Le Tour de Cats

Since her surgeries, K hasn't been able to mountain bike with me so our entire routine has changed. I now start each day by hiking with K, gradually going further as she gets stronger.

I find it very hard to gauge how fast to increase her activity because she can't tell me how she feels. As a hard-headed Labrador, she doesn't limp or show pain unless it reaches the pain level of a fractured bone.

So, we plateaued our hiking over this past week, trying to be conservative even though that's not my style. When I'm the recovering patient, I break every rule that the doctors give me! I'm trying not to be so impetuous with K.

You can even still see K's IV fur patch on her right forelimb, a reminder that my girl is still healing.

K seems to be telling me that she's ready to go further. We'll try extending her walking a little tomorrow.

The most obvious issue that she's still struggling with is tender paw pads, caused by 10 weeks in casts and bandages, that respond to barefoot walking by crazily overproducing spots of thick leather on her paw pads. It's called hyperkeratosis. We're treating it by soaking her paw pads in black tea twice a day - the tannins in the tea help toughen the pads. We also keep her paw booted during most of our hikes. Every day, I take her boot off for a brief period at the end of each hike. We've reached about 3 minutes of barefoot walking twice a day after a week of puppy steps forward.

Today, after I hiked with K, I headed out on what I must call "Le Tour de Cats" in retrospect. I spent the first part of my mountain bike ride on snow covered trails following in the tracks of multiple bobcats. I'd ride along next to one set of tracks for 5-10 minutes, enjoying observing the cat's behavior as he investigated boulders and bushes next to the path. Then, I'd roll over a section of unbroken snow for 5-10 minutes before I picked up the next series of bobcat tracks.

When we have fresh snow, I realize that our forest teems with bobcats! Below, a bobcat walked up a trail and paused, leaning back onto his hocks briefly, even leaving a tail mark in the snow. He probably smelled, heard, or saw something that caught his attention. Then, he continued his dainty walk onward and upward.

A little later, I started heading east, in the direction of less snow. I used a connector trail that I rode yesterday. Below, you can see my tire tracks from yesterday, and next to them, mountain lion tracks! The mountain lion followed my tracks for almost a mile. He never stepped right in the tire tracks but wove across them from one side to the other, acting as if stepping on the tracks was foreboden.

These were definitely mountain lion tracks rather than bobcat tracks because they measured about 3" long and wide. They were at least twice the size of the dainty bobcat tracks that I'd been following earlier. The step length from one lion track to the next was about 20" - a bobcat would have taken about twice as many short steps to cover the same distance. However, these tracks weren't from a huge mountain lion - it was either a female or a young male.

This mountain lion was heading in the direction of the forest behind my house either last night or early this morning. I hope that s/he passes one of my wildlife cameras!

I also realized that the lion tracks originated in a gully where I'd heard magpies and ravens calling raucously almost daily over the past week. I bet that the remnants of a carcass lie in that gully... but I chose not to investigate today. See, contrary to what you might think, I have some common sense.

The rest of my ride was peaceful and relaxing under blue skies with cloud formations whooshing past me in our never-ending winter winds. Although I know that we *need* real winter weather sometime soon to nourish the natural world, I'm reveling in riding "summertime only" trails despite the approaching winter solstice!