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January 2021
The following weeks and months were even busier than usual for Archie and Roxanne.
Roxanne had taken web development courses at university years ago and kept up her skills as the technology evolved, so she was quite adept at amateur webpage design. Archie had been highly successful with his woodworking business by simply posting on social media sites. But Roxanne understood most people just had a quick glimpse at his work and products without making the next step because there was no easy way to do it. And it wasn’t easy to look specifically for his work. She decided he needed his own webpage and a week later, finished the prototype. It was a pleasant surprise for Archie when she sat him down in front of her laptop.
“Press that button, baby,” she said, pointing at a mouse button. He did and seconds later was shocked at how professional the page was and how it showcased his work. He had not been diligent in the beginning about taking photos; she’d taken the ones he had now, and arranged them all into a cohesive site, easily explored by first-time browsers.
After fine-tuning his search engine optimization, within weeks he was experiencing a noticeable growth in business as locals, people across the USA, and even in different countries, found his wood art and contacted him with questions about availability, payment, and shipment.
He received an email from an art gallery in Savannah, asking if he might be interested in a personal show. They specialized in his type of art and felt he would be very successful. He wrote and thanked them, saying he’d think about it when the pandemic wasn’t such an issue. It was a six-hour drive to Savannah, so it would be a lot of work to get it all together. Maybe someday, but not quite yet.
Roxanne then cloned Archie’s website, making a new separate site for their bees. She was now making a range of new products from the hives including chemical-free bee’s wax, comb honey, her own strain of queens, nucleus hives known as nucs for people who wanted to take up beekeeping as a hobby, and a food-safe wax-based wood finish for cutting boards and wooden bowls. Her latest product was ‘tincture of propolis’ made from a sticky pitch-like substance created by bees to seal cracks inside their hives, said to have natural medicinal qualities. Dissolved and filtered in pure alcohol, it made an excellent disinfectant for minor cuts and abrasions, seeming to speed up the healing process. It was all laid out clearly in her new webpage and soon she was getting numerous requests every day. She would soon have to hire someone to manage the business it was creating.
Roxanne’s clinic had a surprise patient one Sunday afternoon. Earlier that day, she and Bud had gone for a walk out through the back of their property, looking for potential sites for additional bee colonies. Bud never let Roxanne out of his sight but ranged around her, exploring everything they came across.
The previous fall she had experimented with a new technique of over-wintering bees, protecting them from cold and rain, and ensuring they had plenty of food to last them through the cold season. The following spring, she’d split all her hives, some into two or three new colonies, and they’d all prospered. Now she needed new locations to install them; areas with lots of bee-friendly forage.
As she carefully made her way through a shallow ditch, there was a stirring in the dry layer of last year’s leaves. From four feet away, something caught Bud’s attention and he launched himself like an osprey diving down for a fish on the surface of a pond, into the leaves at Roxanne’s feet, his jaws snapping. He flicked his head, tossing a snake that had been ready to strike at Roxanne’s bare ankle. He attacked it again, dancing in and out of range, snapping at it with his lips peeled back in a full-jawed snarl. His front incisors nipped the snake across its skull, killing it instantly. But not before one of its fangs punctured the inside of Bud’s fleshy lip.
Bud moved between Roxanne and the dead snake, seized with a powerful primal instinct to protect his master. All the hair along his spine stood on end and a continuous low guttural growl emanated from deep inside his chest. To Roxanne, Bud looked like an entirely different dog. She backed up with Bud following her, still growling at the snake.
Once they were several feet away, Roxanne fell to her knees and took Bud into her arms, realizing he had likely saved her from a painful, perhaps even fatal, snake bite. She hugged his neck and spoke to him lovingly. Then it occurred to her to check him over — she spotted the swelling in his upper lip right away, and the dribble of blood oozing from inside.
“Oh Bud… you’ve been bitten,” Roxanne cried.
She had her phone and went directly to the snake, stretching it out with a stick so it was easily identifiable, noticing the bony rings at the tip of its tail. She took a picture with her iPhone, her shoe alongside the snake for scale, and texted it to Archie. Then she called him. When he heard her voice, he knew it was serious — he’d never heard her this upset, but she was still in control with some ‘doctor’s orders’.
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