Civil war soldiers.
A million ticks.
The soldiers were a lot more pleasant than the ticks. These sightings happened on 2 different walks, in 2 different sets of woods. The tick blight happened as we turned off a fire road on to a path through a meadow in our secret dogwalking forest. All of a sudden, Otterpop, Gary and Gustavo were covered in ticks. Covered. Millions of ticks.
Ruby and I are apparently immune to tick coverage. I cannot explain this with science, but we were grateful for the anomaly.
We are not strangers to ticks. The dogs wear flea and tick poison fluid year round. We go to lots of places where there are ticks. And once a caterpillar landed on my neck at work. This was an entirely different phenomena. Millions of ticks. I will say it again. Millions. Crawling horribly on heads and legs and pants and crawling with their crawly horrible legs.
The soldiers were far less creepy. In so far as how often do you encounter Civil War soldiers out having a smoke in the redwoods? Puffing on corncob pipes. There were some Yankees congregating across the way in their blue wool coats. They told me a gun battle was impending and let us skedaddle away, unharmed and blissfully tick free, before they broke out the muskets.
Um – grey is confederate, blue is union?
I guess I should have remembered this from Gone With the Wind!
Did you consider that somewhere on the walk you found a hole in the time space continuum and ended up back in the Civil War? Check you history books for Team Small Dogs changing the course of the war.
Uhhhh… I have to disagree. As creepy and disgusting as tick are, I think I'd rather find them inhabiting my space than those throwback soldier dudes and their corncob pipes. _shudder_
As we all know from our history books, many important civil war battles were held in the santa cruz mountains. Glad you got out of there before they started hurling dead goats with their trebuchets. Or am I thinking of something else?