The Beach, Is Frozen

Searching

This afternoon Jax and I searched the whole eastern, southern, an western sides of the property and there are no cat tracks. This lion is not acting like or visiting places the mountain lion of the past has. Perhaps a new one.

The Night Tells All, But Says Nothing

I have learned a lot. When the white-tailed antelope squirrel sound the alarm, if you know their sound, there is a predator. If the birds keep feeding, it's a ground predator. If everybody goes to earth or bush, it's an air predator. If you can identify which white-tailed sounded the alarm, look where it is looking, and that's where the predator is. If there's rustling in the bushes, it's not there. If none of the little people are moving in an area, it's there. If the warning tails off at the end, the predator is leaving. If the warning continues, every six or seven seconds, the predator is here and waiting for somebody to make a mistake. So says the day time.

The night time also talks, if you know what to listen for. The 3rd time in a week there is a heavy noise on the back porch. I don't go out on the back porch to see. I open the door to the front porch. If there are no fox eyes staring back at me in the headlamp, if there isn't a skunk in the hole, if the ringtails aren't in the rafters, and no raccoons are on the porch, something everyone fears, is here.

Three guys staying next door said they tracked her into the canyon yesterday and saw a near miss where she almost got a deer. Almost. She's still hungry.

On this night there are no eyes reflecting back at me and I am alone on the porch. Nobody wants a hot dog? Or nobody wants to die for a hot dog. It's quiet and eerie, a slight moon, wind just tickling me, the night talks to me, I am listening, the mountain lion is here.

"I got a monster in my closet
Someone's underneath my bed
The wind's knocking at my window
I'd kill it but it's already dead
I'm just waiting for the sun to rise
Oh how I wish that old sun would rise"

The One

There is One

When the darkness comes there are 11 gray foxes that come to eat. I know there are 11 because I've had 11 in a row come in for a hot dog one right after the other and several times I've seen 11 sets of eyes out front of the lodge when it's feeding time. There is one, a young one, that comes during the day. So often in fact that the birds don't fly away when it approaches and the white-tailed antelope squirrels don't sound the alarm and they don't run. It's front left leg is either broken or deformed of some type but whatever the issue, it's unusable. When it walks normally it carries the leg along helplessly or when it reaches down to eat bird or sunflower seeds it walks on it's knee. It's so painful just watching it.

Another Miracle

For fifteen or twenty years I worked on the books for a company that I founded called Let's Play Sports or on the internet you'll find it under letsplaysoccer.com. Each year as we added more indoor soccer locations my goal was to get that location "into the black". Meaning, positive cash flow. If it was in the red, that was negative cash flow. However in the world of cables on batteries, that is not the case. Red is positive and black is negative. For the first eight years that I was out here I fried at least one battery per year by hooking up the jumper cables wrong thinking that black was positive. Now, for a record second year in a row I made it the whole year (well a month to go) without frying a battery and just remembering that hooking them up is exactly the opposite of what I think it should be. This is a real miracle.

Miracle

A couple of years ago somebody stole the sign on top of Hurrah Pass that said "Hurrah Pass". I told the BLM (not Black Lives Matter) a couple days later and told them and then gave them three or four follow up calls every four to six months. Earlier this year, maybe four or five months ago, a pole showed up, and then a few days ago a sign actually showed up on the pole.