(A continuation of This Post)
Sometimes the stars align and you are privileged to see an animal delve into an activity with primal glee, finally able to do the thing it has specifically evolved to do, and it is wondrous and beautiful.
Sometimes those stars align at 1 AM on a moonless night in November in the barely-developed mountains of Durango and it is Wondrous and The Worst Possible Thing That Could Happen.
I’d had Charlie all of 3 months at that point, which coincidentally happened to be how long I’d gone without medication for my anxiety disorder because ~Durango’s Medical and Psychiatric Care Is Terrible~ and I was compensating by taking him out into the rapidly freezing mountains every time the dread started setting in. For a 10-month old puppy, this was fantastic.
That night we were walking up the short path that lead to the dirt road that circled the neighborhood and I was busy looking up at the stars while Charlie was enthusiastically trailing a scent along the riverbank. I don’t miss Durango but I Do miss the the high mountain stargazing. You can see the band of the milky way almost every night the moon isn’t full. It’s reassuring to me, to be so small in the face of the majesty of the universe.
Something in the bushes beside us
Crunched.
Charlie froze, his neck back and tail a perfectly straight line as he pointed into the dense willows that lined the riverbank, eyes wide and nose snuffling furiously.
I, mistakenly, assumed he’d sniffed out the jackrabbits again.
I’m distractible as all hell but not a terrible pet owner. I keep Charlie on leash at all times, and that night he was wearing not only his anti-lurching chest harness, but a glowing orange collar in case he somehow managed to get loose and decided to run into traffic. The overall effect at a distance made him look perhaps slightly more menacing than a 45lb puppy should have looked:
…Which is probably why the creature lurking in the willows decided to try and make a run for it.
Now, I’d more or less gotten used to the Ominous Jackrabbits and thunderingly stupid mule deer, worked out a peace treaty with the coyotes and and had gotten pretty good at planting my thighs to keep Charlie from launching himself any farther than the length of his leash, but it still too both of us by surprise when the thing that leapt out of the willows to the far bank and started galloping into the night turned out to be a Black Bear.
Not a huge one- probably one of last year’s cubs by the size and legginess, but that was still 100lbs more opportunistic carnivore than I wanted to deal with right now, and prepared to grab Charlie and run the other way back into the safety of the neighborhood.
Charlie, on the other hand, was more than game for this game and lunged with all the might in his tiny little body-
And between our combined stresses, the leash
I don’t know Charlie’s top Speed for certain, but his best friend at the time was a fresh-off-the-track-for-being-aggressive-not-slow greyhound and it only took her about five seconds to barrel the length of a football field, and his nose was rarely more than an inch or two behind her ribcage.
Which for those of you in countries with civilized units puts them at around 70 kmh.
Your average black bear can only book it at 60 kmh.
I can do MAYBE 30 kmh on a good day, or when I am suddenly full of terror, which I was at that moment as I watched my beloved son launch himself over the river after the bear.
Charlie isn’t the most elegant runner- he has a lovely double-suspension gallop that lets him fly but he tends to bound upwards like a gazelle, though this might be a factor of him being shorter than the sagebrush he was chasing the bear through and he needed the vantage to locate it again. This at least afforded me the occasional glimpse of orange as I booked it after them as fast as my stubby little hobbit legs could carry me, only otherwise able to navigate by the sound of crashing foliage and Charlie’s yelps of glee.
I bolted through the sagebrush and scrub oak as fast as I could, certain I was going to slide on the loose dirt and turn an ankle or clothesline myself on one of the many hidden barb-wire fences the ranchers have erected and abandoned over the years through here. Eventually we came to an open grazing field and in the starlight I could see that Charlie had drastically closed the distance between them and was now snapping for the bear’s hocks, clearly having the time of his little doggy life.
For some reason, it didn’t occur to the bear that it was twice the size of it’s pursuer and didn’t just turn around to smack Charlie into an early grave, instead opting to keep running for another half-mile across the pastureland until we finally got to the actual treeline, halfway up the nearest foothill, before finally finding a suitable Ponderosa to climb, running up the trunk at almost the same speed it had been crossing the field with.
Charlie, unfortunately, had built up quite a bit of momentum in the chase and managed to use it to bound a good eight feet up the trunk and snap his teeth into the very tip of the bear’s tail.
I caught up to him as he was sneezing the fur out of his mouth, Bear grunting and whimpering from the branches some 30 feet above us. He danced around the bottom of the tree, barking and wagging his tail hard enough to wag his entire back end.
“CHARLESTON!” I screamed.
He turned to face me, face full of pride. “Look what I caught! Just for you!” he seemed to say.
“NO!” I bellowed, voice hoarse from being unable to catch my breath and tears streaming down my face.
Charlie, for all his gaminess, is a very soft dog that I’ve never had to say “no” about something twice to. He instantly cowed, crawling up to me and rolling over, trying to lick my face from the ground.
“I love you, you moron but NO.” I said, picking him up and dragging him by the harness as I backed up, still watching the black lump in the tree that I sincerely hoped was the bear.
The bear was suddenly illuminated by distant headlights and I realized there was a more serious issue. The neighborhood is bordered by highway on one side, Deserted BLM land on two sides, and a private Ranch on the other, and we had run into neither the highway nor BLM land.
Farmer McGregor was not over-fond of trespassers. Especially at 1AM and deep into his land and well off the easy-to-mistake-for-an-access-road.
I grab Charlie’s harness in one hand and his skinny dog ass in the other and hoist him up like an extremely disagreeable piece of luggage and book it back in what I sincerely hope is the direction of the neighborhood. It takes what feels like hours to find my way back but eventually I get back to my door, panting and wheezing and covered in dirt and leaves and the skin around my eyes red from crying.
Husband hears me come in at 2:30 AM. “Did you go somewhere?” he calls from the bedroom. He is a sensible, Diurnal creature.
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