Last Sunday morning, at Lake Arrowhead, Fred and I went out for our morning “read the news and pee” walk. It was a beautiful fall morning at the Lake. At 5,000 feet elevation, Lake Arrowhead has a pretty short fall season — not much more than the month of November. Most of the trees are pine trees, so there’s not a lot of color. The next most common tree is the oak, which turns to yellow and then, when the rains come, brown and then bare.
The dry oak leaves scare me sometimes. They race along the street when the wind blows hard, and they make a weird noise. The first few times I saw this, I was really puzzled. It took me a few minutes of staring to figure out what I was seeing.
Fred and I started to walk toward the cul-de-sac near our home, and then I decided to head the other direction. Fred’s pretty neat about letting me lead the way on these walks. This is a real important part of our dog-bonding. As Ted Kerasote (Author of “Merle’s Door”) says, I’m “reading the news.” I really enjoy sniffing everything in sight. It’s my way of checking out who’s in town, who’s been visiting, who peed where, and so on. Anyway, I started to walk toward the cul-de-sac, but a really exotic smell pulled me the other direction.
After I did my sniffing, I turned around and there, right in the middle of the cul-de-sac, was a really neat looking animal. It looked like a lot of my doggie friends, but it had a more pointed nose, very erect ears, a body slightly smaller than mine, and very healthy looking grey fur. I started pulling on my leash to go say a big “doggie hello,” but Fred grabbed my leash and yelled, “No Callie, that’s a Coyote and he’d like to eat you for breakfast!”
Wow! I don’t want to be anyone’s breakfast — I don’t care what kind of animal it is. So I guess I learned an important lesson from Fred: “Don’t mess with Coyotes.”
When Fred pulled me back, the Coyote saw him and decided this was a bad place to be. So it ran, very gracefully I would say, down the hill, through our yard and back toward Willow Creek, which is probably where it hangs out.
I really like the way Fred lets me lead the way on our “sniffing” walks, but I’m also glad that he keeps me out of trouble sometimes.
Actually, we have a few coyotes around home, too, but we don’t see much of them. They live in the “barranca” near our house, and they stay pretty close to the creek, which is about 100 feet down in a steep canyon.
Here’s a photo of a coyote that Fred took in Yellowstone Park. It’s not the same coyote I saw on Sunday, but it looks the same to me. I’m sure glad it’s jumping on a little vole and not on me. Come to think of it, that guy did smell a little trashy.
