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In the Summer of 1996, I worked for a private country club, taking care of the clubhouse grounds and adjacent areas. It was in a small town south of Flagstaff, Arizona, up in the high country of the Colorado Plateau. The town was completely surrounded by a National Forest (Coconino), and I would go out into the forest each evening to spend the night in my van as the camping was free on the federal land and I wanted to conserve the pittance of an income that I was being paid.
There was a large elk herd up in Northern Arizona, and I would see elk almost every morning while I was coming in to work before the crack of dawn. Before daybreak they were less cautious about grazing near the forest service roads, because there were so few vehicles on them at that hour (except during hunting season). There was a drought that year in Arizona, and the Forest Service began imposing fire restrictions by April and then proceeded to close off more and more of the Coconino Forest to any access whatsoever by May. By mid May the entire forest had been closed off, and any vehicular (or foot) access was forbidden.
Well, the town where I worked (Munds Park) was surrounded on all sides by this closed forest, which then gave me no quiet place to go at night for sleep. A busy and noisy interstate highway, connecting Flagstaff with Phoenix, ran beside the town and was right next to the golf course maintenance shop where we parked our vehicles, so that was not a reasonable option. The only other choice I had was to park all night at one of the interstate exits and listen to the diesel trucks roaring and belching by all night long. Because I had to get up at 4 a.m. for work, I couldn't wear ear plugs lest I didn't hear the alarm go off, and I just couldn't get away from that noisy interstate for the entire period that the forest closure was in effect.
It was a considerable burden to me as I couldn't get adequate rest and enough of the deeper stages of sleep, but this went on for 6 or 7 weeks until the monsoons came at their usual time in the early part of July. After a few days of rain, the forest closure was lifted and I heaved a great sigh of relief. The trucks had come close to testing my limits of tolerance.
The first day that it was permissable, I drove out after work to one of my more favored areas in a terrific mood, having escaped that miserable interstate. The silence and the forest smells that had been brought out by the rain put me into a grateful state of tranquillity. I hadn't felt so relieved in a long time. After taking a secondary road, I parked the van and got out to walk in the sweetness of Nature.
About 15 minutes into the walk, I was startled to come upon the full skeleton of a great bull elk. Because the antlers were intact, I knew it hadn't been shot by a hunter, and besides, hunting season had been 7 months previously and the body was not fully skeletonized, which meant that it had died perhaps a couple of months before I discovered it. I was impressed by the size of the antlers and the majesty of the animal, and for some reason I just knew that the antlers were a gift to me from the Spirit of Elk. It almost felt like a reward for enduring the hardship of the interstate noise for 7 weeks.
I spoke my words of gratitude to the Earth Mother and to the Spirit of Elk, and then I took the antlers with the only thing available to me, my axe. I kept them in my van and eventually mounted them up near the high-topped roof so I could sleep under them and be able to marvel at their beauty.
Toward the end of the season, I felt an inner beckoning to the sacred mountain, Mount Shasta, and so I left the job early and went up there to camp on her slopes for a few weeks while receiving night-time instruction in an out-of-body state. Then I drove down to Chico, California, to visit friends and tell them the elk antler story.
That evening they were being visited by an elderly Native American Medicine Woman (a Shaman) with white hair and perceptive, piercing eyes. They all wanted me to bring the antlers out to the backyard so they could look them over as I was telling my story. As I did so, the Shaman moved her hands slowly over the antlers while her eyes were closed, and when I finished she said that there was more to the story.
She said that the antlers were, indeed, a gift to me from the Spirit of Elk and that they were meant solely for me. The elk I found had been made invisible to anyone but myself (I had wondered why no one else had discovered it, since it was only 50 yards from a secondary road and was on the ground prior to the forest closure.). I was told that the gift from elk was intended to give me strength and endurance to carry out my purpose during the difficult and traumatic times coming on the Earth during the Dimensional Shift from Third to Fourth Density. And she said that I would have the antlers with me for a long time.
Years later, I worked at the Mount Shasta Resort with a very psychic woman who would quite often get messages for me from her Group of Guides. She would get the sign of "chills" and "goosebumps" when a certain matter was considered important and truthful, and I could verify the authenticity by observing her "gooseflesh".
One day I proceeded to tell her about the elk antlers from the Colorado Plateau, and before I got to the Shaman part, she blurted out that the elk had been made invisible to anyone but me. As received from her Guides, she confirmed that they offered me strength and endurance for the Times to Come. I was humbled to learn that the beautiful elk had come into life in the high country of Northern Arizona solely for the purpose of eventually offering his great antlers to me and laying down his life for me when that time had come. He had made his life a sacrifice to me and had been guided by the Deva or Spirit of Elk to the right place at the right time to make his transition. I hadn't mentioned it, but I found a dead female elk (cow) on the ground only 20 yards from the bull, and she was in the same state of decomposition (same period of time). She had gone with her loving partner when he had made his sacrificial act for my benefit.
The psychically-talented woman also told me that the antlers serve as a sort of cosmic antenna, in that tremendous amounts of information are passed into my sleeping consciousness by way of these antlers, and it is all stored (presumably in the subconscious) for the time when it will be needed and at which time it will become consciously recognized and known. To this day I still sleep beneath those antlers and remain inspired by the way they came into my life.
James Oliver Cyr, M.D.
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