STALKING THE UNICORN, BIG FOOT OR CREEK RAT

On a sunshiny day after one of the recent rains I went down to the creek, tracking. Not running or jogging around a racetrack, but looking for wildlife footprints. It is one of my pastimes.

I learned to track from an early trap line my sister and I had and from Louis L`Amour! Did I know Louis? Of course not. But I've read just about every book he wrote and I think there was not one that didn't, at some point in the story, describe how the hero followed a trail that the ordinary traveler would miss. There was the broken twig, the bent grass, the overturned pebble, the degree of warmth in the ashes of an abandoned campfire, the length between the tracks of a rabbit that must have been startled, not to mention the shape of a particular horseshoe or a misshapen bootheel print. It all boiled down to looking for the minute unusual, the intense scrutiny.

So, with great excitement in my mind, or heart, wherever excitement springs from, I started for the creek. I knew there would be mud where creek bank meets water, and who knows what I might find. The footprints of a 'coon, 'possum, the River Rat? Maybe a panther, a unicorn or Big Foot himself! Never engage in a pastime without hanging a few fantasies around the edges to make it more pleasurable.

I cut across the park meadow and found a golf ball. Before picking it up, I examined the grass around it to see if, like L`Amour's hero, I could tell from which direction it was hit. About four inches to the south of the ball there was a little trail of grass that hadn't sprung back up yet and one or two broken stems of tender clover. Aha, I thought, I'd better veer to the left. I was walking right into a golf ball ambush.

I followed a shallow arroyo beside a road. Some would call it a slanting shoulder on a hump-in-the-middle road. There was a discarded Big Mac cup, several days old, for the rain had destroyed its crispness. A little farther along there was a cigarette butt, still burning. I ground that "campfire" out lest it destroy the forest of light poles.

Noticing some tall grass by the creek bank shaking rather violently while all other grasses were still, I stood still as a stump. Maybe that panther? An orangutan? A platypus? Someone whistled afar off and out bounded a wild terrier. "Hi, Terry," I spoke, but it went past me without so much as a nod.

It's not easy getting down to the mud part of the bank. It is so steep. But, spying a spent tissue caught on an upcoming horseweed, about halfway down the bank, I felt there must be some sort of steep trail. Sending some mountain goat messages down to my legs, I explored where someone had gone before. The footholds were mushy and slippery and at one point I felt an exhilaration like the wild mustang must feel when sliding down one of L'Amour's mesas.

I came out just where I wanted to, where the water falls over the little shelf of limestone and makes that delightful murmur. Right away I saw a track. A mountain lion? A cheetah? No, it was only a dog's track. Probably that terrier who wouldn't even speak to me.

Like feather stitching an edge where water met bank, there were the marks of the red-wing blackbird. Could have been another species, but since the red-wings haunt this place, I assigned the embroidery to them.

Soon I saw some tracks in the making. Here came the muskrat down the creek, the wide V rippling behind him. I tried to become as the tall grass on the steep bank, but shortly before reaching me, he must have noticed the bat of my eyes and quickly dived, only to come up again a few feet downstream and crawl into a hole, without even wiping his feet, thus leaving the familiar print behind him.

A little round indentation in the mud near me must have been where a frog sat before plopping into the water. It could have been a hard-hit tennis ball that subsequently plopped into the water.

It did appear that Big Foot hadn't been this way recently, so I made an imitation of a print for those who came after me to see. Sinking my foot into the mud, I maneuvered it back and forth and sideways so that it was about three times my normal footprint.

I would like to have been on hand the next time someone took my route. But, alas, another rain came and destroyed my handiwork, er, footiwork.

REJOICE!