Читать книгу Close to the Edge Down By the River - R.L. Sterup - Страница 11

Whether alone or in tandem the pair waited and watched, watched and waited, characteristically concealed, out of sight if not mind, sliding quickly, easily, through tall grasses and camouflaging stands of pine, or betwixt tawny rocks in silent atavistic momentum, no more apart from their environs than is a fish stranger to water, in the sense of habituated so thoroughly and completely the one melts into the other, tawny cats virtually invisible against the tawny sandstone. Not unlike the wind slipping through the low hills by the river, sensed but seldom seen, at least not until coalesced into a funnel or vortex that differs from the mere atmosphere of which it is comprised only in shape and dimension, indifferent air twisted into a temporary twister, performing its equilibrium-redistributing purpose before disappearing just as quickly, drawn back into the clouds, its destructive assignment completed, in a whirl of thunderingly unspeakable power. Power in its most primal form. Cunning in the way of the well adapted. Stealthy by nature. And above all patient. The patience to merely sit and wait, for hours if necessary, knowing the patient waiting need only be sporadically rewarded, and that appetite eventually will lead into its leaping way the innocent -- to the extent innocence is possible --- victim de jour.

“Victim” only in the subjective sense. In the broader, objective, grand view of things merely another form of matter awaiting conversion, as it were, as all things in heaven and earth eventually are converted, must be transformed, so to speak, from one form into another, from one state to the next, laboriously un-tuning, years and decades in the case of some, eons expended in achievement, senseless of catastrophe, vibrating if and as commanded, flung together for a time in a manner dimly perceivable, thence in due course de-constructed, as it were, but with no loss of constituent particles, the particles themselves presumably indifferent to the exercise, as too presumably is the atmosphere indifferent to the uses to which it very occasionally is put, or, for that matter, the lurking, stealthy, supremely patient danger assembled in the general configuration of a feline. A species molded by prey, shaped by the ungulates and other innocents it must consume, is built to consume, or the boy-child it too must convert if afforded opportunity, indifferent to when and how and why the fates placed a something-that-is-not-nothing in its way for survival purposes. Seated or perched or sprawled on a sandstone outcrop, invisible or virtually so to inattentive eyes, the beasts attuned or in synch or honed to the frequencies emitted by tasty tail-swishing cud chewers, or other digestible species of species, the frequencies appearing as casually knit into chunks of two- or four-legged fodder, congealed into apparent separateness by mysterious animating resolve, a hopping or strolling or ambling or grazing box of fleshy Wheaties for the cat to eat.

Breakfast of champions, indeed.

Not once did the pair watching and waiting together or alone question why or how the particles as temporarily coalesced into their respective singularities come to be, to exist, or what if any emotional fallout might flow from their random acts of killing kindness. Untroubled by conjecture. Unknown of narrative. Like watching a movie without knowing it is a movie or that one is watching a movie, even. Movies which, parenthetically, are themselves comprised of thousands of still-lifes, not a single moving image, oddly, except the observer somehow pieces together the illusion of movement from the series of unmoving time portraits, and so too the predatory pair, mere instruments or organs or playthings of processes catalyzed by unthinkably complex connections of this and that electrical center. No more or less capable of resisting or revising those unthinkably complicated processes than are the mere molecules comprising atmosphere capable of discretely but firmly declining invitation to join the vortex brought on by a freak coupling of low pressure and a cold jet stream. Sorry low pressure ridge, but I choose not to whirl purposefully. Find another molecule of nitrogen or hydrogen or oxygen to do your dirty work. I’ll take a pass. That badly wounded deer fawn holds no interest. The vulnerable boy pushed by wind into one’s claw-rich paws is of no import. We’ll take a miss on easily slaughtered packets of pure protein, today.

Yeah, right. May as well convince a salmon not to swim upstream, a mallard not to fly south, a bull elk not to rut with a heated cow from his harem, a river not to roar over the waterfall placed in its way, a man caught in a quagmire of submerged logs not to flee the spiritual jurisdiction, a boy-child of ten or maybe twelve not to plunge over the ledge when by a spit of wind pushed after straying too close to the edge.

Perhaps the boy could have fallen up instead of down? Perhaps the cat schooled by eons of experience -- including not least surviving an ice age or three -- could carefully have returned the meat to its previous owner rather than greedily consume it in bleeding chunks?

Equally plausible outcomes, really.

Notwithstanding the colorful moniker, the mountain lion prefers the plains, and always has, for more abundantly run the game in open spaces, at least if left relatively undisturbed, but mechanized men and their iron firing pieces proved problematic, for prey and predator both, bang bang with the guns incessantly the cowboy-hatted yahoos, itchy trigger fingers and bloodlust joined at the proverbial hip, and so to the sparsely populated mountains they duly fled, at least until they, the cats, were drawn back to the land, the isolated county, attracted by the somewhat dim-witted albeit abundant species then clogging the tree stands and shrub country by the river. A species known mostly for its ability to convert relatively non-nutritious legumes into useable protein, and who, though equipped by long years of trial and error with lightning quickness and tolerable speed and impressive leaping ability, nonetheless lacked much in the way of planning capacity. As in none. Talk about your knuckleheads. Collectively dumber than a sack of hair. Head bent, happily ingesting, oblivious to all other sensation, these guys. Like a toddler wandering into an unguarded intersection. Or a penguin mindlessly leaping into the very jaws of the damn patiently waiting leopard seal on the Discovery Channel. Why not design and build a loading and unloading dock for safely making access to the arctic flow, just once? Had the tail-swishing doe-eyed does massed forces in some modicum of coordinated effort, for example, the crouching killers readily might have been repelled. They never gave it a thought, the pinheads. Easy pickings, at least to a patiently waiting and well-concealed opportunist with carving knives of long claws at the ready. The grass-metabolizing population had exploded, more or less, over the course of a generation, abetted by successful attempts to re-forest the river lands, as coupled with successively shorter seasons for homo sapien slaughtering of same, and the fact men just don’t hunt the way they used to. Easier to bag meat at the Red and White or Harold’s Supermarket on Main Street. Occupied instead with football and racing their hot rods and football and drinking beer and football. No wonder the whitetails ran relatively amuck. No wonder, too, their relative abundance brought with it the creatures intended by grand design to feast on their quivering haunches.

Three generations earlier the county’s forebear knew to grab the flintlock before heading to the outdoor privy of a spring evening, against the chance a grizzly might wander through the same space at the same time. Every year, too, after planting and before cultivating the men gathered to scour the freshly turned sod, shotguns in hand, on a coyote exterminating mission. No settler of even modest intelligence failed to fence his heifers and calves against the threat of grey wolves, or failed either to empty his weapon into the flanks of any such mangy mutt he or she happened upon whilst patrolling the family plot. Men battled voracious four-footed predators in annual hand-to-hand killing combat in those trailblazing days. Armed with gunpowder as they somewhat unfairly were the primates won the lion’s share of such warfare, but not without the occasional upset triumph by some particularly adept member of the furry set. “Lion’s share” suggesting as it does the cat’s top-of-the-food-chain potency as memorialized in myth and fable. A cousin found clawed to pieces at the family well. An uncle succumbed to a wolf pack’s shockingly savage tearing of limb from limb. No mere video game, this. Real life flesh-and-blood stuff. Of course, any such winning critter immediately was hunted by all and sundry, torch waving mobs mobbing to track and ritually slaughter the beast, lest it get too comfortable with the concept of casually picking off primates. Mostly successfully, although occasionally the odd man-killing machine escaped to parts unknown, presumably to kill and kill again, until at last arrested by a righteously flying chunk of hot lead.

Then came more and yet more of the sod busting, perpetually hungry men and their wives and children, fencing more and more of the formerly open plain, while farming more and more of the formerly pristine prairie, and with the quartering and sectioning of each and every arable acre the habitat available to the meat-eating felines -- whose ancestors never thought to hone the fine art of dropping seeds in the soil and thence await the seasonal multiple return on the vegetable investment -- gradually withered and shrank, leaving precious little for the formerly abundant, scarcely conscious, species to hunt. They fled if not first shot dead. Our county hadn’t seen a grizzly bear or wolf in the better part of a century, and though coyotes yet roamed here and there, relatively few were they in number, skulking uncertainly amongst the places bunnies hop, and the occasional fox. And of course your rodents who never left, because never represented any particular threat, gentle seed-eaters that they were and are, and, also, no effort of mankind yet has succeeded in reducing the rodent population, at least not where rodents decline to be relocated, and so gophers and voles and mice by the hundreds or thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands happily bamboozle and perplex us, but not worth bothering about unduly, and besides, it gives our house cats something to do. Or the occasional hawk and golden eagle, also. But none among your top tier killers of cattle or sheep or hogs or sons.

Then came the deer and with them the pair patiently watching and waiting, the first of their kind to re-colonize our county in three generations or better, so far as anybody knew. Choosing to appear, as luck would have it, at precisely that instant a maliciously indifferent vortex aimed its sights at our prone flatness. Talk about your coincidences! Like something from fiction. Or perhaps yet another example of fate finding its destiny, or destiny findings its fate, what have you, in the sense of preordained, or perhaps merely inevitable. Assigned a task like everybody else, a part to play, a role to fill, links in a chain, a food chain, ha ha, metabolizing as planned, assuring nature’s balance is somewhat chaotically preserved, never too much of this or too little of that, a check for every balance, designed to leap on inattentive primates, for example, for if left unchecked the population necessarily would explode unmanageably, far too many of the upright-walking critters roaming about the planet, so of course they must die, one after another, in due course, brought to their respective ends by this or that instrument, typically when very young or very old, by one of several handy mechanisms, even by one another’s hand often enough, oddly enough. For rare indeed is the species that manages overabundance by turning guns on one another -- one uncommonly sees an angus bull train an AK 47 on a neighboring herd, or a prairie dug unload an Uzi on a rival town -- but even that proves insufficient in the case of this profligate species, one with breeding-age females constantly in heat, and the Y chromosomes of a certain age forever sporting erections, or so it seems. And so they shoot one another dead on some pretext or another, or are run over by buses, or caught by a submerged limb and grimly held for seven long years, or, in the case of a few particularly unlucky souls, pushed by indifferent wind into the clutches of a top tier predator. For alone among the carnivorous classes cats love to play with their food, to keep it alive for a time, tossing and turning loose the pending meal before clawing it back again, even fattening the feast before feasting on it, or rather him, stuffing the fleshy morsel with sweets so as to enhance the eventual taste, say, for the predator into whose clutches a prey falls has no more choice whether to consume that prey than does the prey have the option of falling up instead of down. All in due time, of course. As it was writ.

The pair eventually returned to their hidden lair to bed down, sleepy from the prior night’s prowling. They sprawled in a furry heap. Snoozing the way cats do, sunbeam dappled, one eye periodically popping open, but otherwise inert.

Their most recent primate/prey/captive suitably caged near or by their slumbering massiveness, sawing logs also.