History is replete with examples of inspiration in science & art coming from dreams, sounds in nature, things that children say, etc. Since the inspiration behind a work of art is always interesting to folks, here is an example of the circuitous lines of thinking that went into a recent sculpture. ¶On one particular morning I was out for a jog with the dogs, and after detouring around two large bull bison on the trail, we encountered a group of mule deer. The deer were visibly distressed by the sight of the dogs in my mind immediately jumped to some of the research on Yellowstone wolves showing how the body gestures of wolves convey the seriousness of their hunting efforts to their prey. When wolves have zeroed in on a particular animal, their gait increases, their head is lowered and tail straightened out to the back, rather than up as their heads and tails are when searching out a prospective meal. With this in mind, I looked back at our female Labrador, Casey, who had a ‘hunting’ body posture as she was darting amongst the prickly pear cactus. I wondered if this was signaling to those deer what the wolves do during a chase? From there, my mind jumped to the fact that wolves and coyotes must get spines in their feet during some of these chases. This gave me the overwhelming feeling of empathy for them in that powerlessness state of not being able to tend to their own injuries, or not having people to care for them as our dogs do. We all know this feeling to a degree when we become injured or encounter things, people, situations in life that we cannot change. To fight them does no good, to complain often does even less – SO, I began thinking of a piece that spoke to that notion. Once I got home I made a quick sketch on paper (above) out of my head of the position our male Labrador takes when worrying his feet from cactus spines. I wanted to use those gestures as exemplified by a coyote as the subject to convey this idea. I later made this small wax study to test the idea in 3D (to the right & below). I soon felt that it needed something ‘more’ and the cactus (scaled to south Texas size as our cactus are quite small in Montana) seemed to balance the design nicely – as well as to lend context to the animal’s slightly unusual position.