Memorable Animal Encounters

Several years ago in the Spring I moved a bale of straw at the edge of my flower garden and saw four babies of a kind of animal I had never seen alive before. They were about one and one-half inch long and clothed in marvelously silky gray fur–perfect miniatures of the larger moles the cats have occasionally offered as trophies. They were so adorable, I wanted to save them, but practicality carried the day, and I left them squirming where I found them, hoping the cats would deal with them in a merciful hurry.

Another year when we had an abundance of rain, I once took my young children on a walk to a place about a mile west and north of our house to a spot in the road where water ran across the road on a concrete surface. The concrete was usually high and dry, but when the small waterway overflowed, the concrete prevented a washout on the road. On this particular day, the stream seemed to be full of crayfish. Repeatedly one of them would wash up on the concrete and then slip and tumble along over the concrete till it finally washed across and dropped off the roadway. I had no idea so many crayfish lived so close by.

Another time, early in the spring also, I saw a chilling animal-sight in the ditch along the road by our house. A thin sheet of ice remained on the water that had accumulated in the ditch. Through the ice we glimpsed a knot of snakes probably a foot in diameter. Heads and tails protruded from the jumble and every so often one of the protrusions would move lazily. I think it was still too cold for them to feel energetic. I suspect they had passed the winter in the nearby culvert. I didn’t know Garter snakes did that.

Chilling in a different way was the time we drove up to the home of friends when we saw a skunk stumbling around in the front yard. It was broad daylight–an odd hour for skunks to be out. This skunk fell down repeatedly and then would get up to continue its circular stumbling walk. We had some of the boys with us who lived in the home we had come to. “Do you have a gun?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure this skunk has rabies, and we need to make very sure it doesn’t bite anyone or any of your pets.”

“We don’t have a gun. I think my Grandpa might, but I don’t think he’s home and I don’t know where it is,” one of them said.

“Then I think we’d better go home and get ours,” I decided. “You stay here and make sure you and all the cats and dogs stay away from the skunk. And watch where it goes if it runs away,” I instructed before we left.

My boys and I headed home and returned as soon as possible with a gun. Shane shot the skunk and then we tried to think where to put the skunk so that it could be tested for rabies if the boys’ parents decided to do so. The boys hit upon the idea of throwing it up on a low roof of one of their farm outbuildings, out of reach of the dog and cats. End of problem.

Shane has an animal tale that seems highly improbable, but is verified by witnesses. He worked for a seed company that kept cats around for the purpose of keeping mice away. Some of the cats were disappearing and the secretary for the business thought she knew why the morning she arrived at work and saw a bobcat leisurely checking out the perimeter of the seed house. A short while later, while Shane was eating his lunch in the office, he heard a commotion from the cats. “I’m going to see if that bobcat is out there again,” he said, grabbing the gun he had brought from home in anticipation of such a need.

He walked out into the seed house and saw–not a bobcat–but a mountain lion in front of the refrigerator that stored soft drinks. The long twitching tail was the identifying characteristic. The big cat ran outside the building and Shane ran out a different way, ready to get off a shot if it reappeared at the far corner of the seed house. It did and he did, but he missed.

The irony of this event is that the Department of Wildlife in Kansas has forcefully reiterated repeatedly that there are no mountain lions in Kansas. To be sure, tracks have been sighted, animals have been sighted and even photographed, and a few have been shot here. But none of this is official enough to count. The ones shot were probably escapees from captivity, and the other sightings were not made by a wildlife department official.

I think the officials need to “get a life.” As if no one except they are smart enough to know what they’re seeing.

On a dairy farm about a mile and a half from our house, one of the girls in the family went to feed the calves one morning and was horrified to discover only the calf’s collar and its head remaining in one of the pens. The rest of the carcass was nowhere in evidence. The farm dogs had raised a ferocious fuss during the night, but the man of the house was on a trip and the wife had no idea what she would do if she went outside and encountered a thief or a wild animal, so she left it to the dogs. That time a wildlife officer came out and agreed that it looked like the work of a big cat, but stated again that we don’t have any proof that Kansas has any mountain lions.

Several days later, very early in the morning we heard an animal sound different from any we had ever heard before. “Scream” is how I would describe it. But that, too, was likely a figment of our imagination. After all, Kansas has no mountain lions.