What a Fox!

It was just an innocent walk to a sacred site in the Big Horn mountains of northern Wyoming. We hadn’t even gone very far when I heard a marmot alarming to our right. I was a bit surprised because the marmots was a comfortable distance away and we shouldn’t have been seen as a threat. Then a hiker coming toward my husband and I gestured to our dogs and asked, “so you brought a fox with you?”

Our cat and senior, arthritic dog still slept in the camper with our youngest, who skipped the three-mile hike, but we had three of our dogs with us, and none of them even slightly resembled a fox. I was confused and started to say “no” when she dropped to one knee and began taking pictures of the trail behind us.

I turned to look and saw that a fox had been following us up the trail, and the woman first thought that he was a dog with us. I also squeezed off a few photos, which I wanted to share with you here.

I ran into a ranger some distance down the trail, shoveling some of the snow away from the trail. Yes, the area still had pockets of snow in mid-summer. It is not as hot at that elevation, at or near tree-line.

I was worried that the hungry-looking fox would continue to follow us, less openly, in hopes of making a quick lunch of our small dog Garnet. I was relieved when she said that the foxes were not known to attack people or dogs on the trail; it was likely curious. Well, the feeling was mutual! I’ll blog again soon about the Medicine Wheel that we visited, a sacred Native American site.