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JDL- I bet the one that left the "trail marker" was simply showing that it did care... Because it really did give a s%@# !!

I can't think of anything I've seen that I could characterize as a prank. I've written about how one left a very large, still steaming pile of feces in the middle of a trail as an obvious message, but I took that as a warning and show of disrespect more than anything. When I prevented one from fishing a puppy out of our tent one night, it clearly conveyed disgust as it gave up and walked away, so there's no doubt in my mind that they are capable of that. Come to think of it, though, a sub-adolescent female once threw a couple of pebbles at me from behind a boulder. It was just up the hill from our home and my brother and I were hunting lizards in the skirt of rocks that had formed along the base of a highly eroded hill. A week before, the area was chock full of scores of lizards, but on this particular day there were none, and someone bigger than me had actually picked up many of the water melon to engine block sized rocks and tossed them a few feet away from the hill. As I was looking among the remaining rocks, a pebble skittering down them, got my attention, and as I was looking for the lizard that had caused the pebble to move, another pebble sailed over my right shoulder, hit the slope, and rolled down. I immediately turned to my right rear and snapped at my brother, a continual prankster and thorn in my side, "stop throwing rocks at me", but he was even further away and to my left rear. There was no way he could have thrown the pebble and moved to where he was that quickly. Looking in the direction the pebble had come from, the only place of concealment was a boulder in the mouth of a wash between the base of the hill and the base of the next hill. About twenty yards away. It was a pretty fair distance to throw a pea-sized pebble, but someone had. I said to my brother that I thought some kids were throwing rocks at us and that we should go catch them. Usually he was up for anything like that, but he balked. When I pressed him, he still refused and when I asked why he wouldn't he got agitated and told me that he thought "some people" were living back in the draw. I said, "well I'm going to catch them", and he took off running for home. Apparently the people had put a scare into him. At 11, he was a miscreant prone to sneaking out of the house at night to hang out with a couple of other kids like himself, drinking pilfered beer and smoking pilfered cigarettes. The draw was a logical meeting place close to, but away from the housing development. I watched him go, thinking about that, then decided to confront the kid(s). I approached the boulder (bigger than me) and looked behind it. No one there. No one was up either of the tree-less slopes of the draw, so I figured they had retreated uphill through the snaking draw. I followed, expecting to catch up with them as I rounded each turn. Finally, about a hundred yards up and in, I rounded a curve quickly enough to see the brown, hair covered backside of a "kid" (smaller than me) rounding the next turn on two legs. I slowed down, thought about it. Realized it was one of "them" (I'd only encountered adults prior to that), understood then why my brother was spooked, then continued more cautiously, checking the slopes above and the trail ahead of me more carefully. I reached the top of the draw, a large, relatively level area - more of a basin with a few large boulders in it surrounded by three hilltops, with an opening to a second draw going down the other side, and found that it was eerily silent. Nothing moving. No rodents, no insects, no birds, and every blade of vegetation that could contain water had been scoured from the area (this was high desert in the Eastern foothills of the Sierras). It reminded me of the ground immediately around a fire ant mound, but no ants. It had occurred to me that I was chasing someone's/something's kid, there were too many places among the boulders for adults to hide, and I considered that if I looked further, I'd find something I didn't want to face. I turned and left more quickly than I'd come. Anyway, I can't think of any reason the lone "kid" would throw a few pebbles, not at me, but intended to draw my attention, other than to mess with me. Beyond this, I do think that they do something akin to counting coup sometimes. Approaching a group of people or a house, demonstrating how close they can get and get away with it.