Crazy Coyote

I think I saw the strangest sight ever. A coyote must have tried to jump the right-of-way fence where my county road intersects the highway. Somehow, he got caught with his front and back leg on one side between the brace post and a tightly stretched wire. It was draped there, on top of the brace post, and you could see where it had rubbed hide off the side where the wire was holding it as it struggled to free itself. It was dead, of course, when I first saw it. It was a grizzly sight then. It was even more grizzly a few days later after the raptors had begun to peck on it. I would have thought someone had put it there, if not for the signs that it had struggled to free itself.

Coyotes don't bother me much, except they do sound eerie sometimes at night. I am, however, frightened of Mountain Lions, which have been spotted in the area. I haven't ever actually seen one, but I have seen tracks, and one of my mares came in all scratched up high on her back one time. I went around the fence to see if she had somehow gotten underneath it, but the scratch marks were pretty unmistakable. At the same time, the old stallion came in all stiff in his back end, like he had probably stood on his hind legs and fought the cat off her.


Sometimes I can just sense the nearness of a Puma by the way the horses are acting. They get all snorty and whirl and run at the slightest provocation, then turn and look with wild eyes.


One of my friends who lives about ten miles away said one night he kept hearing strange noises, so he would go out on the porch and look around, but saw nothing. It had snowed that night and when he went out the next morning, he saw big kitty tracks in the snow right in his front yard. He followed them and saw where the lion had been up on the low overhanging roof of his porch. Probably just waiting to pounce. Gives me chills just to think of it.


Recently, there have been some pictures circulating on the Internet of some mighty big Mountain Lions. One was taken by someone's motion sensor camera and shows a Puma stalking a deer right in the guy's yard. That cat is almost as big as the deer. The title of the email said, "Dead Deer Walking." Here it is.


I felt like I was being stalked by a lion once, which was probably only my imagination. I was putting up hay along the highway right-of-way one evening when my tractor broke down about four miles from home. Being the most sparsely populated area of the least populated county in the least populated state in the nation, the Lance Creek Highway doesn't have much traffic on it anymore, especially right at suppertime. So I started walking home. I decided it would be quicker to just follow the creek bed back to my house, so I hopped the fence. As darkness fell and I was strolling under the banks of Lance Creek, I began to think of the Mountain Lion that had been seen in the area. I began to get real uneasy as I hiked. You can bet I moved out from under that bank. In fact, I moved out from under the trees that grow along the creek, too. Afraid of the dark, no. Afraid of what's in it, maybe!