BILL AND ELNA CAMPBELL

I was talking to mother (Elna Jean Campbell Forsyth, daughter of William David and Elna Campbell, nee Bohne) last night. I was telling her about a woodpecker family here. I watched a baby, almost as big as its momma, be fed a worm she collected, ate, and gave back. Fascinating.

Mom began telling me about how much her mom and dad loved the birds.

I did not know that she got her love for birds from her Mom and Dad. 

She says they never let the kids molest the birds in anyway.
Grandpa, in particular, wouldn't let the boys climb up to disturb nests. 

They protected them. What a nice thing to know about my grandparents. 

As she talked about the birds and how her dad was so protective of the animals she told me a story from the 'timber.' She says she didn't usually go into the timber with her dad unless her mom also went. Her mother would go to bottle berries etc. (Bringing the jars from home with her.)

Mom says usually the kids slept outside, and their parents in a little cabin that was there. She told me how her dad always told them they were not to molest or to disturb the animals.

Then she told how one night they (the girls) could hear something and repeatedly were screaming and crying that it was a bear that was going to get them. But their parents kept telling them it was nothing. The girls kept insisting.

Eventually her dad came out with a lantern to look around. He had been splitting firewood and his axe was still in a log. That area happened to be where the sounds were coming from.

He discovered the axe handle was being eaten by a porcupine.

Mother recalls her father was always so meticulous in caring for his tools. You had to take care of tools because your lives depended on having them. This destruction of such an essential tool just went against his grain.

Mom said he killed the porcupine and it is one of the few times she ever knew her dad to get very upset or to kill an animal (except for food).