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Thursday, October 7, 2010

Past experience - by Bruce

Not much happening lately so I thought I would relate a couple of past experiences. We had only been here full time for a couple months. I took our dog Ben out back for his last nature call of the night. Since we didn't have a fence up I had him on a leash and he suddenly turned and gave a growl that made my hair stand up. I couldn't see what he was growling at because it was totally dark beside the house so we headed right back into the house. I waited a few minutes and went back out with a flash light and there in the snow were fresh mountain lion tracks only about 8' from where we had been standing. The tracks came right along the side of the house and stopped and then turned back and went back down to the road. They were so large that when I put my thumbs together my index fingers were a good two inches apart. I have big hands so it was a very large lion.

Then there was the time about 4 years ago that we were out for our morning walk and there was an animal in the road going the same direction we were going and about 50 yards ahead of us. Because we were looking at the rear of the animal we couldn't tell what it was. We finally stopped and it stopped and turned sideways in the road. Then we observed that it was a mountain lion because we could see the entire profile of the big cat. It decided that two people with two dogs could have the right of way and it headed up into woods.

Or the time I was again taking Ben out for his last nature call and in the back of the house we have a steel door, and also a metal storm door. I opened the steel door and reached across to open the storm door and suddenly noticed that there was a very large bear with its paws on each side of the storm door trying to look in. At that point I was about nose to nose and 6" separated our noses by a 1/16th inch piece of window pane. I was close enough to see the confusion in the eyes of the bear. I quickly closed the steel door, (some might say I slammed it shut) and made as much noise as I could to scare the bear away. It is moments like this when you are nose to nose with 400 lbs of bear, looking into each others eyes, that you discover if you have proper bowel control or not. I do have adequate control.

In the future I will tell about the times we had more close encounters with bear. All interesting especially when you are right up there close to them and there are no bars between you and the bear - like in a zoo.




1 comment:

Barbara J. Galasso said...

I have to say Bruce of all your marvelous nature stories, the ones of your encounters or sightings of wild animals are by far my favorite. I just love reading about them and looking at your great photos of them. I don't want to meet them face to face as you have, but meeting them face to face through your words and photos makes me "ALMOST" there while safe in my own home!