He says he saw that the cat walked clumsily before it came to rest in that spot and it seems like it might be sick. She says she has always hoped to see one of the wild cats but never has yet, and this one is looking more and more like a bobcat. The tail, which is stumpy, would be black-tipped all the way around if the creature were a lynx, but just black-tipped on the outer side if bobcat. But why would this richly-colored cat, reddish along the sides but darkening blacker along the spine, bob-tailed since no tail shows, be so trusting, even dozing in a road while two people approach like stalkers? The animal can't stay there much longer, he conjectures. Then suddenly, on the margin to the right, is a second bobcat, much browner like pale milk chocolate. The crouched cat rises and the tail flicks--definitely bobcat, not lynx. Oh, this is a scene about mating, oh of course that's what's going on...
A pickup truck rolls into view around the bend, the young driver smiling at the older couple as he passes as if to say sorry I scared your animals, each of which has cleared the scene in a swoop into the cedars on the same side of the road. But the gent says let's stay here watching, they may be back--and he is so right! they are, they're in a stand-off with one cat on the road again, the other alongside in the saplings. The blacker cat's hindquarters are sinking barely perceptibly into a sit-down, the slowness exquisite with all that it may be expressing of both confidence and fear. The thought comes to the old girl's mind: haven't I seen cats in a yard someplace I have lived, acting like this?
In the mind's eye it is more a state of being than of doing; the cats are live imagery, a vivid painting of their kind from out of the present, future and past put together. Like remembered cecropia moths fresh from a cocoon, they are central, and time in which they're embedded appears to have stopped, and the sun's afternoon course and the distant approach of spring too. We Are and They Are, the man and woman both know, though in the time before the cats' re-emergence the woman has been able to sit down on the road and pull on a second pair of socks to warm up her cold feet.
In retrospect the darker, most beautiful of these cats on the road may have been a female in heat; that would be unsurprising even though it's a guess. Later the mature couple themselves, back at home base again, feel themselves like the wild cats to be loose-legged and deliberate, full of body language, aware a lot of the time of their placement in relation to each other along the road while they walked back to their parked vehicle in temperatures of single-digits Fahrenheit.
Most significantly, in paused time two bobcats were free to claim a road created for cars and trucks and use it for their own, unhurt or harassed, observed in their rituals by humans whose distance, even from so near, was enough for them. My art, foolishly and everlastingly, says: let this moment in this dark tree entanglement stand for all time, though forests change and go away with or without our involvement, and so when our excessive strength and numbers have done their worst upon the land maybe the beasts and infrequent birds, relegated to far edges, will be back as masters of their former realm; something like this has been seen to happen in miniature in modern central Europe, due in major part to warfare...
https://www.etsy.com/listing/80321335/bird-note-card-watercolor-chickadees
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