Cougars at Magic Sky

            Amanda, Juniper, and I scattered about the living room, reading, writing, drawing. Laura came back early from her morning walk on the ranch we took care of 7,700 feet up the east slope of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. “Anybody want to see some cougars?” she asked.

            We put on our shoes and went out the front door, closely grouped. We walked fast. Laura said, “I walked down to tent site one and sat at one of the picnic tables. I saw movement up in the rocks. It took me a minute to figure out I was watching two cougar cubs playing. Mama’s there too, but she stays down behind a boulder. I only saw the top of her head and her eyes.”

            Above the south fork of Lone Pine Creek, large, old growth ponderosa pines grow in the flat area of tent site one, at the base of a ridge where huge granite boulders jumble wildly toward the sky and share their space with small trees, flowers, bushes, grasses in scant soil eroded from granite mountains. Boulders lean against or over each other and create a multitude of caves and lairs.

            We walked quietly into tent site one and sat down on a picnic bench. Two half-grown cougars climbed a large boulder a hundred yards above us, turned, played together, and ran across the boulder. Their mother stuck her head up from behind the boulder, just to her eyes, as she watched her cubs and us. Warm sun shone on all of us.

            We talked quietly. I said, “She’s saying, ‘I called you and called you. Don’t you understand, those are humans down there, and humans are dangerous. When I get my paws on you, you’re gonna wish you’d minded me.’”

            “She’s smarter than they are.”

            “Maybe. Maybe she’s blinded by prejudice against all humans, and maybe her children have more open minds and realize we’re no threat to them.”

            The sun moved across the sky. The cubs scrambled down behind the rocks, and mother disappeared. We sat there a while and enjoyed the early summer day, but we didn’t see the cougars again.

            Laura went on a longer walk. The rest of scattered around the ranch. I sanded and varnished stairs at the big lodge. Juniper and Amanda pursued early summer interests in the forest, meadows and ridges of our mountain.

            Two days later, everybody else drove down the mountain to town. I stayed home and worked. Midmorning, I took a break, picked up the binoculars at the house, walked down the steep, forested slope behind the house, and looked across the meadow at the ridge where we had seen the cougars. I was still mostly shielded from view by a big bush and several trees, but the first thing I realized when I focused the binoculars on the big cougar lying in sunshine on a huge boulder projecting out into the sky from the top of the ridge, about a hundred and fifty yards from me, was that he was looking at me.

            I thought I was hidden and quiet, but the cougar knew I was there. Warm sunshine soaked into my back as I watched him. Warm sunshine soaked into him. He looked down on the world and often at me. He turned and bit some itch on his flank and returned to looking at the world. I thought he must be the father of the cubs. I thought father rather than mother because he was completely relaxed. He was looking at distant stuff, not tending family. What little I had seen of the mother was a darker color than the mountain lion on the ridge in sunshine.

            I moved slowly behind brush and trees, descended the remaining 20 feet of the slope, and crawled into the deep but dry irrigation ditch, waited a while, then propped the binoculars on the bank, so I was only exposed to the cougar’s view from the binoculars up. He looked right at me.

            I crawled down the ditch until I lay behind a large wind-thrown pine tree from the cougar. I lay on sun warmed earth and soaked in sunshine for a while, then slowly crawled through meadow grass to the upthrust roots of the pine tree. I propped my binoculars on a broken root and focused on the boulder projecting from the ridge.

            The cougar had gone. He had accepted me in his territory until I tried to get too close, and then he journeyed onward through his wild world of the entire mountain. I walked back into my world with images of a cougar the color of winter-bleached grass in sunshine in my mind, carrying with me more awareness of all the wild species that lived in forests and meadows of these eternal, wild mountains.