“What is the oddest or most interesting thing you’ve seen?”

“A wolverine,” Donna Kilgore promptly answered.  “I was looking out my window up the road that leads to the feeding station.  There was an animal going up the road.  It was too big for a badger.  It stood too tall.  It looked a little like a black bear cub, but it was definitely not a bear.

“That’s a wolverine,” I said to myself.  “It left the road and went along the bank of the ditch until it reached the swale.  It dropped down into the swale, went up the other side, and was gone.

“I reported what I saw to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.  They were very skeptical because we don’t have wolverines around here.

“They asked why I didn’t take a picture of it.  It was too far away for a video of it to have shown anything.  I was watching it through the binoculars.  After I lost sight of it, I went and got our wildlife book and turned to wolverines.  That was definitely it.

“I felt vindicated when several weeks later the man who manages water on the creek reported seeing a wolverine, too.”

What Donna doesn’t know is the sequel to her wolverine sighting.

Several miles away lives another couple whose identity must remain unknown in order to protect a guilty third party.

Over a several day period, this couple watched through their binoculars as a wolverine foraged just below the edge of the woods above their house.  One day as they watched it working, the man who lived above them also saw it.

He got his gun, and shot what was possibly Oregon’s only wolverine.