Yesterday the rabbit corpse was still there where I found it, no sign that anyone new had been by. I worried that my tracks coming and going would bring a domestic dog to the scene.
Today there is a myriad of strange tracks out there--no pictures, pictures wouldn't help. Clearly there was a person or two out and about--perhaps with a couple of wild and crazy dogs. Their tracks and other unidentified were all around the little spruce where the rabbit was stashed. The body is gone--but I could come to no firm conclusions about what took it.
There are many problems with tracking humans travelling on foot. They might do anything, as might their dogs, making it harder to get a set of working assumptions. Humans also confound an assumption I use to distinguish domestic from wild dogs. I assume that it is very unlikely that a small dog would be out there in the field on its own--so unless there is very good reason to suppose otherwise (scat, track patterns, etc.), I assume that small feet are wild feet. But these humans may have had a large (perhaps very large) and a small dog with them. I just don't know.
There are so many tracks out there now, I need the clean slate of a good 5-10 cm of new snow!
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