Bear the Dog tore the muscles in his knee, the dog equivalent of his ACL, so I took a break from running in the forest and instead ran on Butler Avenue alongside the prairie dog town and the remnants of Lake Elaine—a one-time golf course irrigation source, now mired in both mud and litigation between the HOA and the lakeside homeowners. I’ve seen coyotes and foxes outside my backdoor. My mother-in-law saw a mountain lion in the forest where I usually run the dogs. My husband saw an Arizona lynx, a type of very large bobcat, which was, Erik said, the same size as Bear the Dog. Bear weighs sixty-five pounds but pounces like a bobcat, which is how he tore his ACL in the first place.
I’m not a fast runner but I pick up the pace when I run on asphalt instead of dirt and rocks. So I was, for me, trucking down the road, next to a guardrail, turning my head on occasion to look for a prairie dog popping his head out if its tunnel. I do not see a prairie dog but I notice something is running alongside me. Finally, my wild-animal-running-partner dream has come true. The animal is black and running on all fours, its back reaching the top of the two-foot-high guardrail. Is that a juvenile bear? How nice that if my Bear the Dog won’t join me, a black bear from the forest will. It’s not that uncommon to see bears near here. Arizona  Fish and Wildlife have to move bears looking for water off the golf courses sometimes. Maybe this one was on his way to the pond near Hole 18.
Nicole Walker is the author of seven books, most recently Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster. She teaches at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. The words here are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of her employer.
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