Tuesday Twitterdeedum

This photo was not taken in the Kootenai Valley.  I pulled off on Mountain Meadow Road near Naples and snapped a nice view of Roman Nose Mountain in the Selkirks. 

The dogs and I had a fun afternoon yesterday.  We walked along a dike leading from Westside Road at the second entrance to the Ball Creek Ranch Nature Conservancy property.

 

After a short distance, a lovely babbling brook to the left is dwarfed by the magnificent Kootenai River, which meanders its way through the huge, fertile valley northwest of Bonners Ferry.

During the walk, I was disappointed with the lack of fall color but did spot a few distinct signs of the season:  elderberries, ready to pick; geese flying south and woolly worms---lots of them.

I’m beginning to think we may have a glut on woolly worms this year, and I don’t know what that means about the winter or if it’s just that it was a good year for the little brown and black fuzzies.

   

I’ve been told that the width of that center brown stripe indicates how bad the winter’s gonna be.  I haven’t seen any exceedingly wide stripes during my sightings.

Annie and I saw several on the road Sunday while on our horseback ride.  She kept cautioning not to step on the woolly worm.  Too bad the drivers didn’t hear that as we also saw a few smashed into the road bed.

Poor woolly worms.  They never hurt anyone, but then again, we can chalk their mortality up to the cycle of life, which gets us all eventually.

The woolly worms along the dike yesterday all lived on to crawl and eat for another day, as I was very careful where I put my feet, and the dogs left them alone.

I was already being careful where I put my feet because it was obvious we were following a well-beaten path taken by a bear with apparent diarrhea.  Every 20 feet or so another pile of scat loaded with what looked like elderberries provided obstacles for me and another excuse for three canine noses to sniff the ground.  

When we reached a fork in the dikes, I walked a little ways to the south, but that trail was not well-beaten and weeds, including a healthy crop of thistles, provided enough of an obstacle on a hot afternoon that I decided to turn around and see if there were other places to explore with the camera.

Turned out that the area where we were became overcast and all spectacular scenes went dull, comparatively speaking.

Closer to Bonners Ferry, the brilliant sunshine returned, and by the time I reached our road here in Selle, the whole countryside was ablaze with early fall beauty.

Shortly after arriving home, I heard a car pull up to our mailbox and park.

 

“Not another one of those phonebooks!” I thought.  “Maybe I could catch this person and give them back the book.”

Well, they had driven off by the time I reached the outdoors.  I could see something sticking up on the mailbox----not a phonebook, thank God.

Instead, it was a piece of paper with a photo of a little girl holding a black cat.  LOST written across the top changed my confrontary mood immediately.

“Poor little girl,” I said to myself.  “We’ve all been there and experienced the pain of lost animals.” As I kept looking at the paper, I thought the little girl looked familiar.

Fast forward to my Tuesday morning walk on North Kootenai Road and the sighting of a black cat walking along the roadside about 200 feet north of me.

I picked up my pace in hopes of getting a good view of this black cat.  After all, we see LOTS of black cats out here in Selle.

The cat crossed the road and went into the ditch near the intersection at Selle Road.  As I came upon the corner, I looked down, and there it sat on top of the culvert.

 

Sure looked like the same cat in the picture with its big green eyes.  Plus, it meowed back when I talked to it.  Then, it went inside the culvert.

Seemed like I couldn’t walk fast enough to get back to the house to call that telephone number on the piece of paper.  When I did, I left a message and when Heather called back, I experienced an immediate surprise.

This was Heather, our former neighbor with the baby who had to move to Seattle because of an immune-related problem that played havoc with her baby from the day he was born.

They’re back in Sandpoint with their baby, nine months after his birth.  Not out of the woods yet, she says, but doing SO well.

 

What great news!  And, they’ll be coming by today to see if Heather’s daughter can lure the cat from its hiding place.  They left it with some friends in the neighborhood, but, being a hunter, it wandered off.

 

Looks like another possible good ending to what could have been a sad story for Heather’s daughter.

 

On this Tuesday, another beautiful day lies ahead, and maybe, just maybe, a nice family who’ve been blessed with good luck medically can also reconnect with their kitty.

So far so good.  Happy Tuesday.