The image is a little of soft Leon mountain skins in the chin of a spike wire. I am on the 87th of 100 walking 200 square miles around my house in Colorado, mainly in public lands where wild animals have the influence. Today was a steep and tree -linked drawing of rocks and its puzzles of green and crispy crunchy lichens. I have lowered this raffle a couple of times since last winter, when I followed the Fresh Mountain Lion clues on a snowy slope of rocks as large as garbage trucks and blush in my head grew strong enough and decided to stop and not follow the cat further. I was entering the field of ambush and, although the possibilities of an attack or any negative encounter are astronomically small, I heard the bell.
What I have learned in 87 days has arrived slowly and constantly. I began to follow the animal paths a year ago for a book in which I am working in the west of Colorado almost to the Utah line, transitioning this area of 200 square miles from one side to another through ravines, cannons, mountains and tables. Almost every day the learning curve has increased significantly. Today’s recognition was that the map in my head is becoming a map in my body. I do not mean this on a large scale, but the draw that I walked down could feel for miles. I no longer mean the map on my phone. I go for memory, which is how a mountain lion would perceive geography, knowing this drawing as many animals do: deer, claps, mountain cats, bears, like a ladder that connects to a lower and deeper cannon where a crystalline stream babble day and night. I would not say that I am no longer able to be lost, since I have been sometimes so far, my heart beats faster between the ponderosa pine columns that have begun to be seen anyway. I can still lose myself, I can still ruin, but my senses anthized a new awareness of how the earth is.
Four years ago, a friend of mine from Utah, a wildlife photographer, left a path of paths to capture images of anything that moves in this shaded and shaded drainage and, although he gave me the coordinates of exactly where he had tied the camera to a tree, I could not find it to save my life. There are no human paths around here. The hunters can use the paths of the animals, but climbing on demolished trees and working rocks so that Boulder descended in this steep ravine maintains their low numbers. The old surgery bear droppings and the excrement of alces with accounts talk about who claims this place.
For the 70s I had settled in a state of meditation while I was out, letting the blow of my mind vanished, sometimes going barefoot to train my attention. I no longer rehearse, I should say or recite birthdays on my head. I have arrested more or less the hours dedicated to scribble in my diary. Now I move and the only noise could be the last song I heard on the radio as if it were in a room where no one is listening.
Today I felt that my body became a compass. Some people can be born with this sense, but not me. I proud of the ability to lose myself. I live for the sensation, looking around. Where the hell am I? These months of walking have been an effort to answer that question, bow my head and see what animals see. In particular, what the mountain lion sees, maintaining their own home ranges around here, especially women who tend to stay near where they were born, compared to men who make larger territories and, often, have to leave to find a place without other fearsome men to deal with. They are woven in all my square and not enough miles, leaving eschatimo and tracks, scat so fresh to Buzz has increased my spine while taking advantage of a trunk of digested deer meat with my finger of the boot foot, finding it soft and wet, the cat just in front of me, or perhaps, for now, behind.
Are mountain lions lose? It does not seem to me. They know where they are at all times. It’s a cat thing. They are points of consciousness in the wild country. They pay attention to everything.
Animals are part of the compass. Not only are you feeling the land of the earth, but how animals move through it. My friend, the photographer, was one of them, his camera somewhere, his place chosen because he could feel the attraction in his body of animals. He saw mountain scraps at the base of larger trees and the way the raffle opened when he arrived uphill told everyone to come here. You can almost find it with your eyes closed. In a way, I was glad I had not found his camera. I simply knew that I would have a bear and alce, and, if it is lucky, a muscular cat and honey color and its long tail, the entrance animal to everyone else. The trap of his camera would have caught photographic evidence of what we do not see, what could be against what I am trying to learn, how to witness with all my senses what is right in front of me. As I said, learning has been slow and stable. I could have gone through monitoring courses, and that would have helped, but I decided to go first hand, get out of my door and walk.
Photo: C. Childs
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