I knew if I had any shot at feeling well throughout the week, I needed the medicine. My husband offered to go. He’s the kind of guy who volunteers for practical things, but this was, in theory, his birthday trip — and he was already in bed.
Last Sunday had gone slightly sideways from the start. I woke feeling crummy. My husband and I picked up medicine on our way out of town, headed toward a yurt in the Texas Hill Country.
By 11:30 that night, we were both in bed inside the yurt when I remembered that the bag with the medicine my doctor had ordered was in the car. I put on my shoes to go get the meds. It was a short 40-yard walk through the dark.
On a clear night, the Texas Hill Country sky is full of stars.
I didn’t think a thing about it. Most of us don’t — until we do.
The yurt where we were staying was in a remote area near the Blanco River outside Wimberley, Texas. It’s the kind of place people go to unplug, read books and remember what real darkness looks like. I love real darkness, and the night sky was a big part of the appeal of the experience for me.
I grabbed my phone as a flashlight and headed to the car. The path was short and obvious. I stepped into the dark with the confidence of someone who believes she understands her surroundings.
Let me emphasize the rural Hill Country’s dark. It is not neighborhood dark. On clear nights, this is a darkness that makes all the stars shine bright overhead, but my phone’s little flashlight did the trick as a light source. I reached the car without incident, found the medicine bag and turned around to head back, phone flashlight on and still in my hand.
That’s when I saw it.
For that split second, my brain and my eyes didn’t seem to be working together, but very calmly, I said to myself, “That’s a mountain lion walking by.”
It crossed my path about 12 feet in front of me.
It was moving the whole time. Not toward me. Not away from me. It was simply crossing the path I was about to take, heading east.
It walked like a giant house cat with a place to go.
It just walked on by like it knew exactly where it was going, paying me no mind.
As it stepped, I saw its muscle ripple in its left hind leg. I saw its tawny-colored fur. It was absolutely silent. Even though I could see it stepping, I couldn’t hear a thing. It came from the dark and went into the dark as I stood there frozen. After it passed, I thought, “I think I’ll go inside.”
I began making noise and waving my arms to make myself look as big as possible — and walking back to the yurt.
When I walked back in, my husband said, “What on earth was all of that about?”
As I told him what had happened, my heart rate finally caught up with the moment.
We spent the rest of the glorious week there in the yurt. He drank coffee in the morning. I ate yogurt. We read books in the afternoons. He drew some. We cooked incredible meals and spent a lot of time in the hot tub looking at the stars talking about all the things. We went for walks — in the daylight — and we listened to a white-winged dove from dawn to dusk.
When I told the people who run the yurts about the mountain lion, they said that no one staying there had ever reported seeing one before. Research is the way I process things — so I spent a lot of time reading about mountain lions in Texas.
I had a lot to learn. Until last week, I didn’t know mountain lions, cougars and pumas were the same animal. This feels like something I should have learned earlier.
Now I know that it’s not surprising that no one else has seen one there — mountain lions generally make it their mission not to be seen. However, they have been documented in that part of Texas for more than a century, particularly along the nearby Blanco River.
Like so much in our lives, they are present, but rarely visible.
Their survival depends on not being noticed.
The more I learned, the more I found myself wondering about the mechanics of the moment. I kept asking myself, “Did that really happen?”
I’m sure that the mountain lion had already registered me — my footsteps, my flashlight, my predictable humanness — before I turned around. It had simply decided to continue on its way. The entire thing lasted seconds, but it felt much longer.
When I turned around, my light and I may have been the surprise.
We like to believe that short distances are insignificant, that being alone means being in control. Forty yards can feel like nothing — until it doesn’t.
Occasionally, something silent crosses directly in front of us and rearranges that thinking.
I am not inclined to assign grand meaning to the experience. A mountain lion was moving through its territory. I happened to be moving through it at the same time. We noticed each other. Then we went our separate ways.
Still, the days since have felt different, and I find myself thinking about how much of life is lived in that space between the expected and the unknowable.
We check the boxes. We complete the errands. We assume we understand the terrain.
And then, without warning, something reminds us that the world is far less predictable than we pretend.