AND THE CHASE IS ON!

Brian and I enjoy taking our walks out here in the Desert.  This year though we are taking  it a little easier on our feet.  Brian has developed a small cyst that is dissolving on it’s own and was caused by shoes breaking down.  And I’m being more caution after having surgery on mine this past summer.

Anyways, we stay mainly on the dirt roads and we like to head out away from all others.  Towards evening we head towards the mountains just to the East of us-where it’s very peaceful and quiet.  We go until we see the top of the sun just hitting the Western slopes of the mountains and then we know we have to start heading back.

On this particular evening, I knew that the sunset would be amazing, and so I took along the camera. 

As I turned around to shoot some pictures of the Eastern mountains where the sun was shadowing areas and making it look picture perfect; I all of a sudden hear this thumping noise as if someone or something was running towards us.  We have  to always keep an ear and eye open to the ATV’s that roam out here, for they won’t slow down and we usually have to move over to allow them through, I knew the noise was not machine made but something else!

Like I said, I turned around and appeared a huge Jack Rabbit!  I don’t know who was more startled, me or the rabbit!  I let out a squealed, because at quick glance I wasn’t  sure what it was-thought maybe a coyote got too close to us.  The rabbit stood only for a second, with his huge ears raised high, then he was off, but not in the same direction he came from, but cross country.  He appeared to have hidden himself in some nearby bushes.

After my heart got back out of my throat, we carried on back towards our camper as the sun kept going down.  A few minutes later out of my right eye, here comes a coyote on a dead run.   He’s also watching us as he’s running as if he’s on a chase.  We stopped to watch him and I tried to shoot a few pictures, but he just wasn’t going to slow down enough for me to get a good shot of him.

We continue to watch him as he literally circled us.  I don’t think we have ever seen such a huge coyote out here as this guy was!  Anyways as he made a complete circle around us, we notice he went in the same general area as that rabbit went hiding in the bushes.  sure enough he had found his prey that we apparently had disrupted and the chase was on! 

We watched first the rabbit taking off with the coyote on his tail in the opposite direction of us.  Now that the sun had set and we watched an amazing show, we knew we still had a ways to go to get back and needed to keep going. 

Once again out of the corner of my right eye I again caught movement and right in front of us-no more than 30 feet comes the jack rabbit and the coyote chasing right behind him!  They both stayed on the roadway for the longest time and watched the chase until we couldn’t see either one of them.

We found the prints to the coyote and was amazed to his size.

We can’t help but wonder who won-the coyote or the rabbit?