Warren looks forlorn. I tell him I’m off to see if Bill has returned. As I’m driving out Hank Taylor comes up the road. We pull along side each other. I switch off my engine otherwise he can’t hear me over the clatter of the diesel. He asks me if I’ve got my foundation in yet. I say only if you count a truck and pup buried in the mud. He looks quizzical but then looks behind my rig to the tableau beyond. "Want me to get my D4?" "No, it’s okay Hank, Bill is just down the road and I can get him up here." "I’ll just get my cat."

"Okay," I say, knowing that Hank more than anyone out here loves to help.

Hank to the Rescue	Hank Hooks Up

About 30 minutes later an aging D4 with an even older driver, now dressed in his work duds, comes bouncing up the road. Hank is 74, but still fit as a fiddle and spry as a cat. He deftly maneuvers the chattering equipment into position. The juxtaposition is still great. This powerful little hornet of a machine is still dwarfed by the massive front end of the Kenworth dump truck. Still I suppose I should have thought of it more like a tug boat tied to the Queen Mary. An apt comparison if I’d thought of it at the time. Hank ran a fishing boat for many years.Hank has a power winch on the back with an massive hook and a large diameter cable. The two are quickly wired up. Hank moves out, puts his blade down to anchor the cat, and fires up the winch as Warren guns the engine and rocks the mighty leviathan. But the winch is just pulling the cat, downed blade and all, toward the snarling front frill of the truck.

Hank pulls the cat forward and backs up behind a pair of alder trees for bracing. This is going to hurt. Again the pas-de-deux is resumed. The tree groans, the truck rocks mightily, and some progress is made when "ping" the cable snaps and shoots out toward the back of the cat. For just such events the drivers compartment is heavily armored with wire caging. No harm is done. In a few minutes the hook is bolted and clamped to an undamaged section of cable.

Bracing Against an Alder (Ouch!)	Out She Comes

The dance is resumed and this time we see sparks flying along the cable like some cartoon depiction of a telegram. And then snap. The clamped sections weren’t clamped enough and they unfurled along each other causing great friction. In drier weather, this is the sort of thing that causes brush fires. As they cable is patched, Jason, who has showed up to watch, and I shovel some of the smaller gravel from the now dumped loads under the rear wheels of the truck in hopes of improving its traction. Because there never was a chance to spread the loads both were unceramoniously dumped in place. This means that the trucks load sits between the truck and the pup, creating what we think is yet another obstacle to a successful conclusion. The pup is going to have to run over the 5-foot gravel hill on its way out.

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