CLIMBING through the January snow,
into the Lobo canyon
Dark grow the spruce-trees, blue is the balsam, water
sounds
still unfrozen, and the trail is still
evident.
Men!
Two men!
Men! The only animal in the world to
fear!
They hesitate.
We hesitate.
They have a gun.
We have no
gun.
Then we all advance, to meet.
Two Mexicans, strangers, emerging
out of the dark and snow
and inwardness of the
Lobo valley.
What
are they doing here on this vanishing
trail?
What is he carrying?
Something yellow.
A deer?
Qué tiene,
amigo?
León —
He smiles, foolishly, as if he were
caught doing wrong.
And we smile, foolishly, as if we didn’t know.
He is quite gentle and
dark-faced.
It is a mountain lion,
A long, long slim cat, yellow
like a lioness.
Dead.
He trapped her this morning, he says, smiling foolishly.
Lift up her face,
Her round, bright face, bright
as frost.
Her round,
fine-fashioned head, with two dead ears;
And stripes in the brilliant
frost of her face, sharp, fine
dark rays,
Dark, keen, fine rays in the
brilliant frost of her face.
Beautiful dead eyes.
Hermoso es!
They go out towards the
open;
We go on into
the gloom of Lobo.
And above the trees I found her lair,
A hole in the blood-orange brilliant rocks that
stick up, a
little cave.
And bones, and twigs, and a perilous
ascent.
So, she will never leap up that way
again, with the yellow
flash of a mountain
lion’s long shoot!
And her bright striped frost face will never watch any
more,
out of the shadow of the cave in the
blood-orange
rock,
Above the trees of the Lobo dark
valley-mouth!
Instead, I look out.
And out to the dim of the
desert, like a dream, never real;
To the snow of the Sangre de Cristo mountains,
the ice of
the mountains of Picoris,
And near across at the opposite
steep of snow, green trees
motionless standing in
snow, like a Christmas toy.
And I think in this empty world
there was room for me
and a mountain
lion.
And I think in
the world beyond, how easily we might
spare a million or two
of humans
And never
miss them.
Yet what
a gap in the world, the missing white frost face
of
that slim yellow mountain lion!
Lobo.