The Lion

In the last post I talked about the mental and metaphysical aspects of walking in the early morning hours. There is also another side. It is primal and puts me in touch with my animal being. There are night creatures out there. I was terrified of the dark as a child. But as life goes on, the mystery and most of the fear get explained away. No bogey men under the bed, no horned green monsters lurking in the shadows, but there are always still some real fears that on rare occasions that cut right to the base instincts.

Being startled is not an unusual event. I come across skunks, jack rabbits, even a little fox that I have been eye to eye with numerous times. Even small birds in the brush can give me a momentary alert. Once, on a particularly dark morning last winter, I got the feeling that I was approaching something enormous. I couldn't see anything, but I knew something was there. I could almost feel the breathing. I stopped, took out the flashlight and clicked it on. There, not five feet away was a cow bedded down right beside the road staring at me with those big round eyes. Fowler's fences were down again. I smiled and moved on.

Perception also plays tricks on you in the dark. The mind desperately wants to explain everything it encounters, but without much light, it gropes wildly for a solution, like flipping pages to find the right answer. Shapes change and outlines rearrange until there is enough information for the aha! Then all the elements rearrange again in a fraction of second to recognize...a shrub! I love that feeling, that crystallization of elements to explain the unexplained. Not because it answers the mystery, but rather because it reveals that the explanation isn't always the answer. There can be an amorphous moment when there is no answer. That's how we lose our childhood, our wonderment. We explain life.

A few times in life we are blessed with being in exactly the right place at the right time, to have an experience we never forget. It happened on a walk about four years ago. It was late winter, and the return trip found the cold sun about an hour below the horizon. It was that half light when things are just becoming visible at a distance. I was approaching a series of sharp turns in the road away from all houses and buildings. As I approached the turn there was a sound that for all the world sounded like someone was skateboarding down the hill toward me from the opposite direction and approaching the bend. It was quite bizarre. Who in the world could be out at this hour skateboarding in the dark? In just a few seconds more I had the answer. We meet at the bend, and there not fifty feet from me was an adult male mountain lion. He saw me before I saw him and he was growling all the way down the hill. Ears back, eyes glued on me, three foot tail waving, he was sending me a strong message. I froze. The hair on my neck stood straight up. Now I know what the dogs feel when the hackles go up on their backs. He was not pleased. These are very secretive creatures, and I had somehow managed to walk right up on him. It was over in an instant. He kept those eyes on me the whole time until he got past the bend and into the chaparral and was gone.

I was stunned and elated. I had witnessed what very few people ever get to see. A magnificent predator in the wild, close up, face to face, both of us wondering if this was our moment. But no, we went our separate ways. He to munch on one of Fowler's calves and me to breakfast.