The West Will Swallow You by Leath Tonino

Author:Leath Tonino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Published: 2019-11-03T16:00:00+00:00

Old Friend

Do you remember the time? I was driving, you were sitting to my right, the summer day was blurring by—aspen, Doug fir, northern flicker, Steller’s jay. Neither of us knew what the heck we were looking at, some moving thing the color of the road’s dirt and, in places, in the pattern of leaves, the color of shadow. The windows were down, the radio off, the jeep bumping along. I eased us to a stop and the animal stopped, twenty feet ahead. We cursed for joy. We sang dirty words of surprise and disbelief and gratitude for our good fortune.

I’d never met a bobcat in the wild, never looked into a bobcat’s face and felt a bobcat looking back, and neither had you. It really shut us up, that feeling, really paused our mouths and minds. It sounds cheesy, but it’s true—the eyes, those eyes. We stared and the bobcat stared and the shared staring bonded us, everything deepening and stilling. Catching a glimpse of a secretive animal is one thing, but catching a secretive animal catching you, appreciating the mirrored fascination, seeing that it has a face like yours, with ears and nose, a mouth and eyes, and that it casts its senses into the world like a soft net, as you do, as I do, and with that net retrieves the faces swimming out from the shadows and the sun …

What can I say? It shut us up and shut us up fast. That seems to say it all.

But do you remember the thing that happened later, after the bobcat broke the trance, disappeared into the woods, after we drove away, talked, swore some more, laughed and felt blessed and went quiet? What I remember is sadness. No, what I remember is shame. My outward gaze turned inward. I realized we’d done wrong.

That bobcat we saw, that bobcat we admired, what did it see? Bumping along again through the shadows and sun, the blur of aspen and Doug fir and woodpeckers and jays, it hit me in a painful way—a jeep. Bobcat gave its perfect body and we gave a jeep. Bobcat gave its eyes and we gave a windshield. In return for fur, we offered steel. That bobcat we saw presented itself honestly, but we did not. We took without giving. We absorbed without being absorbed. Unaware that we were doing so, we played ourselves off as a machine.

Sure, it would be easy to say that the bobcat didn’t care, only stopped in fear or shock, that bobcats don’t cast their senses like a soft net into the world as we do, or for the same reasons. But you were there. You saw the eyes. It was trying to look. It was looking. I can’t say what exactly it was looking for, but I can say with certainty that it was looking.

Beers. A dip in the pond. A bonfire that night, the flames licking up, the owls hooting and scooping overhead. We told the story and our friends were excited and since then I’ve told the story to others who also were excited.

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