Follow Your Gut
“Hiking in the Rocky Mountains, on a trail I knew pretty well. I was leading a group of kids, maybe twenty or so middle school-aged children from the camp where I worked. I turned a corner and saw a jawbone of a deer. Pretty cool, showed it to the kids. Didn’t have any flesh on it, so I assumed it was pretty old. A hundred feet further down the trail I find another bone. Femur, maybe (I specialized in insect populations, not deer anatomy.) …
… This one looked a little fresher. Another way down, another bone. I’m getting a little nervous at this point, so I explain that we should probably turn around and head back. My students all groan that they want to see more dead stuff, but I shepherd them down the train and back to camp. Two days later we got a call at the camp that someone had been attacked in the area by a mountain lion. Apparently a mountain lion had set itself up in the caves on the cliffside, and it had gotten pissed when someone got too close. I’m glad we left the area, even if my students would have loved to see more dead stuff.”