Ta Dah!

 In spite of a looming sky and predicted rain, my friend-who-found-the-hut and I set out early this afternoon ready for whatever fell out of the sky and determined to persist until we found the hut.  We had talked beforehand when we had decided to put this walk off as it looked so dark and threatening, and I had asked her a few more questions to try and figure out why the hut kept eluding me and I kept landing on Tony's driveway.  Drawing 2017 is the map I sketched while we talked.  A few minutes later she called me back and said nothing was coming down, and we decided to just GO.

 We walked the by-now familiar trail leading to the river and along the south bak.  We passed some early toothwort leaves and the treacherous pile of logs that must be scrambled over in order to continue along the trail as it leaves the river.

 Since I want to be able to walk this trail by myself and not get so wretchedly lost I made copious maps and notes as we walked.  I realize these are as inscrutable as the glyphs on yesterday's little woodworm-eaten stick.

 As we came to the crucial ending of the trail, M. picked her way along, remembering clues from the only time she had ever walked this way.  She has a great memory, because in spite of seeing this trail only once before, she could tell from the kind of ground cover (crowfoot/ground cedar) when to start bearing east.   We found the spot and headed left up the bank of the gully.  After a few yards we crested a ridge, and there in front of us was:

The Shelter!  This drawing does not do it justice.  It's a primitive lean-to kind of thing, very sturdy with walls of branches packed with about 12 inches of dry leaves.  Its ridgepole is touching a tall, straight tree, and the pole slopes toward the ground in the back.  Large patches of bark (we could see a nearby dead tree that had a stripped trunk) covered sections of the hut.  Inside it smelled wonderful, like leaves and grass, not at all mouldy or sinister.  It was just big enough inside for a single person to stretch out in a sleeping bag.  The floor was made of compacted dry leaves.  The openings on either side of the tree trunk were barely big enough for a person to squeeze in, too small for a bear to enter.

Nearby were a fire pit with some charred wood and a sort of wood-drying rack shown here.  Sticks were leaning against each other along a post slanted against a tree.  It looked like a small hut, but we think from its location that it was a firewood supply.  There were absolutely no signs of anyone having been there recently except the charred wood.

We were convinced we had seen another hut through the woods a short distance away, so we walked over there after a while.  It turned out to be the branches of an enormous felled tree that were shaped like a teepee when viewed head on from the gully we had walked in.  On the right and bottom I sketched the walk that we made to get home, down the ridge, through some brambles, and alongside the chimney to the trail.

When I got home there was a letter from my penpal grandson Nate with a big yellow circle made of fun foam used as a sticker on the back, and Jesse lay in a tangle of legs and paws on his bed.  A fine afternoon!