Note
Very oddly, when I was running yesterday, I found that over half of the streamers that I had put out just last week were missing. That's way too many for random animals and in any event there were no cows out in the area (the usual culprit when it comes to eating streamers.) I didn't check carefully, but given which streamers were missing, it would almost seem as if someone ran a subset of the course and picked up streamers along the way. But that doesn't make a lot of sense to me either, for various reasons.
So it comes down to my go-to blame the guilty party: iamstillhungry, which could also explain his recent alias change (trying to evade justice.)
Note
Intervals, 10 x 5 min.
While warming up, I noticed horse tracks in the dirt road, and occasional fairly fresh cow pies, yet no actual horse or cows in sight, nor any cow sounds within earshot. My guess was that a herd had just been moved from the pasture I was in to some other location, and that a rancher had ridden around afterwards to check for strays.
During interval #2, I came across a pair of cows, a mother cow and her calf, on opposite sides of a fence paralleling the road I was using. It was a similar setup to something that happened some weeks back, except that time the cows were all on my side of the fence.
Just like last time, when the cows saw me coming, they skittered off away from me, both staying close to the fence. They disappeared as I finished #2, then I caught up to them again on #3 and they disappeared again when I finished that one up, and then I caught up to them again on #4, which is where it got interesting last time and I was pretty sure something would happen this time, too. So the three of us are headed along an east-west fence, which would "T" into a north-south fence, at which point it would be decision time for the cows. At the "T", the mother cow went as far as she could and then turned north. The calf became frantic at the sight of me closing in and its mother headed away at a gallop (do cows really gallop? maybe they saunter or trot instead?), and it made a desperation dive into the fence and somehow wriggled through.
That would have seemed to have taken care of things, but not with this particular set of cows. Because I kept on running to finish off #4, at which point I was ready to start retracing my path on #5. And on #5, they were waiting for me, both on the other side of the fence, but still ready to run. So we all began making our way west. Once again, by the time I finished #5, they were out of sight, but I could hear them and hear how happy they sounded! ; )
But the, while I was recovering preparatory to starting #6, my eyes caught sight of some motion off to the south, which turned out to be two more stray calves headed down a slight incline, coming in my direction and about 100 m or so from me, maybe a little closer. Then I looked again and realized they were cow calves, they were bears, a small mama bear and a good sized cub. At about the same time, they noticed me. I was now thinking this didn't look good.
What happened next kind of floored me. The mama bear turned around and took off. The cub, on the other hand, started running too, but headed straight for me. Now I was thinking this *really* didn't look good.
Without thinking and just reacting, I started yelling "Whoa, go away bear!, whoa, go away bear!" I mean, it was kind of ridiculous in retrospect, as if a bear could understand what I was yelling.
Then things got worse again. The mama bear turned around, saw her cub running towards me, and now she started running towards me, too. I started thinking "where are those cows now when you need them."
But then the situation rectified itself. The cub stopped at a tree, and started climbing up the tree. When the mama bear saw the cub climbing up the tree, she stopped running and walked to the tree and stopped there.
And then I thought I felt recovered enough, and now would be a really, really good time to start interval #6, so I got started, and only looked back once! I think I made better time on that interval than on any of the others.