I Met a Legend in the Dark

Skiing for exercise in the late, last low glow of a fair Saturday, river running open on my left, firs and oaks and ashes and aspen interwoven not so awfully high overhead, I heard a snap, not a dry wood crack but one elastic live sapling scraping against another, so I stared to my right in search of the animal. Remembering that moment, it in fact took me some weeks to refresh my memory back to the fullest possible detail. Yet I knew without a doubt, as soon as I saw what I saw, what animal had just left the scene. That faint woody click was different from the panic of a deer when spooked. Something on padded paws, with some bulk was plunging southward, opposite my own bearing. I knew that the lingering sunset gloom would give me one chance at an ID. Wolf maybe, I guessed at first, because no, it couldn't be a deer, common as they are. I knew to watch for a defining tail, since all that I'd be able to get would be a quick silhouette.  I knew, though for a few days forgot, that I had seen the tail midair, ropelike, in the shape of C, though continually recalled the front parts, the low-slung body with legs thick as the arms of an ape. The impression left was both those things, the tail, a moment's wink of silhouette, shaped like a C up above the rump, and those short stocky legs the length and thickness of a man's heavy forearms, or an ape's. Cat! I think I said, "oh!" before veering off the trace of path in a degree of shock.

Having cougar in the back of my mind since seeing a housemate's photos on Facebook of cougar tracks the day before, I still forgot to think I could meet the same animal on a skiing hike in dark nearby woods.  Yet what other kind of animal could that shape have been in unfenced private forest in the middle of North America, given those tracks he'd lately found and the momentary springing outline I saw, an animal probably bigger and longer than either of us, scared off as I flapped by on cross-country skis? As I had only seen that silhouette, I'd for better or worse just missed a fully fleshed-out sighting of another American wild animal I had never met anywhere before in the wild. Earlier that same afternoon I had, alongside Lake Superior, viewed a new species of gull from so close up I thought I recognized expression in its face--what are you all staring at??--and beheld it from angle after different angle in full flattering sun. The bird, a rare ivory gull, looked like a marble bust or an art-quality color photo brought to life. Then I had headed over to Pineapple Art Center to unveil and talk about an art proposal making use of pencil silhouettes. This continuum of images--from live and moving to flat monochromatic, to live but silhouetted black against a night-dark forest--seems artistically significant only later.

For the first couple of nights as I lay awake after that startling encounter--in the urgings of many people, dangerous owing to the nature of that kind of beast--I troubled myself with the question: did I really see a long thin tail, held up like a C or uncurling into another shape--or did the power of suggestion, the desire for this spectre to really prove to be a cougar, add an imagined tail to the back end of the bounding-away form? Looking hard, I think, was probably its own reward: I really saw, however fleetingly, what there was to see. The stumpy cat legs, the low-slung long belly. But the other part of the conviction I had had in those seconds as I stood on my skis came back to me--no bobbing white rump and tail of a deer, nor any other obvious tail of the bushy sort belonging to a wolf. The animal sprang away like a cat, or panther, or mountain lion, all of these, because it was one of these, of magnificent size. A legend of the old American wilderness.

What is a silhouette when compared with a fully-formed image? I think it takes its place as the image of all of its kind, while a three-dimensional photo or illustration is of one specimen. Just below is decorative, contemplative artwork I have taken on as an assignment, hinting of types of human, suggestions of personality, categories of motion. I plan on doing another sheet not of human figures but our four-legged, hands-free relatives like the cougar or deer on the run. If I should be so lucky as to glimpse or even gaze upon another mountain lion, or panther, or cougar in broad-enough daylight I wonder what I'll have to report beyond color pattern or perfectly supple, enviable powers of motion--attitude, say, of an animal in the way that we each saw the other and drew our conclusions. A different type of story and artwork to be sure!