Gone Stalking (Wildlife, That Is)

Uhhooof.
Having laid off the writing for a while, I feel the grinding of my mental gears as the rusty cogs roll over again. This is a muscle that, if not exercised at least occasionally, gets hard to rouse as time moves on.
The last time out here I spent my energy riffing on matters spiritual, havin' gotten my hackles up over a comment made on another blog. This will bring things a little farther along...
In November, I got to walk in some woods a little upstate from where my mother and her kin lived, back before they became Californicans. I spent a week hunting white-tailed deer in Missouri with my best buddy Rocket.
I've lived in the Desert Southwest for over 30 years now. The ways I walk the uninhabited spaces have been shaped by not only the desire to spot cool mineral specimens/fossils, but also the desire to spot the odd rattlesnake or Gila monster before I step on 'em. I also like to hunt, and Out Here, because it is desert, the wildlife we can hunt are fewer in number. Not to mention s-n-e-a-k-y. One trick is, as elsewhere, to appear like the terrain. That's easy enough. Wally world and the local military surplus can set one up very well to blend in. Being quiet isn't too tough either - depending on how much rain we've had, not that many bushes to whack. And consider this: desert bushes have attitude. You mostly don't want to bump into or brush against the locals. Too many noises associated with that. Noises like"AaAh! #*%@!!", or r-r-i-i-i-p-p. (Desert wildlife, the hunted varieties anyway, are keenly attuned to those sounds.) The other hazards with local fauna are firmly attached, you might say, to the things that cause the noises. One bush is called 'Cat-claw'. Can you guess why? Combine that with a slight incline - often an incline with a steep drop off into a dry wash close by, and a little pebble, or dozens of them, underfoot. You're easing along with your eye on a whitetail or mule deer, or maybe a javelina, quiet as quiet, when the dastardly cat-claw snags at you from beside a creosote bush. Movement in that direction is suddenly arrested - at least at point of contact - but your foot, or feet, slide in the loose stuff...
I don't care if, like me, you stifle the scream of surprise and despair; when you land in that wash downhill, most likely on top of the odd rattlesnake or Gila monster, you ARE gonna have the wind knocked out of you. Last time I checked, that isn't what I'd call stealthy, and if you've really stepped in it, as it were, the firearm that was supposed to go off only when you pulled the trigger will proceed to cause any and all critters in the vicinity to high-tail it to wherever you are not. Another sun goes down in the northern Sonora Desert.
I went hunting in Missouri. With Rocket.
November in MO is very different for a Desert Rat. For one thing, the ground is very hard to see; it's mostly covered in something! The colors are different, too. At that time of year a lot of reds, but everywhere is still an abundance of green. (Driving through New Mexico and Texas into Oklahoma didn't prepare me. Shoot, that was like driving around home, at least until it flattened out a lot.) We got into his home town late Friday night; long hours on the road, and darkness, made the view of the terrain a low priority, at least until the next day. I bedded down on the World's Most Comfortable Couch in his mom 'n step dad's place and forgot everything, including consciousness, until a few hours later.
Later, in the afternoon, down on Missy and Ricks cattle farm... Rocket parks the jeep and we set out. I'm still goggling at how green everything is. What I am coming to realize is, everywhere the trees are, a rich reddish brown coverlet lies upon the... growth. I think there's ground under there, I've seen it in the creek(!) beds and road cuts. (Gods, what a lot of water!) This coverlet takes me back to when I was 10 - my Dad went to work for a Large Corporation in Cincinnati, and we left suburban Cal for semi-woodsy sorta-rural Ohio. Nice. As I wax nostalgic, I realize that this coverlet is easily a foot deep, and dry. These leaves are not small, either, being the fallen armies of old oaks that reach for the sky(far larger than the little viejos we have in small numbers in AZ - just like the huntable critters). I step from meadow into forest... and it sounds like I have slipped my feet into some comfortable potato chip bags. I quickly understand that I am not gonna get near anything, even if I try to sneak up on an earthquake. What to do? I try the old toe-heel approach; that only produces a different tone of crrustle-unch. I am now reduced to a shuffle-stop sort of travel. Even the frisky little breeze that had accompanied us is no longer an ally. When I stop, it whips up, the trees move and I attempt to move along further, at which point it dies out again... it's a conspiracy! Look, it's a Desert Rat, let's see how much we can mess with him!
Then there were the cattle...