Late Start

My! How time flies when you're having fun!

I got a pretty late start on my walk last evening. One thing after another seemed to conspire to keep me from getting out to enjoy "Saga's Park." The sunset was in full swing as I started my eastward journey along the creek and the thunderheads that I was to later learn were dropping hail and spawning tornadoes over the eastern plains were looming like a huge, pink, cotton candy menace out beyond the downtown cityscape. (I really must remember to carry a camera with me more often. It's not as if I don't own three – or is it four? – of them! But I digress…)

Out into the garish evening I went, mentally calculating as to whether there was enough of the sunset left to do the full five-K I had planned or not. As it turned-out, not. By the time I had turned south to head across the creek and head back west, the color had fled the eastern sky and what light still outlined the mountains silhouetted to the west had faded to a murky grayish-orange glow.

The twilight was enough to follow the trail along the creek, but just barely. I was about half-way back to the western end of the park when a noise off to my right made me start. And had that been a movement that I half-caught out of the corner of my eye?

I peered off into the murky twilight under the trees and there, over the stream, on a tree that had fallen under the weight of one of the snowfalls we had received this winter, was a fox. He sat there, staring back at me with that same expression that Saga uses on me when she is trying her Jedi mind trick on me; "You can go about your business now. You did not see me steal this sandwich off the coffee table! This is not your lunch!"

The noise I had heard repeated itself and I noticed that the fox had been out hunting for its dinner. It had a field mouse in its jaws. As I watched, fascinated, the fox settled down to a sit, then to a crouch, he was still wary, but it appeared that he decided that I wasn't going to take his prey.

If those two joggers hadn’t come by and frightened it away, I probably would have been able to leave the poor fellow in peace to enjoy his dinner. But just then two guys came running down the path on the other side of the stream; startling the fox who dropped the mouse into the stream and darted past me off into the field.

I finished my walk and returned home well after it was full-on dark, and with the new moon being this evening, there was no moon or light at all one the final dregs of the sunset had left. I am going to have to get an earlier start this evening!

Wherever you are today, I hope you had a pleasant evening and that your day today is a great one!

Don Bergquist – April 14, 2010 – Lakewood, Colorado, USA