RE: Derek Wolfe is now on my personal totem
Lions gonna be lions, and mule deer are a favored natural prey. No need to kill a noble animal for that. No need to kill a lion for roaming around a rural neighborhood, either. Where I live, in western Colorado, they come and go as they please, usually undetected, and they seldom pose a threat to humans. Dogs are a different matter. If folks let their dogs run free, they're fair game. And if folks walk their dogs in lion country, they're more likely to experience a scary encounter with a lion than if they're walking alone. To a lion, a dog is just a potential snack.
Many years ago, skiing alone on the Liberty Cap Trail in Colorado National Monument, I turned around after reaching a high point on the trail and was heading back toward the trailhead when I encountered fresh lion tracks crossing my twenty-minute-old ski tracks. The pug marks in the snow were the same size as the baskets on my ski poles -- five inches in diameter. If that lion had known what a lousy skier I was, I'd have been easy prey. In my mind's eye, I see it crouched in the sagebrush near the trail, the end of its tail nervously twitching back and forth as it watches me glide by.
More recently, while walking toward a highway intersection one evening, I saw one run across the pavement in front of me, squeeze under a guard-rail on the opposing side of the road, and disappear in the brushy draw just beyond. Of course, I did the only sensible thing I could think of and ran over for a closer look. In the gathering darkness, I couldn't see the cat in the shadows, but I knew it could see me, so I slowly backed off and then continued my walk home. In my thousands of miles of hiking out here, it's the only lion I've ever seen. As the crow flies, it was 3/8 mile from my house.
Suggested reading: The Beast in the Garden, by David Baron. A good read, the book chronicles a number of human/lion interactions, some with less than happy endings for the humans involved. Just off I-70 on the east edge of Idaho Springs, there's a wooden pedestrian bridge, the Scott Lancaster Memorial Bridge. Scott was a high school cross-country athlete out for an evening jog when he was dragged down and killed by a lion. Did Scott trigger the cat's natural instinct to pursue as he jogged by, or did he bend over to tie a loose shoelace and appear smaller and more vulnerable than usual? We'll never know.
I know this is probably a minority opinion, but I'd rather remember Derek Wolfe for his exploits at Nippert and Mile High Stadium rather than as the killer of a lion.
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