Utterly exhausted after a day wandering the hills to the west. Oddly, the idyllic mountaintop meadows were the most grueling part, given the August vegetation and mid-day heat. Spectacular views, though.
After the trail up to altitude, there were two options heading away from the hut at the trailhead in the right direction. I took the one less travelled by, which, as it turns out, is not always the best way of finding the right trail in the mountains. After up and down a large hill, beast tracks and beast noises helped me to convince myself that what I had thought was a trail was in fact a trace. So I backtracked and found the right, properly blazed trail. Long walk over the hills. My destination was a small town at the intersection of the mountain ranges that was apparently hosting a well-regarded (and free) traditional music festival. After many hours in the mountains, having set out at dawn, I finally reached the rural road leading to the town. Something shifted in the shadows ahead, and an inner sense told me that finding out what it was would be a matter of the higest priority. The identification then became clear as an enormous bull lumbered onto the road, presumably wandering from a local dairy operation. Having been (I thought) on my way to the traditional music festival, the notion from the Golden Bough of a bull being the sign of danger for the traveller flashed into my mind -- Tauric Diana. (But when there's a large bull in front of you in the road, the cultic resonsance is sort of a second-order consideration.) We looked at each other a long while, as I was sizing up the adjacent woods for safe running paths and climbable trees. He seemed a nice fellow, just a bit lost, and angry about that. A car came up behind me -- I signalled for it to slow and pointed out the obstacle. The car then inched forward, forcing the fellow off the road, and he trundled away.
I headed into what I thought was the town square, and asked a vendor about the concert, but he had heard nothing. (As it turns out, the venue was an additional hour's walk or more down the highway from the trail intersection. Apparently it's more a county than a town.) I would walk the two or three hours on the highway to hear the concert, tbh, like Henry VIII waking before dawn to walk hours to go see a rural theatre performance that he had heard good things about, but there's thunderstorms in the forecast, and I'm an intrepid fellow, not a complete idiot. (Despite appearances.)
[Full disclosure, the beast was polled, but I made a point of looking to see which it was, given the effects on disposition. And I often ran past dairy fields at dawn in the undergrad town in Virginia a few yeas ago -- I know what an angry cow sounds like, and this didn't seem to be one, though, again, I might have misread the identification.]