Curiosity Conundrum

Hello Everyone,

I originally sent out this email on July 11, 2014. Now that I regularly take Arthur biking, it's fun to look back at the first time that happened. Not an auspicious start.

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It's a little unfair to say that cats are the curious ones out of all the animals with whom we share our lives. Cows, for instance, are plenty curious, and 'curious as a cow' isn't even that bad of an alliteration. And while cats will bat things on your night stand just to watch them fall, they will also ignore their curiosity, as well as everything in the world, and lounge for hours on end when the mood hits them. Dogs are also curious. Recently, my dogs displayed their curiosity by running wildly away when let off leash in the South March Highlands Conservation Forest.

First, a note about the name of this area. This is where a lot of the good mountain biking in Ottawa is done, and it's a great spot. But there are no highlands there, nor anywhere in Ottawa. You have to go to Gatineau for that, and they are called the Gatineau Hills for a reason. Also, it should be called the South Marsh area because the mosquitoes are atrocious.

But I digress. I was there to do some biking and Anna brought the dogs to see how they would do off leash. I would still like to take one of them biking with me, but as a pair, their curiosity and lust for adventure often gets the better of them. They bolted into the forest after me and ran around frantically in the first few minutes. Dogs are allowed in here, so the concern wasn't that they would trespass. It was more a question of getting them back.

They did come back, after a few minutes, so Anna took them to a different part of the lands to avoid them running off after me again and then into the woods. That didn't work out much better. Curiosity played a different role later for me, though. At about the mid point on the trail Dave and I were on, when we were deepest into the woods, we dismounted to climb one particularly tricky bit of rock. We heard a peculiar sound, somewhat hard to describe, that we at first thought might be two trees rubbing together. There had been some damage from the recent wind storm, so it wasn't a crazy idea. But the sound was irregular and wasn't quite like what you would expect from trees rubbing. Curiosity got the better of me while we were resting, so I wandered off the path a bit into the clearing where the sound was coming from. Dave thought it might be a racoon. He was close. It was a couple of bear cubs high up in a tree next to the path. The sound we were hearing was likely them calling for momma bear. Dave's reaction sums it up best: "Welp, we're outta here."

The need for rest instantly vanished and we patched off and didn't look back. The worst part was that for the next 20 min, every shadowy shape at the side of the trail looked like a bear to me.

Now, I'm not surprised that there would be bears in that forest. It is a forest after all. The question I'm pondering is if I'm better off knowing when they are nearby, or if ignorance would be bliss in those cases.

wes

#Biking #Dogs