Idaho—This poet’s experience with a cougar intensifies his already acute ways of seeing.
I had recently moved to northern Idaho to write, and everything I wrote was dull, forced, unnatural. One day I saw a cougar. He was easily eight feet, from his tawny head to the tip of his long tail lazily rising and falling, about the same size as the trophy cougar I once saw displayed in a glass box at a gas station down in Kamiah. He lay stretched out on pine needles on a slope forty yards away. I felt lucky to have seen him. I was also glad to be inside my house; we had come close enough.
The house I bought sits amid thousands of acres of timber in the Clearwater Mountains, high above the South Fork of the Clearwater River. The day after seeing the cougar, I decided to take down a hog-wire fence from a wooded area where the previous owners kept small livestock. I had no interest in raising anything there; I wanted what came forth on its own urges—deer, blackberries, turkeys, dogtooth violets—to have free play. Working around a thicket of wild roses to loosen the fence, I saw the bright carcass of a six-point buck. Something had been eating it. From the fresh scratch marks on a fallen larch holding up the buck’s rack, I knew it was the cougar.
I once asked a forest ranger what I should do if I was ever surprised by one in the woods. “Likely the lion would see you first,” he said. “And if he really wanted to jump you and break your neck, you’d probably never even feel it. Or,” he added, “not long enough to worry about.”
Charley Dreadfulwater, who has worked in these mountains for thirty years, helps me with chores I don’t dare try on my own, like dropping big trees dangerously close to my barn. I told him about the kill. You don’t know what to think about lions anymore, he said. “Used to be, you’d never see them, just their markings.” “Now their fear seems to be gone. Last month, out after firewood, I had three of them not sixty feet away looking me over. Calm as anything. I eased back into my truck and waited for them to go away. I like lions. They were here first.” He shook his head. “But there’s only so much land.”
A week later, I went to check on the kill. Only a rag of its fur, its bones and hooves remained. Charley told me that since I wasn’t a hunter, which deer figure out pretty quickly, I’d always have plenty close by. And something to eat them. For several days, I avoided walking in the woods near dusk, when the cougar could see better than I could. But I kept staying out later and later, my neck aching from looking into low branches perfect for leaping from. Was I going crazy? Did I want to see a lion perched in a tree, waiting for me? Why didn’t I at least buy a pistol?
One afternoon about a month later, I was in the corral, on my knees, pulling up thistles. The cold air was misty wet from a low cloud. I was trying to work off the bad feeling of having made mediocre sentences all morning. It seemed I was becoming an expert. I thought how my dad, a carpenter, could caress the grain in wood and just about make the wood sing. What would he think of his son’s courting self-pity?
As the mist shifted, the Gospel Hump Mountains came into view. I loved how the clouds seemed to rub their pearly gray peaks into another season. What happened next is hard to explain exactly. I looked up and saw the cougar. He stood in the mist curled around us, close enough to touch, not moving. We looked at each other. Over his shoulder, I could see Gospel Peak covered with snow. Part of me wanted nothing more than to lie in the snow on the peak, slowly move my arms and make a great angel. I also wanted my father to be alive again and see this magnificence with me—we wouldn’t have to say anything. I just wanted to hold his hand.
I was quite afraid—even to blink—but also calm. I wanted to see my father shake his head in wonder, the way he did after finishing a tough job, when he had to admit he was happy. Because if I moved, surely my heart would escape and fly off.
How long the cougar stayed I don’t know. I remember how clear everything was—the pointy buds on my plum trees, his eyes, the dark whorls the knots made in the boards of my fence. And that perfect, priceless silence in his wake when he turned and went back, as smoothly it seemed as a trout in water.
Years have passed. I have not seen him—or any kills—so close again. Charley smiled when I told him about our meeting. “Maybe he figured this is your hunting ground.”
Once upon a time, a big lion suddenly showed up and might have hurt me, or worse, but instead left me with a sharpened way of looking. I can see great distances—rain falling in fat columns miles away while the sun warms my bare shoulders. I can hear great distances too. A pine cone dropping branch by branch—pwak! pwak! Or the sudden flutter of a chukar’s wings. When the two senses come together, it’s often stunning. Moonlit nights, standing at my window, I can see a passage of the South Fork’s curled brilliance that sounds like a woman removing and collecting in her hand a long string of favored pearls.