- I have yet to actually see one of my rodent housemates (see previous entry). I thought I'd found their little gateway, a mouse-shaped hole (it was a hole in the shape of a mouse, it even had a tail) in my cupboard – I tacked up cardboard over it and thought I'd won, but those motherfucking mice, pooping in my motherfucking house – I found mouse poo under the suitcase in my bedroom. The sanctity of my room of repose has been violated. Mice: this means war.
- That race I ran last Sunday, we were supposed to turn around at the water station, but no one knew that, including the volunteers, so everyone just kept on running. Eventually, a kilometer or two later, we figured it out and turned around, and as we're approaching the water station again there's this bald eagle sitting in a tree looking at us with disdain. You could tell that, if he could talk, he would have been saying, "Yeah, you guys were supposed to turn around up there. You are stupid." Many of us stopped to look at him because the race didn't really matter anymore.
- This week, Monday morning, I dropped my car off at the shop and walked to campus, and as soon as I set foot on campus suddenly there is this cacophony of crowing and all these crows are freaking out, swooping around and shouting, and then a fox runs around Jesse Hall! A motherfucking fox! Running around the corner! And it stops and turns around and runs away again, and all the crows swoop and shout after it. A fox being hounded by a murder of crows! I've never really seen a fox up close before and definitely never seen one in town. It looked just like a fox does in cartoons. It was beautiful, really, and I loved it. I don't know where it went or where it came from. I don't know why the crows cared so much.
- That evening, I was walking back to the car shop through the university neighborhood. It was pretty dark. I walked by some house and then this line of five raccoons walks by me! Five! All in a line! They were all adults. They stopped and looked at me and they weren't scary or freakish like the raccoons in California were, these are nice wild healthy critters going about their business, and perhaps they were up to no good but they were not rapscallions.
- Yesterday morning I walked across the California Street footbridge and saw some tracks in the snow on the bank – feline – quite large. Quite large feline tracks! I thought at first that they were probably bobcat, but those are only a couple inches square, and these were larger. Cougar! Cougar tracks! And there were two sets of them – do cougars travel in pairs? This is two blocks from my house. (I have been informed that 'mountain lion' is the preferred term in Montana. Sorry, I'm from Idaho.)
- Last night while walking home along the river trail I heard all this flapping and splashing in the water. It was getting pretty dark but I could see that there were ducks about, so I thought it was just a duck flapping around. But it kept on going, on and on, and I saw that the duck was spinning in a circle, so I thought maybe it had whirling disease or was being attacked by an underwater alligator, but it turned out to be two ducks. Two ducks having a duck fight! They were fighting each other with their duck wings and their duck beaks! They were spinning around and around and fighting and floating down the river for like ten minutes. They'd stop every couple minutes to take a break but then they'd start again. No, they were not mating. It was very weird and mean. Then they swam upstream to the middle of the river and I lost them. Probably, today, there is a dead duck body floating around downstream on its way to the ocean.
tl;dr I SAW COUGAR TRACKS TWO BLOCKS FROM MY HOUSE.
Do cougars hunt mice?
