The Yule goats await their big moment in the 2022 Beulah Yule Log Hunt.

After two years’ hiatus, the Yule Log was hunted again last Sunday in Beulah, Colorado, a small town in the foothills of the Wet Mountains. This hunt is a twentieth-century revival, passed (along with log splinters) from Lake Placid, New York to Palmer Lake, Colorado to Beulah, where the tradition was renewed in 1952. (Photos from 1954 and 1977 here.)

(Here’s a report of M’s and my first Yule log hunt in 2015.)

Diana Miller with a red-tailed hawk from the Raptor Center.

In the introductory program, inevitably, some local clergyman has to make the usual solsticial wordplay between Son and Sun.

That was subtly countered by  my friend Diana, local resident and director of a raptor rehabiitation center, who steps up with a red-tailed hawk on her wrist and delivers an invcation that de-centers humankind in favor of wild animals. (As she did in previous years.)

A huntsman and two companions.

After final instructions from the head huntsman (one of a dozen who serve as guides

, referees, and whippers-in for the hunt) the hunters (mostly teens) scramble uphill into the wooded slopes of Pueblo Mountain Park.

Those of following the hunt stroll behind them, and all too soon, there is a shouting and and a trumpet blast from up the ridge.

But what is this sound? “Click click jingle jingle!”

It’s the Yule goats, harnessed to the log, instead of having it pulled down off the mountain only by the huntsmen and whoever else volunteers.

Pulled by goats. Hmm. How long before a Thor-figure joins the huntsmen?