In January, I dreamed of watching a mountain lion give birth. Six weeks later, on a Sunday morning in February, a mountain lion strolled through the oak trees behind my house.
I live in a wild, lightly populated part of the Coast Range of northern California: mountain lion habitat. But in fifteen years here, this was the first big cat I had seen. Here is how it happened:
I am sitting at my desk when a movement out the back window catches my eye. The mountain lion is passing in front of my woodpile, crossing to where my car is parked. She (or he) is not as big as I imagined (though when I look in a book later, I will discover that this cat is average size for the area: about twenty-six inches high and seven feet long). Her tail looks exactly as it is supposed to: full, fluid, sweeping the ground. She glides toward a clump of manzanita bushes. Strong body, tawny color. A cat head. She moves gracefully, easily, seems right at home, no sign of nervousness at human habitation.
Nandi, my Rhodesian Ridgeback, is at my side. She catches on to the excitement and starts to bark (though more at me than at the lion). The lion seems not to notice. She pauses for a moment in the manzanita, and then she pushes off with her powerful haunches. As she crosses from the manzanita to the woods, the Stellar’s Jays call out sharply. I can trace the cat’s path through the trees for several minutes by listening to the shouts of the birds.
And then she is gone. The air comes together over her path, and I start to breathe again. Sun pours down on a hillside that seems suddenly translucent — and empty.
A half-hour later, I go outside to examine the ground to see if I can find tracks, but the lion seems to have stepped only on hard ground or meadow grass: no soft earth or mud where her paw might have left a print.
Midafternoon, when Nandi and I go out for a walk, I discover that the hillside feels different. The lion’s paw marks may not be visible, but her presence is imprinted on this place. Hours later, her image still hangs in the air. As Nandi and I walk through the meadow and into the woods, I am on edge, my senses alert. A big cat has been here, could be here now. From the safety of my house, seeing the cat was a pure thrill; but out here in the woods, knowing that a lion might be nearby creates an undercurrent of fear.
The encounter triggered months of contemplation about wild animals — those in the mind and those in the flesh — and about what difference it makes whether or not wild animals actually inhabit the landscape. Although I had never seen one, I had known that the big cats were around because of neighborhood news. A rancher to the south had a calf attacked by a big cat one summer; another neighbor to the north said a lion had tried to carry off a newborn foal. People report sightings now and then: a big cat on a rock at the river; a mother and two cubs walking down a country road. More often, there are rumors, especially of the blood-curdling scream that some swear is a mountain lion’s roar.
In the absence of the grizzly bear (long vanished from this area), the mountain lion is the rarest animal that roams these hills. Sleek, shy of humans, almost completely nocturnal, the big cat is seldom seen. Even in the stories of calves killed by mountain lions, the cat itself appears only as a glimpse, if at all.
The mountain-lion-in-my-mind before that Sunday was composed of other people’s stories, an awareness of the cat’s invisible presence, and the images that the word lion evokes in the imagination. Mountain lions are this continent’s “big cat,” a category of animal that has stirred the human psyche for centuries. Listen to Laurens van der Post in his book A Testament to the Wilderness:
The lion, not only in the imagination of first man, but even in our day, is not the king of beasts for nothing. It is so chosen because, of all forms of animal life, it is the most many-sided, the most highly differentiated. It is powerful. It is swift. It is strong. It can see as well by night as by day. Its senses of smell and hearing are very good. It is very intelligent, and it doesn’t abuse this formidable combination of powers. It has a sense of proportion, and does not kill except for food. . . . Above all, the lion is fundamentally the cat that walks alone. In other words, the lion is the individual; it is the symbol of the instinctive and royal individual self.
As vivid as my mental image of a mountain lion had been before that Sunday, my response to the living, breathing cat in my back yard began not in my mind, but in my body. At the first glimpse of that tawny shape, my heart began to pound, my body to tense. Recognition seemed to come from below my conscious mind, as if my animal self had named the mountain lion while my head was still processing information: cat head, bigger than a bobcat, long tail . . . By the time my intellect finally made sense of the image — Aha. So this is a mountain lion. Of course — recognition had already resonated throughout my body.
What my imagination hadn’t grasped before the encounter was the cat’s wildness. With the real animal before me, I realized that I hadn’t fully understood wild; I hadn’t understood the cat’s raw power, the fact of its otherness. The real animal was outside my experience or comprehension, an unknown. It evoked a feeling that the animal-in-my-mind hadn’t, a feeling I hadn’t expected: fear.
According to Barry Lopez, the Eskimos have a word for this kind of fear: ilira, the fear that accompanies awe, as distinct from kappia, the fear that arises in the face of unpredictable violence. In Arctic Dreams, Lopez explains that ilira is what you feel while watching a polar bear; kappia is the fear of having to cross thin ice. Such distinctions are made by people who, from living intimately with the natural world, know fear well enough to define its subtleties.
For me, ilira came when I walked in the woods later that Sunday afternoon and knew that a mountain lion might be around. My rational mind understood that my chances of being attacked were slight. But another, more primitive part of my psyche was sharply aware of the big cat’s power, of her capacity to kill. The possibility of encountering a mountain lion was suddenly real and immediate. Before that morning, my mental image of mountain lions had tended toward the romantic. But the lion who crossed behind my house brought the real animal into focus, and corrected the distortions of my imagination.
That was not the first time I had experienced such a shift. Five years earlier, I was living in a yurt that was attacked by a bear. I was away for the encounter, but when I returned and saw what my visitor had done to a tin can, my romantic notions about bears dissolved.
When I asked for advice, my old-timer neighbors without exception said: “Kill it. Once it has the taste of human garbage, it will never stop.” My transplanted city friends said, also without exception: “Oh, how wonderful. A bear!”
Torn between those extremes, I had a terrible struggle deciding what to do. The bear-in-my-mind had suddenly become complicated by the threat of a real bear to my home. Until then, bear had symbolized to me the thrill of living in remote country, free of civilized constraints. The encounter with a real bear forced me to acknowledge the danger that wild animals can pose to human life, a danger that my mental image had lacked.
As it turned out, I moved a little earlier than intended to my present, more substantial house. And that summer my neighbors across the river killed five bears. I suspect that “mine” was among them, since he hasn’t returned.
Sometimes an animal encounter has provoked a psychic shift in the opposite direction. Each year my fear of rattlesnakes reaches its peak in the first few weeks of summer, when the snakes are back at large after their winter hibernation. In the month of June, I hardly take a step without expecting to find a snake at the other end of it. But when I do finally encounter the real animal, I see that it has not been lurking behind each rock, waiting to get me, as the snake-in-my-head has been. The encounter, in this case, tames my archetypal fear, and turns obsession into realistic caution.
The point is that an encounter with a real animal keeps the animal-in-the-mind real, too. A face-to-face meeting with a wild lion or bear or snake prevents an anthropocentric worldview because it puts us in contact with an other that is beyond human control.
The animal-in-the-mind is a mediator with the unknown, the unknowable. It symbolizes forces beyond human experience, ways of knowing and being that are foreign to us. If that symbol loses its grounding in the real animal, if no one anywhere is encountering a real lion, we will eventually forget what that lion is like. And the lion-in-our-minds will become slowly contained, humanized, stereotyped, its depth and power and mystery weakened. The mountain-lion-in-my-mind was powerfully satisfying until I saw the real animal. Imagine what might be missing from our collective image of, say, a dinosaur. There’s no way to know.
I have thought a lot about my fear — the Eskimo’s ilira — because it caught me by surprise, and at first I was embarrassed by it: here was a mountain lion, an animal I had hungered after for years, right behind my house, and I was afraid. The emotion seemed ungrateful.
Would it have made a difference if I had carried a gun with me on my afternoon walk? Would I have felt afraid then? The gun would surely have lessened my feeling of vulnerability, the fear I had of possibly encountering the big cat directly, creature to creature. If I had felt fear, it would have been a different kind.
The fear I experienced — fear of a creature more powerful than I — is probably more familiar to women, although it may have been felt by male hunters before the invention of guns. Through long years of evolution, that kind of fear has surely had survival value, because it sharpens the attention. I wonder if fear might play a similar role in our present moment of evolution, when the unknown within often seems a greater threat than the unknown without. Certainly, my unexpected fear startled me into alertness, not only to the big cat in the woods, but to the meaning of what I had experienced.
I think again of the Eskimos, whose culture evolved around hunting with knives and spears rather than with guns, and who know fear so well that they have more than one word for it. Like other totemic cultures, the Eskimos have a rich mythology in which the animal is a teacher and friend whose help is petitioned through ritual and whose wisdom is passed on in story. The Eskimos also have face-to-face encounters with real animals. For totemic cultures, the relationship between a bear-in-the-mind and the bear in the woods is fertile and fluid. The bear is celebrated, but also hunted; the hunt may provide food for survival, but it also may bring death for an unwary hunter.
Whatever happens, the hunt and the story are entwined, and flow in and out of one another. Ritual animal and real animal, human and nonhuman, mind and flesh are part of a single experience of life, joined in a pattern that embraces fear and purpose, hunger and longing.
In my dream of the mountain lion in January, six weeks before my encounter with the real lion, the big cat was giving birth in a zoo. I was watching with my mother and a friend. We looked right into the cat’s vagina, and we could see the folds of its uterus contract, struggling to give forth. The new life hadn’t quite been born when the dream ended.
I didn’t understand the meaning of the dream until I came across the van der Post passage quoted above. I then concluded that the dream was about my “royal, individual self,” which was, in many ways, struggling to be born.
The week after the dream, I came upon a bobcat one night as I was driving home. The bobcat was caught in my headlights, and I watched him for several minutes before he continued on across the road, in search of something. I wondered at the time if the encounter was related to the dream. If so, I was a little disappointed that I hadn’t seen a mountain lion instead, but I figured that was too much to hope for.
So when the mountain lion walked in front of my woodpile a month later, I was not exactly expecting her. Still, I was also aware of a certain lack of surprise, as if some secret part of me had, in fact, been awaiting such a visit since the night of my dream. I had no doubt that this cat had come for me. For me to be at my desk on a Sunday morning and to be looking out the window at the precise moment when a shy, seldom-seen, nocturnal predator appeared was too much of a coincidence. For fifteen years I hadn’t seen a mountain lion, and then I’d dreamed of a big cat and seen one within a six-week period. The synchronicity brought my inner and outer worlds together with such force it left me tingling for hours. All day long, I turned over and over in my mind the image of the cat, the memory of my dream, and the resonance between the two. I felt certain that this mountain lion had come to make real the image in the dream, to bring the symbol to life.
This, I understood, was what it was like to live in a world in which inside and outside are one. This was true participation in the environment — an experience that was commonplace for our distant ancestors, whose intimacy with the natural world and innate sense of belonging combined to produce an awareness that our personal destinies are linked with that of the natural world. To experience this feeling — as I did, courtesy of the mountain lion — is to know what it means to live in perfect accord with nature: as if all life, inner and outer, is engaged in a single purpose. It is a feeling of being known.
The Kalahari Bushmen say, “There is a dream dreaming us.” My encounter with the mountain lion occurred in such a dream time, where unlikely events come together to form a pattern of meaning, where my destiny was part of the destiny of the mountain lion and of the oak trees and of the sun-drenched hillside, on a Sunday morning in February.
“Lion” is excerpted from “Intersection: A Meeting with a Mountain Lion,” by Barbara Dean, from the anthology The Soul Unearthed, edited by Cass Adams . © 1996 Cass Adams. It is reprinted here by permission of Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., a division of the Putnam Berkley Group, Inc. The essay originally appeared in Northern Lights.
— Ed.
