Human meets wildlife stories can be tame, mysterious, scary or disturbing. This has the elements of all... The winter of 2011 brought lots of snow, so much that I even snowshoed up our roof with no ladder needed! This of course brought out the road graders. Here in our county, the back roads are cleared with graders, not plows. One day Russ was working in his shop and there was an uncomfortable grinding noise. Going out to inspect he saw a road grader tipped precariously on it's side (just about where I am in the tractor photo) leaning close, but not touching our fence. The driver repeatedly revved his engine in hopes power would release him from the snow encasing his tires. Perhaps he was hesitant to call for help, but momentum and absent traction finally made the choice for him. Help arrive about an hour later.
The grater was released from it's prison and we were pleased no one was hurt and no significant damage to our land or the grater.
Come spring we noticed that several of our fence rails were broken because of the road grader. Russ called several fence companies and they didn’t make that rail type any more. I actually didn't want to have white rails next to well seasoned ones anyway so I made a practice of looking in people’s fields for piles of unused, seasoned fence rails.
One spring day we headed to Pagosa for a mountain picnic and I noticed just the pile I was looking for on the edge of a property. I suggested we go check it out and perhaps approach the owner. Russ thought we were on a wild goose chase and was slightly uncomfortable with the plan. My thinking was, ‘this is a lot easier that cutting down trees and liming & skinning them and letting them season’!
It was a large property, with the lower, road edge mostly field and a long winding dirt driveway slipping into the woods. Russ was apparently not feeling as needy as I was and again voiced his reservations. Approaching the top of the hill was a log house; magnificent! It was the largest log-MacMansion I had ever seen. Russ was feeling 'the protector', and told me to wait in the truck. He walked up the grand curving staircase to the door, disappeared inside, and out came back out with a Paul Bunyan type guy. Rugged, plaid lumberman shirts, black rubber apron and a bloody knife in his hand! Hmmmm!
Stop here and consider. No one knows where we are, we didn't own a cell phone back then so it was not a part of our daily garb, we have just driven off the main road into the woods and my husband was now inside the house as a man wearing a full rubber butchers apron and brandishing a bloody knife steps outside and beckons me into his house. Definitely one of those panic moments!
Russ steps back out as the man (soon I learn his name is Dennis) says… “You might as well have the tour too”. Russ gives me some sort of look that was difficult to translate... caution, warning, you gotta see this! Waving me on in Dennis says “Don’t mind me, I’m just skinning a bobcat on my kitchen table”. Slipping past him into the large spacious entry room, there is in fact a beautiful bobcat on the long trestle table temporarily covered with plywood and a tarp. Fortunately, Dennis had just begun so the cat was gutted and mostly still furry except one leg and the upper portion. The fur was thick and healthy.
I must interject here that I was at ease with this amiable man. His love was art, wildlife and making his home a place to display his passions.
The short end of that story was that the cat had climbed an electrical pole the night before and electrocuted itself. Dennis thought everyone was out of electricity, but learned after calling LaPlata Electric the next morning that was not so. LaPlata Electric came out and found the cause of the outage to be the cat. With his passion for wildlife Dennis asked the electric company if he could keep the cat and they agreed. But why?
Well, the house was amazing, a work of art. I will never be able to describe the artistic beauty or the endless details but here are a few… a fireplace the size of the end of our house with the nicest stone work I have ever seen. Embedded in the stonework was ‘cave type’ metal door with a woodland scene tooled in it. Behind was wood storage. The tub surround in the bathroom was all done in cut glass tile… the above showing a forest scene with all the local animals and below a water scene with local fish. There were 100s of plants and pictures. All the lighting was made by Dennis, either metal or antler originals. There was a HUGE stuffed bear, a stuffed fawn, and tons of deer head and skulls everywhere. Obviously ‘Paul Bunyan’ was a hunter. He wasn’t a curmudgeon, a hermit or a ‘Paul Bunyan’, but a very outgoing and gentle family man. There were many feminine touches, not all burly hunter and masculine.
We walked away with an enormous aloe plant, a spider plant and the invitation to come back and take all the fence posts we needed and some soup. Not bad huh?
So 'our' bobcat became part of his home decor. This man brought the outside in. This man and his family lived in a wildlife museum disguised as a home. This man lived his passion.
Ya just never know who you’ll meet!