Some years ago Dick and I were in the car, not far from home, when he suddenly shouted, "
Elk!" at the top of his lungs, and stuck his arm under my nose in an attempt to direct my attention toward the field on my right.
"No, dear," I said, when I had extracted his arm from my nose. "Those are pronghorn antelope. Little pronghorn antelope. Elk are large, sort of moose-sized."
"Snrffle, mrff," he said, or something sounding like that. "I got the word wrong."
"You probably don't even have elk around here," I said, because I spent most of my life in British Columbia where wildlife is really wild. BC is
not where the deer and the antelope play, like Alberta is.
"We do, we do," he insisted. "You'll see."
But I never did see. I've never seen an elk in Alberta.
Dick came home one day last year with a story about seeing elk an hour or two north of here, but he couldn't produce photographic evidence, so I refused to believe him. No proof, no "Oh, darling, aren't you wonderful?"
Recently, however, he came home from a business trip waving his camera in the air, and, once more, yelling "Elk!" at the top of his lungs.
"Where?" I asked, pretending not to see his camera. I looked out the window, but there wasn't even a deer or a rabbit out there. Wasn't even a dog.
"In here, look, look!"
"I'm rather busy right now, dear. Maybe later you can show me what you think is an elk," I said, smiling on the inside but looking like a very strict, very busy wife on the outside. Or a very busy blogger, anyway.
"Just look here!" he said, pointing to the LCD screen on his camera. "What do you think those are?"
"Spots," I said, "four spots."
"Just a minute, just a minute, I'll zoom in on them."
"Oh," I replied, straight-faced, "now there are only two spots."
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| Four spots |
"Here, here, here," he said. "This one's better, look at this one."
"It's out of focus," I replied, looking at it.
"Oh, that's the wrong one. Here, this one is better."
And he was right. Two elk. Two large elk. And he hadn't really had time to leave Alberta, unless he had gone to Saskatchewan, which would have been silly.
So, now I know there are elk in Alberta. And the third picture was better than the second one, also better than the first, for that matter, although you can enlarge the first one and see the four spots are elk, too. Not antelope, not deer, not rabbits. Elk. Yep.
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| Two of the four elk, rather nice-looking ones, too. |
To see other critters that have found their way into people's cameras, please click
Posted by Kay for Misty Dawn's Camera Critters photo meme.
Both photos, in this instance, are by Richard Schear.
