We Here Now series
In the Presence of the Wild
An Intimate Encounter with a Mountain Lion
One day recently I went kayaking on a remote lagoon by the Pacific Ocean north of our home. In the burnished late afternoon light I paddled about ten feet from the north shore admiring the tawny rocks and dried grasses from the previous summer. Only gradually did it dawn on me that some large animal with the same colors and textures as the rocks and grasses was moving slowly along the water’s edge. It took a moment to see its camouflaged outlines emerge from the surrounding grasses. It moved with the feline grace of a cat but was substantially larger, with a body four feet long and a tail another three feet. I instantly ceased paddling and paused my breath, suspended in awe and wonder.
It was, I gradually realized, a mountain lion. They are seldom seen up close in the wild since they are nocturnal animals and wisely wary of humans. Encounters between humans and mountain lions are usually no more than fleeting glimpses. Despite their fearsome reputation, attacks on humans by cougars are extremely rare, with less than 20 resulting in death over the past hundred years. Nonetheless, two years ago just ten miles up the road from where I was paddling, a man was attacked by a mountain lion on a trail in Redwood National Park and was saved from death only by his wife’s wielding of a ballpoint pen to stab the lion’s eyes and force him to retreat.
Yet in the moment when I encountered this mountain lion she didn’t even glance in my direction. Instead she kept moving, placing one paw in front of the other with the stealth of a panther on the prowl. But she didn’t appear to be stalking anything, simply moving almost invisibly through the tall tawny grasses. I kept completely still, simply watching. When it gradually dawned on me what I was witnessing I entered a state of heightened awareness, all my senses attuned to this extraordinary moment. She continued to move forward without acknowledging my presence, though I’m pretty sure she knew I was there. At some point she slowly disappeared into the grasses and I thought I’d lost her. I continued to sit motionless in my kayak, more keenly aware now of the wider environment around her — the grasses, rock and lightly rippling water of the lagoon.
Just when I had given up and assumed our meeting was over she reappeared a dozen feet up the steep slope, only this time she faced me directly. Her eyes set farther apart than mine, she gazed at me with startling composure — neither surprised nor spooked by my presence, inclined neither to pounce or retreat. I felt no danger, even though I later heard that mountain lions are able swimmers. She gazed at me with unwavering attention, much as I gazed at her, though mine may have been accompanied by more awe and wonder. When she closed her eyes it was not a mere blink but a several-second rest, then a gradual opening again.
How often in our lives do we experience a sustained presence with a truly wild animal, let alone one close to one’s own size? She surely sensed that I posed no threat and presented no tasty meal. Most of all, we could be present with one another for fifteen minutes or more, I floating on water, she stepping on the water’s edge in a rare state of spacious shared awareness. Had I wielded a camera, however discreetly, she would surely have sensed it and darted back into the thicket. Instead, her prolonged presence just a few feet from me imprinted itself on me in an animated memory more vivid and imperishable than any photograph I could have taken.
When I was a young student of Zen Buddhism I first heard about “dharma transmission,” the official ceremony by which an elder sage conveys the mantle of wisdom to his or her designated heir. That distinction hasn’t passed on to me yet but maybe, just maybe it has come in a more spontaneous form directly from the wild —an mutual recognition of aliveness contained in a penetrating gaze exchanged without words. Even in a lifetime decades of which were spent surrounded by wilderness I remain largely a domesticated creature focused mostly on human affairs. Yet in this instance there was no intermediary between self and other, just the unmediated mystery of a fleeting shared awareness passing between us.
Wildlife biologists and friends have less sentimental interpretations of what the lion was thinking. They say she was simply sizing me up, deciding whether I was predator or prey, nothing more. Maybe so. But whatever her intentions the effect of her gaze on me was transformative. It continues to echo and resonate in me, piercing my veil of domesticity with the spirit of the wild. I’m boundlessly grateful for this late-life encounter, “woke” not by some political realization in our overwrought human world but by the wakefulness of those untamed creatures who survive by their alertness alone.
In a remarkable coincidence, in the same week when I published this Medium essay, one of my favorite podcasts, “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” broadcast an episode on the same topic — “eye-to-eye epiphanies” between humans and other animals. It features a number of extraordinary stories of intimate eye contact between humans and whales, chimps, ospreys, and a dying wolf. In all cases the encounters were life-changing experiences for the humans, and — who knows? — maybe for the animals as well. But in all the cases cited these encounters were fleeting — a penetrating glance or fierce glimpse, not the kind of extended connection I experienced with “my” mountain lion. Be that as it may, I continue to feel the after effects and wonder if some of the wildness of this cougar has pierced my domesticated spirit and infused it with some of the wakeful sensibility of the wild. Here’s the link to this altogether fascinating podcast episode:
