Ten and a half miles today through Briones, and 2460 feet climbed. I am 19 miles behind last year’s totals for the date. Perhaps, given what’s happened so far this year, I should say only 19 miles behind. I got a few miles in and realized, again, that I had forgotten to call Pam, again. We have been meaning to hike in Briones since February. We’ve known one another for 17 years, but we have some catching up to do: my working for her husband the last five years at Earth Island added a slight note of awkwardness to our usual mutual soul-baring for a time. Back to normal now! Though she may not have wanted to walk ten miles today.
Six and three quarters miles in a gopher snake sunned itself in mid-path dust. It was wary, but it was torpid. I sat a few feet away and watched it for a time. Pocket binoculars come in handy for such things. With those binocs, a snake five feet away looks as though it is only whatever one seventh of five feet away is. Two minutes, three, and listening to the whirring ratchet of Steller’s jays and the coughs of harriers startled to find a human in the road, the drilling of the acorn woodpeckers I’d seen a mile back and wild turkeys gargling beyond the ridge I’d just descended, and the snake moved. It was tentative, deliberated. It shook its head from side to side, shiny black tongue flickering the wholetime, then each five or ten seconds would move forward in a jerk, a quarter inch at a time. It met a wheel rut from a mountain bike, flowed along the path of least resistance for a foot or so. Shake, flicker shake, flicker lurch. A pipevine swallowtail went among the red maids, orangetips flitted before the downdraft off the canyon head, and the snake kept on. In the glasses its scales looked carved of polished jasper and agate. Its eyes onyx. After twenty minutes, my skin reddening in the sun, it reached the grass at the roadside and was, suddenly, gone.
On the ridge-top a sound of clinking tags: a German short-haired pointer charging me at full speed. She bore no malice, but passed me by, ran a hundred yards and then doubled back, combing the tall grass and poison oak on either side of the trail for a few minutes, then speeding back the way she’d come. I kept on. Four minutes later she was there again, looking faintly distracted, faintly nervous, as if lost and searching for her human charges. I called her, but though she looked at me somewhat kindly she did not come. I called her again. She trotted up to within fifteen feet and I could see she had no tag on her collar, just the county rabies vaccination medal. She dove joyously into a copse of coyote brush, pointed emphatically at something caught in the trunks, tail wagging madly. I looked back the way she’d first come for a long moment, waiting for someone on bicycle or horseback. No one showed. I wondered about taking her back to the house, putting up signs. I could not get near her. I walked on.
She followed, at a remove at first and then just ten feet away or so, tracing whichever verge of the fire road was farthest from me at the moment.
“Are we walking together now, girl?” She cocked her head and then ran back around the curve we’d just traced and out of my sight. I walked a minute more and she was there again, and followed me again. It felt intimate and yet frustratingly remote, as if in a dream a loved one recognized me only vaguely. Zeke was her size ten years ago, and he ran as much though without her air of desperation, and my body suddenly remembered how it felt to walk sleepily along sun-drenched fire roads with him, his every nerve alerted to the possibility of fun, and when she finally abandoned me and ran back toward where we’d met I could not contain myself any longer. His name in anguish echoed off the far hills.
I would shout his name loud enough to cleave the world, had I the voice.
Today I saw the first Castilleja in bloom of the year, and the first Brodiaea laxa. Coming down the Yerba Buena trail off Crescent Ridge I rounded a curve and saw the hindquarters of a Columbian black-tailed deer, standing unconcerned in the road. She had not seen me and I crept along stealthy behind her for a time. I would have followed her a long way, but an unseen buck off the side of the trail spied me and leapt noisily away, spooking her, and she panicked and ran. Above a red-shouldered hawk flew past, rising on a thermal. I would not have seen it but that its shadow passed in front of me on the road.
buddy and cora went with dad to hike in briones this afternoon. they were hoping to find more sun than we had around here most of the day.
the pups were ready to go—hikes with dad are their very favorite things, even more fun than all the other things. my husband was planting trees and flowers this morning, and he put a little california walnut sapling in a big pot. cora started rooting around in the pot with her snout, so i got an enthusiastic nose-rub that was rather more muddy than usual, and that baby tree has been caged with a little fencing, for its own good.
anyway, seeing how cora finds joy in playing with a little tree, she and our senior dog buddy are most likely having a grand old time with the terrain and wildlife, in the classic zeke tradition.
[me, i’m working on taxes. the dogs have more sense than to volunteer for THAT job.]
Chris,
I have a totally self-centered question…
I’m going to be staying in Clayton next week with some time to kill. Do you know if there’s anywhere good to take our 13-year-old, short-walks-only dog Chris that he might enjoy?
Your post reminded me of a dog I borrowed a time or two from a boyfriend. A Chesapeake. I’d take him for walks in the woods and he would do circles around me, me on the fire road, he through the trees, looping back every few minutes to check on me and trot along with me a yard or two before going off on another loop of his own.
A howl sent your way…
Natalie