WILD ONES: Darlene Mosley has been calling this “The Summer of
Animals.”

Darlene, who has three horses in a pasture along Route 770 not
far from Marshburg, phoned us after reading about reports of
rattlesnakes in Cameron County and a mountain lion not too many
miles from her horse barn.

A couple months ago, she had been riding one of her horses on a
logging road on the south side of Route 770 when she noticed what
she thought was a stick.

But this “stick” was almost too straight. Still, it wasn’t
moving and looked “barky.”

Suddenly, she noticed it was a snake. “It pulled its head out of
a water puddle and went up into a coil,” she said.

“This all happened in seconds.”

The rattler was only about a foot and a half long, and as big
around as her thumb. Since it was a small snake, Darlene figured it
was a young one.

She walked her horse on by. Darlene had been riding with her
daughter and they had gotten separated. The two waited, and the
snake eventually came out of its coil and went down the road. The
two riders got away unscathed.

For those of you who were wondering, horses do not get spooked
around snakes – that’s just one of those myths.

The second animal of the summer crossed Darlene’s path some four
weeks ago.

This time she was riding her horse on a trail on the other side
of the roadway.

“An animal jumped into the road from the woods. It was a
mountain lion for sure. I saw the tail and everything,” she
reports.

Darlene had been riding with Martha Wilcox and she, too, saw the
mountain lion.

Finally for the summer (so far), she was at a residence on Route
219 in the Custer City area.

When she stepped outside she could hear howling so close “the
hair on the back of my neck stood up.”

The howling was coming from a coyote, of course.

For whatever reason, coyotes in this region are not the smallish
“wily coyote” we’ve come to expect from the Roadrunner cartoons.
They are more the size of a German shepherd.

Let’s let Darlene’s Summer of Animals be a cautionary tale for
us all.