The Sighting

(Please click on the title for a reading aloud by the author.)

Dinner was cooking. I looked up from trimming broccoli and saw the shape and the rolling, fluid movement in the grass. It had to be a cat. It was a bobcat walking across the landscape about fifty feet in front of the house. I’ve seen plenty of sign, and had a couple of close encounters, but far off in the woods. Never have I had a sighting even close to this. I grabbed my binoculars and watched the cat. It walked from juniper to juniper, pausing at each and looking around. It switched its tail. With a coat the color of September grass, and with broad cat face and golden eyes its stare was intense. Tufts of black fur swept up from the tips of its ears. The bobcat eventually went out of sight. I stood there for a few moments, awestruck.

After dinner I went out with my camera and tape measure looking for tracks to photograph. I found them, took some pictures and followed them. Moving slowly, quietly, I was down wind of the direction the cat was traveling. The tracks lead to the base of a large juniper and disappeared under it. The cat had crawled into the thicket of branches near the ground. I stopped, the thought it might be in there materializing in my mind. This was a good time to back off and go away.

Seeing such an animal in the landscape, knowing it’s out there, in its reality so different from my own, and then facing the possibility of being in very close proximity to it confirms the existence of another dimension to being in the world. There is still some wildness around us. There is a wholeness in realizing a meeting would be on the cat’s terms, not mine. We may think we rule the planet in our great, sweeping, and often destructive ways, but when it’s down to one to one with wildness, we do not. This gives me hope.