The Wild Ones

This story comes from Abby, second of the Elzinga sisters. Abby lives a few miles from the ranch with her 3 kids and husband, Ethan.

It was just Becky and I in the front, driving the long, dark road home from Salmon. My three little kids snored in their car seats in the back, rocked to sleep by the gentle motion of the car following the winding Salmon River. On winter nights, the mountains on either side of the canyon are monolithic, the little homes with glowing windows reminiscent of porcelain Christmas houses. On such nights when the wind swirls the snow and the desert is empty, I’m grateful to shut the winter outside.

We were just coming up on one of my favorite places, an old homestead that had been built into the wide curve of a hillside along the river canyon, most likely in the days when Highway 93 was just a hardscrabble dirt road.  “Grapes of Wrath” my dad called it. It had been about a decade since anyone lived there. The more recent inhabitants had rapidly absconded with their double-wide after a huge boulder rolled down the mountain in the night and landed at their back door. 

The original ranch house is in a better spot, it’s old log walls leaning into each other, the bay window facing the river long missing its panes.  People often stop to take pictures of it. I just want to live there.

On this clear, dark night our headlights swung around the curve to rest on the old house. Suddenly, a shape appeared, showing up white in our highbeams. I thought it was a coyote at first, but something was odd. He wasn’t running. He wasn’t even hurrying. He was strolling, like he owned this stretch of pavement.

It was a mountain lion.

Even when we got close to him, he didn’t pick up his pace. He saw us all right, but he was going to take his sweet old time crossing the road. Becky slowed, almost came to a stop. There were no cars around. She let her 4Runner roll past him. I saw him close, not ten feet out the window, standing on the edge of the road. He was practically looking into the car. I thought we might have made eye contact.

“Keep going, Becky,” I said quickly, “don’t stop.”

What made me say that? There was a whole wall of metal and glass in between me and him. Was I thinking he would somehow get the kids through a vehicle? It wasn’t rational, but it was a very strong feeling. I wanted to get away from him.

I’m no stranger to animals. I am even comfortable around ones much larger than I am. Danny, our Hereford bull, weighs almost a ton, but he’s relatively harmless and he respects people. Red, the draft horse, has feet as big as dinner plates, but he’s almost a teddy bear.

The odd feeling I had was this: I was in the presence of something that considered me an equal. We are both predators, after all. Mountain lion armed with tooth and claw. Man armed with nothing but his wits.

I’d never seen one before. There was one instance, when Ethan and I had first bought our little house (before we had small children and a large dog) when we thought there was a mountain lion. Ethan heard something out in the sagebrush behind our house, a snarl, a shriek. He thought he saw eyes in the beam of his flashlight.

There was another time when we rode our horses behind the house. They rode easy, quiet and calm all the way to the foot of Little Morgan Creek. It was just barely getting dusk, when the light is pink and gold and the lines a little more blurred. It’s the softest time of day for the desert.

Where Little Morgan trickles out into the valley,  there is a copse of gritty cottonwood and aspen. As soon as we rode our horses into those cottonwood trees all of a sudden something changed.

You can always tell when a horse is nervous. Their body clenches up underneath you, head goes up, ears perk forward or switch from side to side. They get all stuck underneath you, like they’d rather go backwards.

 Ethan and I didn’t see anything that would have spooked them, so we shrugged it off, and pressed on up toward the draw, figuring they’d seen a rabbit. They didn’t shrug it off. In fact, the more we went on the more they didn’t want to. Finally we agreed to turn back because something just didn’t feel right.

We never saw a lion, but I do wonder if there was one up in one of those old trees. Maybe in the rocks, just waiting and watching. Mountain lions can take down full-grown elk if they want to. Their prey rarely sees them coming.

Sometimes in the summer we’ll hike in the mountains, try to get a view in if we’re not too busy on the ranch. We’ve hiked up some canyons where we never stopped looking around. We kept checking above our heads. Some places just have a kitty-cat kind of feel. We’ve even hiked around a canyon that we didn’t like the look of, even if a real good cow trail went through. They’re smart, mountain lions, and you just don’t see them.

This one on the road by the the Grapes of Wrath was my first. It was a good reminder that we don’t own this country we live in. We might think the world is pretty well civilized, but there are plenty of vacant places in between. Inaccessible draws, broken shale ridges, places that we can’t get to on our own two feet. They pose no obstacles to the feet of wolves, lions and bighorn sheep.

Then again, there are places like the Grapes of Wrath that are slowly and steadily becoming uncivilized, until eventually, they become the haunts of the wild ones.

-Abby, 2nd of the 7 daughters