You start taking walks in the woods with a dog, and you start finding things you’d miss because you don’t, after all, have a very sharp nose. Along the Seaview Trail in the Berkeley Hills early this afternoon, Scout (a.k.a. The Dog) started nosing something lying in the weeds. When I caught up with him, I saw what he was interested in; at first glance, it looked like a little carcass tied to a couple of bloody sticks. I picked up a twig and turned it over, and saw that it was the lower part of a deer’s leg. The bloody sticks were bones that had been stripped bare by a coyote or some other hills varmint (OK–there are mountain lions up there, and they’d have an easier time dispatching a deer than a coyote would, but I didn’t think to look for any tracks; in any case, if the predator was a cat, it probably left plenty for the coyotes and other scavengers to gnaw on). Looking at it now, I’m surprised by the delicacy of it.
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