Alen Liere: Lost and Found

Part of my morning routine is to go for a walk in the woods with the dogs. I have been doing this for 23 years – ever since the day my wife and I completed our home at the base of the mountain.

When we were building the house, I was often tempted to set aside my work and sneak away to explore the forest, but I promised myself I would not go until the house was completed, and the tantalizing secrets behind the trees and bushes just a couple of hundred yards from the building site were part of my incentive for putting in extra long days.

I kept my promise to myself and finished the house before the snow came. Some of the areas I now tramp are mine; some are not. Most of the neighboring landowners don’t mind me walking on their property. Some do, and I stay off.

After 23 years, I know the location of every deer scrape, every coyote den and every turkey roost tree. Despite my tendency to get hopelessly lost on Spokane’s south side, I can unerringly go back to the deer trail I discovered on my mountain. I know where to find the best moss for worm bedding and where I can pick wild strawberries in the spring and wild raspberries in the summer. I know the spot where the first buttercup of the year will appear in late February.

I often discover things lost in the woods. I found an arrow buried in a pine tree and a rusted knife stuck in a rotting log. Recently, I found a fully inflated inner tube. I must assume it blew away from someplace, but it must have flown a long way. Several times, I have found things I lost previously – stocking hats, camouflage cushions, stakes for turkey decoys.

In the middle of the lone logging road on the hill I found a dog collar with a little red pack attached. Inside the pack were two plastic sacks. I think the pack was to be worn by the dog so he could carry his own means for disposing of his doggy doo. But picking up doggy doo in the woods doesn’t seem necessary to me in light of all the deer and moose droppings. I don’t think I’d have anything in common with a person who picks up doggy doo in the woods.

The best things to find in the woods are not really lost, but no one was meant to find them – like the turkey nest with 12 eggs and the duck nest with six. Deer sheds, of course, are always a possibility and probably my favorite. It makes me sad, though, to find a complete skull and horns near the scattered bones of a whitetail buck, and there have been a lot of them this year.

There are cougars on this mountain at times – I’ve seen them – and I imagine they get their share of deer. That’s a natural thing and I can live with it, but I think the killer of most of these was bluetongue – an insect-borne viral disease of ruminants, also known as epizootic hemorrhagic disease. Yes, that’s natural too, and the coyotes clean up the carcasses. But unlike the swift, efficient attack of a cougar, bluetongue causes some nasty lingering symptoms before the deer dies.

I also find things in the woods that make me angry – plastic grocery bags, candy bar wrappers, aluminum cans. I pick them up and carry them home. Some of this, I assume, was tossed aside during logging operations several years ago. But I’m afraid some is discarded by slob hunters and hikers with less connection than I have to this land.

My wish is that these folks would become lost and never found.