The elk (and maybe the mulies) came back!

Two mornings ago Tobie woke me, very excited, to announce that something extremely important was happening outdoors and that I should get up immediately and let him out to investigate, defend against and/or consume, as the situation may demand. I told him to shut up and come back when it was light enough to see, then went back to sleep.

Surprisingly, the situation still obtained when I finally did get up and took him outside for a first pee. Across the wash, maybe 150 yards from the porch, the ground rises to a mud-flat with lots of brush and then to a bare rocky slope that steepens but never quite becomes a cliff, rising about 50 feet before it flattens out again. Up that slope there used to be a regular game trail, and it wasn’t unusual to see elk climbing it in single file. But starting nine years ago when the cattle took over, elk became rarer and finally disappeared entirely.

Elk are well camouflaged and my eyesight is going so even though Tobie stood on the driveway and pointed them out to me I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary at first: but then some of them saw us or caught our scent and started pronking up the slope, so that their motion was undeniable even to my eyes. I saw four of them and there were probably more. Welcome back! Ironic since just lately I’ve seen a small gang of cattle back in the general area.

Then this morning I found small hoofprints that could pretty much only have been made by a mule deer, which I also haven’t seen around here in a few years.

The native ungulates don’t seem to like sharing space with cattle, for reasons I don’t understand. Hard to imagine that the cattle would bother them, with the possible exception of the breed bulls. When they’re around they’re not shy about using the cattle’s waterer, but never when the cattle are around.