I make the occasional run out to Indian Head and around the Qu’Appelle Valley and after my parents won a few free oil changes at the local car dealership and offered me one, I had an excuse for another road trip yesterday after I got the kids off to school.
The free oil change turned out to be quite expensive when the garage found out my tire treads were getting quite low (which I knew and intended to deal with soon) but also that one tire had damage to the sidewall (which I didn’t know) and they recommended repairing immediately as it was dangerous to be driving on the highway!
So I left my car behind to get new tires and they gave me a loaner vehicle for the day.
I decided to carry on with my plans anyhow – eating take out East Indian food (not sure what amazes me more – that my small prairie hometown has supported an East Indian restaurant for five years or I haven’t managed to eat there before now!) at our family cottage, checking out our family farm, going for a long hike.
That’s where the road runner part comes in.
I decided to extend my hike past where I normally (and easily) go – not just to the “Hog’s Back” hillside about a kilometre from our farm yard but to take a big walk around the whole quarter section of land that we have which overlooks the Qu’Appelle Valley.
In my head, I thought there’d continue to be nice grassy parts along the fence line so I wouldn’t have to walk through the stalks of the combined canola. Turns out I was only partially right – there were a couple parts that were good for walking but for most of my walk, I was either getting my bare legs (hadn’t really prepped for a hike and was wearing ankle socks and shorts!) scratched by the canola stalks or by the various pokey weeds in the grass.
A smarter man would’ve turned back right away but I kept thinking “Oh, it’ll get better” mixed with “I really want to do this” so I carried on (to be fair, the picture above is from the end of the hike, not what my legs looked like after my first few steps!)
Anyhow, I got about halfway through and all of a sudden, I hear a rustling near me and see an animal take off from the tall grass where it had been resting (it was also a fairly hot July-like day yesterday.)
I only saw a glimpse of it and I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that my first thought was “Why is a dog way up here? Must be loose from a cottage below.” Then, even more embarrassingly, I ran through other dog-like wild animals it might be, ruling out “fox” but settling on “wolf” completely forgetting that there was an animal between those two extremes called a coyote.
Perhaps part of the reason my mind blanked on coyote was that we’d just seen one at the Calgary Zoo a month ago and I was morbidly fascinated watching the penned coyote gnawing on its lunch and I didn’t want to contemplate a close call with one not having a fence between me and it!
Anyhow, the rest of the walk proceeded without further incident (well, as I said, my legs were pretty mangled by the end – can coyotes smell blood like sharks do?) but I did pick up a couple rocks to carry and turned on some tunes to try to dissuade any further interactions even though coyotes rarely attack adult humans.
When I finished my walk, I spent some time thinking about what had happened and it made me realise that seeing that coyote was exactly *why* I wanted to go for the walk – it’s a good reminder that we mostly live in a fairly safe, developed, neutralized world and that can make us a bit complacent even though wilderness and untamed nature isn’t very far from us either.
But yeah, next time I go for a walk at the farm, I hope I see a deer instead! 😉
