Watched by Wild Animals

by Enos A. Mills

The wilderness has a web of wild life trails. Many of these are dim. The unobserved of all observers, I often sat in hiding close to a worn, much-trampled wild life trail—a highway—where it crossed a high point.

Before me just at sunrise a grizzly and a mountain lion met. The grizzly—the dignified master of the wilds—was shuffling along, going somewhere. He saw the lion afar but shuffled indifferently on. Within fifty feet the lion bristled and, growling, edged unwillingly from the trail. At the point of passing he was thirty feet from his trail-treading foe. With spitting, threatening demonstration he dashed by; while the unmoved, interested grizzly saw everything as he shuffled on, except that he did not look back at the lion which turned to show teeth and to watch him disappear.

It was different the day the grizzly met a skunk. This grizzly, as I knew from tracking him, was something of an adventurer. His home territory was more than forty miles to the southeast. He had travelled this trail a number of times. On mere notion sometimes he turned back and ambled homeward.

But this day the grizzly saw the slow-walking skunk coming long minutes before the black and white toddler with shiny plume arrived. The skunk is known and deferred to by wild folk big and little. Regardless of his trail rights the grizzly went on to a siding to wait. This siding which he voluntarily took was some fifty feet from the trail. Here the grizzly finally sat down. He waited and waited for the easy-going skunk to arrive and pass.

The approaching presence of the solemn, slow-going skunk was too much and the grizzly just could not help playing the clown. He threw a somersault; he rolled over. Then, like a young puppy, he sat on an awkwardly held body to watch the skunk pass. He pivoted his head to follow this unhastening fellow who was as dead to humour as the log by the trail.

Along the trail friend meets friend, foe meets enemy, stranger meets stranger, they linger, strangers not again. The meetings may be climaxes, produce clashes, or friendly contact; and in the passing high-brows and common folks rub elbows. To meet or not to meet ever is the question with them.

One old trail which I many times watched was on a ridge between two deep cañons. At the west the ridge expanded into the Continental Divide and the trail divided into dimmer footways. The east end terraced and the trail divided. Stretches of the trail were pine shadowed, spaces were in sunlight.

Where the trail went over a summit among the scattered trees travellers commonly paused for a peep ahead. Often, too, they waited and congested, trampling a wide stretch bare and often to dust. On this summit were scoutings, lingerings, and fighting. Lowlanders and highlanders, singly, in pairs and in strings, stamped the dust with feet shod in hoofs or in claws and pads.

One of the meetings of two grizzlies which I witnessed was on this ridge trail. A steady rain was falling. Each saw the other coming in the distance and each gave the right-of-way as though accidentally, by showing interest in fallen logs and boulder piles away from the trail. Each ludicrously pretending not to see the other, finally a passing was achieved, the trail regained without a salute.