At Least They're Committed

As soon as the poor little thing realized someone was near, it started to scream.

Having arrived at 1 a.m. Saturday to the Park Home on the ranch, I didn’t head into the backyard until morning. That’s when a heard it. A high-pitched cry of distress. I followed it to a thick, plastic, 5-inch-wide pipe that protrudes about 4 inches from the ground and goes down close to 4 feet. (Estimated, that is.) My eyes adjusted to the dark and there he was, staring up at me — a young prairie dog, seemingly stuck.

I called out to D saying, “There’s a little prairie dog stuck in this pipe!” He replied, “Good!” because, in case you hadn’t heard, prairie dogs are menaces and are tunneling across the ranch and several other sites in this state destroying things.

Of course, I knew we’d have to save it. Putting on my gardening gloves, I at first grabbed a plastic bag and tore it into a strip thinking it would be easy for his little nails to pierce the plastic, allowing me to pull him up. I couldn’t get it down far enough to save my life, let alone his. He chided me with a series of high-pitched chirps for my attempts.

“Hold on, buddy, we’ll figure this out!”

Not being entirely familiar with the agility of prairie dogs, I next went into the house and got a broom with a wooden handle thinking that might work better. In the meantime, I grabbed some dog kibble to drop to him until we figured it out.

Heading back outside, I at first noticed the silence. I dropped the kibbles into the pipe and looked in. No movement.

Oh my God! Could he have died that quickly? He didn’t look like he’d been in there long at all. His coat was soft and his eyes bright. I squinted hard. No movement. In fact, nothing. I squinted harder and thought I saw the outline of a corpse, decayed and melding into the earth. I straightened and gasped. How?

Reason then crept into my brain. First, unless the little bugger was a ghost, what I saw was obviously not his corpse. Secondly, I realized it was just the pattern in the dirt, no dead bodies to be seen.

He must have burrowed into the pipe, versus falling down it. He must have finally figured out a few yoga moves and twisted round to go back the way he came. His mom must have found him and dragged him home by his tiny tail . . . something.

But my mind is perplexed and I don’t know why. And why do I feel like I failed the critter? Why do I still picture it down there, dying or rotting when I know better? Why do I feel like I was sent on a mission from God and somehow had failed? Why do I overthink everything?

Shaking my head at my silliness, I think of the other occurrences from this weekend. I literally crossed paths with a beautiful but deadly cinnamon bear — he was going west to east and I was heading north to south. We were very close to each other and stared in disbelief for a good 4 or 5 seconds before I started fast-walking backward toward the car and he quickened his pace heading onward up the hill. Had he wanted to charge, I would not have had enough time to reach the safety of the Kia, so, phew! I was shaking so hard I couldn’t find the camera on my phone until he was long gone.

That was after I tried using the rocks to climb up the steep hill rather than taking the long, safer way around. Near the top, a rock gave way and I rolled down the hill along with several rocks that then dislodged in a cloud of red dust. Some fishermen called to me from across the river. “Are you OK????” I said I was fine and then noticed D storming toward me to help get me back on the safer path. “Why did you try that???” Hmmmm, is that some sort of metaphor? Needless to say, I’m beat to shit.

Yet those aches and pains, the embarrassment of the fall, the coulda-been close call with the bear, none of those come through when I ponder the trip. All I can think about is, what the hell happened to that damned dog?