Friday, March 8, 2013

Walks with a Fox

We went for a walk. As you can tell, it's evening. I was in the lab all morning, and I was in the lab all afternoon, so this was the first chance I got to take a real break today.

This was at 7 PM, and it's still twilight. The sun set around 3:30 this afternoon. As we walked, the stars started coming out. How neat to see Polaris nearly at the zenith. It's only 10 degrees off, up here. Castor and Pollux were shining brightly, too. (And, totally off-topic, if you read the 1952 sci fi book The Rolling Stones by Robert Heinlein, Castor and Pollux star there, too. They have spaceships, but still record things on "spools". And use slide rules.)

 First, we saw a bunny! He had a bunny friend with him, and they were eating supper.
 Dan and Paul, climbing an icy hill in a gully.
Later on, on the top of the ridge (behind where Dan and Paul are in the other picture) we saw someone who would have turned the bunnies into supper:

 It was dark, and after you drop your camera on the frozen ground last year (twice), your flash no longer works. So squint your eyes a bit and believe me that there really is an arctic fox in the picture above. He started out on the opposite side of a little gully from us. As we walked around and climbed up another hill, he followed us, and checked us out. He got within probably 3 m of us at one point. We headed back for the station because it was starting to get even darker, and the fox followed us on our path for a little while. So fluffy! And he's quick, too. He had no problem covering way more ground than we did, in no time.



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