Four hours later I was dutifully awoken by the alarm, I was still tired and more than a little confused, but I pulled myself out of bed to commence the morning chores.

I stumbled out of the tent and headed to let the chickens out, but the door was already open; the dogs were out also. I peered around me and realized it wasn’t morning. It was full daylight and while the sun in the sky said it was somewhere around noon, my watch claimed that it was really 5AM.

It all came flooding back, I sat down in my chair with a thump, cursing loudly and at length; heads popped out of doors with sleepy looks of confused alarm on their faces.

“It wasn’t a fucking dream!” I stated.

I was joined minutes later by three shivering women and I decided to bump the fire up into high gear. I mentioned to Sonya we could all probably use some soup about now, her and Matilda wandered off to the kitchen to pull something together. What we got was a dutch oven on the fire with bread cooking in it and a kettle hanging over the center of the fire with a stew starting to assemble inside. It was like watching a cooking show on the internet.

I had to do a few things right away, I had to get heat into all of the sleeping areas and needed to find out the extent of our situation. I asked Michelle to check on our livestock feed situation and to possibly long tether the seven animals out in the pasture, Sonya went to help her.

Matilda helped me dig deep into the storage room to find the rest of my winter camping supplies, I didn’t know what the weather was going to do but freezing during the night was not something I enjoyed. After extensive shuffling I found my micro wood stoves and the stove pipes, we pulled those out and I went back in to fetch one other item I had noticed that might be helpful.

Apparently during my drunken shopping spree at the gun show I had purchased a drone. I’m not a big fan of drones and it hadn’t been anywhere on my shopping list, but I had bought one on that silly, fun day. I wondered what other surprises were waiting in the storage room.

This was a commercial hunting drone, top of the line apparently, its own screen which connected to its control pad and had an on-board video camera. You could record the video feed and even cast it real time to a separate larger screen. It was time to survey the area.

While the girls unpacked the micro stoves, I went through the drone instructions and put it on to charge. The battery was at 80% already and it took less than an hour to reach full charge. We started installing the wood stoves while we waited on battery charging and soup cooking.

Each of the micro stoves for the tents were one-foot square with a three-inch stove pipe that went through the stove pipe jack built into the tent. They had glass windows in their doors and put off incredible heat; when operated correctly, they were more than enough for the small spaces we had. The stove for the camper was slightly larger at 12” x 18” and it could only be installed when the sliders were extended; it was also a double decker with an oven on top of the fire box. The setups were easier than expected and I now only needed to cut some wood lengths down to size. The electric chain made short work of the wood and we transferred some coals from the fire into each firebox and started to break them in. In no time at all we had three little wood stoves heating up our sleeping spaces and smoke cheerfully puffing out the chimneys. Since I had seen the obvious signs of spring when I toured the area early I decided not to bother installing the artic liners in the tents.

Then it was time to have a look around at our surroundings. I placed the drone in the middle of the clearing and powered it up, the minute I activated the camera I had a cockpit like view of the grass the drone was sitting on; the girls were watching the same view on the big screen TV. I should have made some popcorn.

I wanted to keep it simple, so I turned on the record feature and told the drone to hover just above the ground. It was an odd way to view things and would take some getting used to. I held it at a hover about ten feet above the ground and rotated it 360°; I spun it too fast and we couldn’t really see anything. I practiced a few more times, increasing altitude slowly and practicing rotating slowly; I managed to get it to do both at the same time.

I stopped the rotation pointing due east towards the Miller residence and the Missouri River, I focused on the controls and keeping everything steady as we slowly climbed up above the tall trees. As I cleared the tree tops I was stunned, looking east all I could see were rolling hills covered in old growth forest.

I stopped the ascension at 75% of max altitude and start a slow rotation, wilderness was all that came into view. Once I had rotated the full 360°, I brought the drone back down to earth. We hadn’t seen any sign of other people, we seemed to be alone.

I fetched the drone and stored it away, we’d watch the video again later, but I was done exploring for the day. I fetched myself a beer and a shot, Michelle brought me a bowl of soup and some fresh pan bread. I looked at the sky and remarked that we hadn’t seen or heard a plane going over all day; that statement wasn’t greeted with cries of joy.

There was a lot to think and eventually talk about; for now, we ate and drank. Mostly we drank.

We did manage to do our evening chores and prepared the fires for night, but we drank; I got drunk. We shut the camp down and went off to bed.

Thankfully, there were no dreams that night.