HILLSPEAKING
from The Anglican Digest 

MICHAELMAS A.D. 2004

MUCH has been written in "Hillspeaking" in recent years about the pets at Hillspeak – so much so that visitors frequently ask about them as they introduce themselves – but little has been written lately about the wild fauna to be found in these hills and hollows.  The reason is obvious: there are fewer wild "critters" around than there were a quarter-century ago.

  The transformation of the Silver Cloud Ranch to Hill-speak and the gradual selling off, in the 1980s, of all but three hundred of the 3200 acres that had comprised the property under the Rev. Howard Lane Foland's suze-rainty resulted in the gradual loss of habitat for native fauna, but insofar as SPEAK itself was concerned it meant the development of an en-dowment fund to bolster SPEAK's ministries.

  Nevertheless, those of us who have lived here over the years miss seeing the red fox that used to cut across the area between the Big Red Barn and the Calf Barn, the gray foxes that each year raised a family across the county road, but still on SPEAK property, and the deer that gathered each autumn to munch apples under the two Rome Beauty trees next to the Farm House.

  The late John West, who lived in the house at the end of Skyline Drive, several times reported on a bobcat that came to scrounge just outside his kitchen door.  Ruby Baker Hanks, who lived at Hillspeak from 1971 until 2003, looked up from her dining room table in the late '90s to see a black bear peering in at her through the window.  The bear was comfortably ensconced in the carport.  Lillian Burns, Father Foland's housekeeper for almost a half century, talked about the blacksnake that lived in an old maple tree beside the Farm House and would hang down and greet her as she came back from chapel in the morning.  I re-member coming across a very long blacksnake sunning in the middle of Skyline Drive and persuading him to move to a less hazardous spot for his siesta.

  Tom Pace, who surveyed the property for subdividing when the Trustees opted to sell much of it, was working on the far side of the Green Hill close to the Big Spring that used to supply Morningside's water.  He came into a little clearing and sat down on a fallen tree trunk to work out his figures and as he was doing his calculations looked up to see two black bear cubs tussling not thirty feet from him. "I knew that where there are two cubs," he said, "mama bear will not be far away.  I very slowly stood up and backed out of the clearing."

  All is not gloom, however.  A day or two before I wrote this John Burton, TAD's managing editor and our next door neighbor, reported that he had eased an unusually long garter snake off his back stoop.

©SPEAK, INC
805 CR 102 - EUREKA SPRINGS AR 72632-9705
PHONE: 479-253-9701    FAX: 479-253-1277       E-MAIL: speak@speakinc.org

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