The unexpected

For the past few days we have watched a bighorn ram at the end of his life.  Isaac first noticed him a couple miles upstream when he was returning from a camera walk.  He noted the strangeness of finding a sheep down in the brushy riparian area of the river bottom, and as he watched, noticed that the ram did not seem well.  He was thin and somewhat weak looking, and had a bit of a runny nose and a cough that racked his sides.  The ram was searching out mineral licks, and Isaac filmed from only a couple dozen feet away as he licked the dirt, craving something his body badly needed.

Two days age we again spotted him, this time just across the river from Taylor Ranch.  He was walking slowly down river, and ended up bedding right on the trail just fifty yards downstream from the Taylor Ranch bridge.  We kept an eye on him all day, skirting wide around him when we went hiking down the trail. Sometime in the evening, the ram moved off the trail, picking his way even closer to the river on the steep and high riverbank that carves its way around the corner.  He was within twenty yards of the bridge, just standing, when we noticed the length of his hooves.  All four feet where extremely overgrown, and there was some thickening to his right front leg, and he looked more emaciated even than he had only days before.  But although he bedded frequently, and coughed with a vengence, he surprised us by mustering the strength to climb the steep bank again just before dark.  He bedded at the top, and we weren’t sure we would find him in the morning.

Morning light had us walking up and down stream, searching the riverbanks and the hills beyond, listening for birds and watching tracks.  Coyotes had been around, their prints leading both directions on the trail, and milling around the spot where he had been bedded the night before.  Just about the time we were thinking we wouldn’t find him, and that he had most likely moved off downriver and probably had days or even weeks still ahead of him, we found him.   He was only feet from the end of the bridge, and we had walked right by his camouflaged body.  The pair of coyotes had gotten him at some point during the night, and he had fallen back down the bank he had climbed only the night before, to wedge behind the bare fingers of a large willow bush.  We were surprised at how little was left, and figured the coyotes must be curled up somewhere, with distended bellies and well fed dreams.  All the better for the ram, who had been uncomfortably hard to watch even the day before.  In a way it was surprising he had lasted so long, in a place filled with hungry predators that seemed always looking for a weakened animal, an easier catch.  How had this animal made it so long in his state?  Clearly, this had been going on for a long time, judging by the length of his hooves and the shape of his body.  It’s a funny world, and just when you think something must be one way, it goes the other.  I guess there are no musts or definites or for sures… no iron rule that permits things to happen in only one way.