The secret history of spruce

It's amazing to look inside a tree. Of course you can only do it afterwards, if you know what I mean. 

Here you can watch a tree grow from a scrawny sapling, year by year, into the substantial tree it became before Greg cut it down. This tree was a seedling in 1960, more or less.  

Some kind of insect made its home deep inside this tree. A happy insect, I imagine.

And here is the story of how, long ago, two young trees met and fell in love. They probably had a lot in common. Eventually they grew together until it was hard to tell one from the other. But later they split up.

Odd messages

Once in a while when I am walking around on the island I come upon small wooden tablets containing what looks like ancient writing.I believe that these are messages written by the island's gnomes and left in particular secret places for each other to read and reply to.
The tablets seem to function like email, which would suggest that gnomes actually do not make use of the internet.
It appears to be a very difficult form of writing. It must take centuries to learn how to read and write it.
I am pretty sure that all the gnomes have left, since the McNutt's Island gnomes winter in Labrador. I hope these messages were not too important, and can wait until spring.

Mystery house

I suppose this is one of the summer houses of the gnomes, who have left for their winter homes in Labrador. Occasionally you come upon such indications of their presence on the island.

Rare sighting of a moose on the island

It is an extremely rare occurrence when a moose is sighted on the island. For one thing, there are very few moose in western Nova Scotia at all, and those are, for the most part, within the vast forested wilderness interior.

The moose must have swum to the island at a low tide. It is well known that moose can and do swim. And there's really no other way it could have gotten here. We heard it crashing through the dead forest north of the house very early this morning, before the sun was up. It sounded like, well, a moose. But we couldn't imagine that it actually was. We peered out the window and saw an enormous creature behind the shed where we keep the rotor-tiller and the extra chairs.

We waited anxiously until it was light enough to take a picture of this amazing event. The moose may have been tired from the exertion of its swim across the harbour, because it remained quietly near the house, where finally we were able to take a picture. It did not seem particularly pleased to have its picture taken, and later wandered off to some other part of the island.