kids. But we made it (and we are still somewhat sane)! I will write up something on the funeral in the next few days-- it ended up being really nice. But for now, here's one of the fun little moments from our first trip to Big Fork. This is Jim-- one of Fred's neighbors. He's holding up a shirt from when he was 10 years old and Holland is holding up his pants.
Jim tells the most hair raising story from when he was a child. He and a couple of his friends were out playing. Jim had crawled under a bush and was backing out when a big ol' bear knocked him down and started sniffing at his ear. Can you imagine?
The bear must not have found him yummy smelling enough... for it started away. Little Jimmy got up and started running. Now take a close look at those Levis. The bear took after him and took a swipe right across his rear end. The bear knocked him down again, where this time Jimmy had the good sense to hold still.
Meanwhile, his friends had run home, yelling "a bear has Jimmy". Jimmy's mom grabbed-- get this-- a broom and took off. By the time she got to Jimmy, the bear was gone. He told his mom, he was just fine, not hurt at all. But when he stood up, (as you can see on the pants), the bear had taken a chunk of his rear end off-- along with the material of the jeans. It had also clawed the front of both of his thighs. Can we stay stitches?
Isn't it cool he saved these clothes to show off, all these years later? I guess he was quite the little businessman-- he would charge the kids at school 2 bits (50 cents) to see his scars or to see the mangled clothes. My girls LOVED the story and the show and tell (not of the scars, thank goodness, just the clothes)! However, Reese was freaked out for the rest of the trip about a bear trying to eat her.
Then, one afternoon, while Byron worked at securing his father's farm, I took the girls over to "Jimmy's Zoo". He and his wife have 29 miniature horses, several goats, rabbits, dogs, ducks etc.

You'll notice, the horses are about the same size, if not bigger, than Reese.

Kean even had a close encounter with the little horses. By the way, Holland now has her heart set on getting one of them as a pet.