The Wafting Guide, variously known as Miladies Guide To Inside Wafting, Wooly Mammoths' Anniversary Edition Wafting Guide (Books of Extinction Series) and Wafting Into The New Millenium, began as an imaginary ping pong ball batted between the -- let's call them minds -- of Larry Peterson and Ross Olson. It all started at Camp Shamineau, located near metropolitan Motley Minnesota back in the misty days before Zip Codes. The former was in charge of recreation, the latter of nature lore.

I wouldn't say their minds were fertile, but some have used an expression that could be interpreted that way -- loosely (and kindly) translated as "well fertilized." And perhaps it was the cumulative stress of a long summer, consisting of week after week of hundreds of kids, kids and more kids.

No one seems to be able to say how it happened, but perhaps it was on being asked for the 1037th time, "What can we do? We're bored!" One or the other of the co-conspirators said, "Have you tried Wafting?"

When asked, "What's that?" one or the other replied, "First you need to catch a woombat." Perhaps it was the week reserved for the pathologically gullible -- or maybe they were REALLY B-O-R-E-D!!! But in the style of Bob and Ray, Laurel and Hardy, Huntley and Brinkley or the Three Stooges without the violence, the story began to take shape. And the rest is history, or at least so you might wish.

Sensing that the story was getting out of hand and that oral tradition could not be trusted to preserve it (but lacking the judgement to recognize that some stones are best left unturned) the young Olson began to pound out the story on the sort of primitive manual keyboards then extant. The embryonic Peterson put pen to paper producing such lifelike illustrations that there is no doubt he had really been there.

You may begin the story and go from page to page, or if you are a qualified researcher with the proper credentials, you may use the TABLE OF CONTENTS to examine individual pages.

GENTLE READER TAKE WARNING IN THIS AND BE ADVISED: Peterson, shortly after those fateful days decided soberly and deliberately to go into Psychiatry -- professionally, that is. Olson has been barely dodging that particular profession, whether court ordered or "suggested," for lo these many decades.

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