The best adventures are the kind that nearly require you to call 911. Such was the adventure I had today. Highlights include a battle to the death that sounded like the worst cat fight you’ve ever heard at 3:00 am, a pitchfork, and one enraged ten pound rodent CLINGING TO MY KAYAK PADDLE, teeth bared. As one of my favorite authors, Dave Barry, would say, “I swear I’m not making this up.”
So the pictures above were taken many hours after my heart stopped pounding hard enough to cause me significant concern. (My heart has been on the fritz lately, but nothing too serious.) The heron landed about twenty feet off my left shoulder while I was staring into the dense underbrush where the incident had occurred, trying like the best detective possible to piece together the facts. The little green frog was nearly under foot on an ill-conceived but well-executed tiptoe through pucker brush looking for animal tracks in the muck to help me identify which of the creatures in my backyard got inadvertently bonked on the head with my paddle and came up ready to bite.
The story is such a good one that I am going to wait until I am actually awake to write it. I’m also going to attach the only photos I have that give clues (or red herrings) as to what sort of animal I was dealing with. I already talked the details through with a friend who knows Maine wildlife better than most of us ever will, and he’s putting his money on a fisher being involved. Stayed tuned, folks. Tomorrow night is only 24 hours away.
The Nature of Maine 