By Peter Anderson
Eastbound clouds stall out over the high peaks of the Sangres. Others, low and gray, drape the big valley sky to the west. It is a restless season. I imagine the bears are on the move … such a fierce hunger before the big sleep, and the rose hips are ripe. A bull elk climbs slopes so thick with pinyon and juniper, it’s hard to guide his big rack through the branches. He is moving away from last night’s smoke, the hunter’s fire. And he is moving away from my wife Grace and I, who are walking and talking quietly on the trail below him, watching the white dog as he noses through a pile of old cow bones.
We follow the cottonwood trees that line the stream, wondering how far it will flow before the veins of the aquifer take it underground. Maybe it already has. Whether it is water or a slight wind we are hearing, it is a thin sound in a wide silence, a silence instantly shattered by the white dog who rips through the brush and out into the clearing, by a cougar, one flying stride behind him and closing in on his ass, and by HOLYSHHHEEEOWWWWW, the loudest roar I can muster from my middle-aged lungs.
The cougar, dead still now, turns his gaze to us. The white dog, having left the scene barks with great bravado. Look tall, I’m thinking as the cougar hisses between big teeth and stares us down. Look very tall. And he stares us down some more. And as he lets loose this weird gurgling groan. Grace talks to the cat – ”hello mootieekins” – as if it’s one of her housecats and the cougar angles in toward us. “No,” I whisper, “we’re cat chow here.” Look taller. Then again maybe she’s right. Maybe her voice soothes the big cat, who veers off into the willows, looking over its shoulder. As we slowly back away, I grab a rock, as if I could fend off the charge of a full grown cougar.
Meantime, the white dog who is beyond the trees and in the clear, catches the odor of something dead further out in the valley and runs out toward it. He has already forgotten what we cannot forget.
