Some 30 years ago, a lovely hiking companion and I were hiking in the dark to join some friends at a rocky-mountain wilderness shelter –using the light of the moon to guide our path on an old forest road from the nearest vehicle-accessible place. It was a sort of "if we leave work at 5 on Friday, we can get to the region in 2 hours, up to parking in 2 hours, and from there to camp in another 2, and the others will probably still be up talking around the campfire" sort of thing that I did many times at that age.
This time, from about 20 minutes in, being the "hike in quiet so that you can see the wildlife" sort of companions, we noted that something was on our 4-o'clock and keeping pace with us. So we alternated being loud and being quiet, kept a steady pace.
I'm certain that any predator that wanted to stalk quietly could have done so, but this one was unconcerned about stepping on stuff or brushing against branches. Even so, the noises were subtle and infrequent, but always at about the same distance and azimuth -- just far enough into the foliage to be invisible in the moonlight.
As it turned out, our pace turned out to be quite a bit greater than Naismith's rule would indicate, so although we were in a scary situation for several miles, it wasn't long before we could hear our companions in the distance, and around that time we no longer heard anything moving behind us.
So there while is a part of me that thinks having the noise of "Spot" on my 4-o'clock for an hour would be absolutely terror filling, there is another part that thinks there would be some diminution of the terror just from being certain there is something there knowing pretty much exactly what it is.
1 comment:
On the one hand, yes, very scary.
Some 30 years ago, a lovely hiking companion and I were hiking in the dark to join some friends at a rocky-mountain wilderness shelter –using the light of the moon to guide our path on an old forest road from the nearest vehicle-accessible place. It was a sort of "if we leave work at 5 on Friday, we can get to the region in 2 hours, up to parking in 2 hours, and from there to camp in another 2, and the others will probably still be up talking around the campfire" sort of thing that I did many times at that age.
This time, from about 20 minutes in, being the "hike in quiet so that you can see the wildlife" sort of companions, we noted that something was on our 4-o'clock and keeping pace with us. So we alternated being loud and being quiet, kept a steady pace.
I'm certain that any predator that wanted to stalk quietly could have done so, but this one was unconcerned about stepping on stuff or brushing against branches. Even so, the noises were subtle and infrequent, but always at about the same distance and azimuth -- just far enough into the foliage to be invisible in the moonlight.
As it turned out, our pace turned out to be quite a bit greater than Naismith's rule would indicate, so although we were in a scary situation for several miles, it wasn't long before we could hear our companions in the distance, and around that time we no longer heard anything moving behind us.
So there while is a part of me that thinks having the noise of "Spot" on my 4-o'clock for an hour would be absolutely terror filling, there is another part that thinks there would be some diminution of the terror just from being certain there is something there knowing pretty much exactly what it is.
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