bobcats, cougars, autumn

There is a female bobcat in my neighborhood (apparently the females keep to a certain area, and the males come to them at the appropriate time). I've spotted her once in my very backyard, hanging around the woodpile, her pelt a gorgeous gold-rust, her motions just like a housecat. Tonight her weird cackle-yowl echoes off the walls of the little canyon carved by the creek, hour after hour; it's the night for bobcats and coyotes, who wail like grieving women as the belly of the moon grows full. Deer stand in my yard and watch me water plants, unafraid; quail skitter like fat gray question marks across my road, and a cougar has been spotted in the woods just a short walk from my house. I hear wild turkeys call in the woods, fall asleep and dream they've transformed into Native American men, crouched low to the ground, covered with brilliant feather-capes. The animals know that the sickle of the year grows sharp; my garden will die out, the agave--now covered with golden flowers and equally golden bees--will wither to a memory. I am not ready, wear summer clothes and flip-flops till my toes freeze. The deer move like slender thieves in the night garden.

Thinking of this, somehow I remember the night I saw a cougar on Highway Nine. I was still driving my former car, an old, beat-up van, during the drought many years ago. My children were small, tired--I don't remember why we were driving late that hot night, all the windows rolled down. Dust filled the air, and we seemed to be the only ones traveling that road. Suddenly, something crept out of the abolute darkness of the woods--I thought at first it was a big dog, but the tail was long, catlike, the creature like nothing I've ever seen before, pure muscle, with a buff pelt and a square head, the tail moving, twitching. I stopped--this thing owned the road and wasn't about to be hurried, something long and furry clamped in its jaws, a rabbit, I thought. I told the children to roll their windows up and prayed my van's battery wouldn't go dead, as it sometimes did. The creature turned its head towards us, orange fangs shut tight on its prey, its lantern eyes alight, and then it slipped over the road and into the woods. I described this later to a ranger who said it was most likely a mountain lion--something I thought I would never encounter and have never seen again, though I am grateful for the once-in-a-lifetime glimpse, a visitation from an angel of wildness.