I am a man surrounded by blessings. One big star in this constellation of blessings is the beauty and solitude of our little mountain home. And so on a cold winter night, above 7,000 feet of elevation, I had walked about 200 yards to the top of a little ridge. Falling off behind me, it was another 200 yards to our rugged little dirt mountain road. About a mile further beyond the road is the natural spring that supplies our water. We are on a canyon that has a few rims, and the house sits on one of these intermediate" rims.
If you continued to walk past the springs you confront the final, steep wall of the canyon, and at the top of that wall (perhaps 750 feet up) there is a flat mesa top. Along that mesa top is a small river-so I have a river one mile behind me, and a second river about a mile in front of me at the very bottom of the canyon (the little Jemez river). It is very quiet, and I can hear the Jemez river, as the water flows over and around the boulders in it's bed. With three permanent water sources, this place has been a little Eden for man and animals for thousands of years. The marks of ancient man still exist here. Just to the left of where I stand is a mound of rocks that once comprised a residence for the ancient ones from long ago. Their presence is also marked by thousands of shards of pottery scattered across the forest floor. If you look for them, you can find pieces from the rim of a broken jar, or the handle of what may have been a cup. They must have loved this place as much as I do.
We still see wild turkeys, deer, elk and bears. But at the very top of the animal food chain is the ghostly mountain lion. People can spend years in the mountains and never see one. One of my blessings is to have seen lions nine different times in the last five years. As I am standing on "my" ridge, all of these things pass through my mind. The moon was full, with a light snow cover on most of the ground. We have a lot of Ponderosa pine trees. Their needles capture a lot of the snowfall before the snow can hit the ground. Those needles shield the ground from the light of the moon in the same way they filter out the snow. *I have watched the moon rise above the wall on the other side of the canyon. It is perhaps three quarters of a mile across to the opposite rim of our canyon. The moon is brilliant here, with no artificial light to dilute it's wonder. It "backlights" the huge Ponderosa*pines that crowd the edge of the canyon-a great place for a plant that converts sunlight to nourishment.*
As the moon rises further, it is nearly over my head. The patches of light reflected by the snow form a beautiful contrast with the darkness beneath each of the Ponderosas. And down at the house, the lights are off, except a tiny light in the bedroom. This makes me smile, because I know that light. Barb, my wonderful wife of forty three years was reading a bit before she falls asleep. *I am keenly aware that my participation in all of this beauty is temporal. There will come a day when these experiences and memories will be as close as I can get to this place, and these evenings. *I am determined to soak it in.*
While I was trying to take mental pictures, my mind was snatched to the here and now. Something big, fast, and very quiet had gone, in the blink of an eye, from the base of one Ponderosa across the tell tale snow to the sheltering dark base of another pine. Now I am thinking about the two hundred yards to the house-and the perfectly good sidearm sitting on the night stand. Is it a lion? *Probably not, but I don't find complete solace in the statistics. I have read some of the stories about dealing with the presence of a lion in close proximity.*
Even top of the food chain predators need to be careful. Your food fights back. If you are a mountain lion and pull a muscle or hurt your paw it can be a sentence to a slow death. *Because of this, mountain lions are said to prefer two types of attack-an attack from behind, or even better, attacking prey that has fallen. The best way to fall is to walk backwards, but the ground was smooth, and I carefully, and slowly, backed off the ridge, down to the wall that surrounds our little court yard, and into the house. Can fear be delicious? *I think it can, because I think it was. Probably not really a lion-but whatever it was-it really, really, helped to make it a night I will always remember.*
If you continued to walk past the springs you confront the final, steep wall of the canyon, and at the top of that wall (perhaps 750 feet up) there is a flat mesa top. Along that mesa top is a small river-so I have a river one mile behind me, and a second river about a mile in front of me at the very bottom of the canyon (the little Jemez river). It is very quiet, and I can hear the Jemez river, as the water flows over and around the boulders in it's bed. With three permanent water sources, this place has been a little Eden for man and animals for thousands of years. The marks of ancient man still exist here. Just to the left of where I stand is a mound of rocks that once comprised a residence for the ancient ones from long ago. Their presence is also marked by thousands of shards of pottery scattered across the forest floor. If you look for them, you can find pieces from the rim of a broken jar, or the handle of what may have been a cup. They must have loved this place as much as I do.
We still see wild turkeys, deer, elk and bears. But at the very top of the animal food chain is the ghostly mountain lion. People can spend years in the mountains and never see one. One of my blessings is to have seen lions nine different times in the last five years. As I am standing on "my" ridge, all of these things pass through my mind. The moon was full, with a light snow cover on most of the ground. We have a lot of Ponderosa pine trees. Their needles capture a lot of the snowfall before the snow can hit the ground. Those needles shield the ground from the light of the moon in the same way they filter out the snow. *I have watched the moon rise above the wall on the other side of the canyon. It is perhaps three quarters of a mile across to the opposite rim of our canyon. The moon is brilliant here, with no artificial light to dilute it's wonder. It "backlights" the huge Ponderosa*pines that crowd the edge of the canyon-a great place for a plant that converts sunlight to nourishment.*
As the moon rises further, it is nearly over my head. The patches of light reflected by the snow form a beautiful contrast with the darkness beneath each of the Ponderosas. And down at the house, the lights are off, except a tiny light in the bedroom. This makes me smile, because I know that light. Barb, my wonderful wife of forty three years was reading a bit before she falls asleep. *I am keenly aware that my participation in all of this beauty is temporal. There will come a day when these experiences and memories will be as close as I can get to this place, and these evenings. *I am determined to soak it in.*
While I was trying to take mental pictures, my mind was snatched to the here and now. Something big, fast, and very quiet had gone, in the blink of an eye, from the base of one Ponderosa across the tell tale snow to the sheltering dark base of another pine. Now I am thinking about the two hundred yards to the house-and the perfectly good sidearm sitting on the night stand. Is it a lion? *Probably not, but I don't find complete solace in the statistics. I have read some of the stories about dealing with the presence of a lion in close proximity.*
Even top of the food chain predators need to be careful. Your food fights back. If you are a mountain lion and pull a muscle or hurt your paw it can be a sentence to a slow death. *Because of this, mountain lions are said to prefer two types of attack-an attack from behind, or even better, attacking prey that has fallen. The best way to fall is to walk backwards, but the ground was smooth, and I carefully, and slowly, backed off the ridge, down to the wall that surrounds our little court yard, and into the house. Can fear be delicious? *I think it can, because I think it was. Probably not really a lion-but whatever it was-it really, really, helped to make it a night I will always remember.*
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