I was in a rush, heading from my office to a side door in the main building that opened to a room full of work waiting for me to attend to. There's been a lot of construction going on in this section of the building, and the workers had just today dumped a couple of pallets of metal siding right by the door I use to enter the building. As I crossed the pavement, I noticed a small brown shape moving at a fairly good clip across the asphalt, away from the pile of siding.
It turned out to be a wooly bear, heavy on the brown, light on the black ends: a good omen for a short, easy winter. I reached down to pick him up and rescue him, when I realized I didn't have time to run him across the vast lot to an appropriately sheltered grassy spot. I was needed in the building now, so I made mental note of where Wooly was, figured he couldn't get too far, and decided to rescue him when I passed that way again, heading back to my office.
It took longer than I thought it would to get through my work in that department, and nearly an hour had passed by the time I was able to get back outside. I held out little hope that Wooly would still be there, but even twenty-five feet away I could see the little blob of fuzz not five feet from where I left him.
When I was close enough to really see him, I became confused. The poor thing was dead, but he looked far smaller in death than the wooly bear I'd seen an hour before. I scanned that area of the lot, and became aware that there were perhaps a dozen wooly bears scattered about the area.
They were all apparently dead. I couldn't tell why some were dead; they seemed perfectly intact, but were stretched out straight and stiff (a living wooly bear will curl up in you palm when you pick it up). Other wooly bears played Don Quixote, tilting at the local variety of windmill otherwise known as semi-truck tires and losing. I gave up on finding any alive, and headed back to my office.
About fifteen feet away from the epicenter of wooly bear genocide, I encountered one last brave caterpillar sluggishly making his way toward the grove of trees nearly fifty yards away. His path would have taken him straight through the most heavily trafficked area of the arrival docks, a totally suicidal path for the fuzz ball. I picked him up and carried him over to a densely thicketed area that had plenty of leaf litter for him to burrow under. I tossed him into the center of the thicket, where the local birds and beasts would be least likely to find him, wished him well, and returned to my office.