I saw it just seconds before it was too late. A rounded grey lump in the lefthand tire track.

Thought "Rock!" at first, and was already swerving out into the sage before I realized what it was.

A hat.

Someone's lost hat.

Nothing fancy, mind you. Just a Western felt hat, and not in great shape, at that. A small hole in the crown, and crude, wide hand stitching all around to hold the sweat band in.

How it came to be here, at least a mile into nowhere, I do not know. Left on a truck cab or tool box, probably, and blown off later by the wind. And now, someone is hatless.

An item easily replaced, one would think, but that isn't always so.

Some people get attached to their hats.

One of the Outfit's bosses, just two days ago, sent out an all points bulletin to everyone in the outfit trying to arrange the cross-state transfer of his felt hat that he left at someone's house. To keep his "bald head from getting sunburned".

Yeah, he can afford to buy a new hat. But it wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't fit just right like the one broken in, and it wouldn't have the memories that the old hat has accumulated.

Like this hat in my hand out in the sage. How did it get that nail-sized hole in the roof? Why a new sweat band? And where was the owner when he made those large stitches to put in it? Stranded in a bunkhouse during a rain? Around a campfire in elk camp?

Did the owner even do this stitching? Or was the new sweatband a present from someone else?

Either way, I suspect someone wants this hat back.

So, what to do with it? There's no lost-and-found out here in the boonies. Leave it where it was, and it'll get run over and smooshed into the dirt (like the glove I lost on 29 September and found yesterday).

Or blown out into the sage, never to be seen again.

But the owner's likely to come this way again. And there's a gate just a half-mile down the way...