More Bobcat Beauty

 This is usually all you see of a bobcat, much less capture in a photo. I've found that the darkish brown ground color and the straight, not humped, backline, making a large dark apparently tailless rectangle, are pretty good identifiers for the brief glimpse one usually gets of a bobcat.

On August 18, that cat came back, several times. I already could not believe my luck at seeing him. To have him intermittently inhabiting the sideyard was simply over the pale. It was the squirrels that brought him. And I could tell he was around when they went from 13 to zero. It wasn't that James was eating the squirrels--it was just that he was around, and they knew it.

Confirmation came in their rough barks and squirrrs, their insouciantly flipping tails. This was a difficult shot to get—a taut bobcat and a very saucy squirrel in one frame. 

How much experience could this squirrel have had with bobcats? And yet it taunts the cat, foraging for sunflower seeds at the foot of the birch clump—the one that’s seen all the action—daring the cat to charge.

I was locked to the window, hoping so hard to photograph a charge, maybe even a capture. Lord knows James could have a squirrel or five. That would be fine. He was like a high-tension line, his pupils narrowed to pinpoints. The squirrel foraged and flirted and made little sorties out, little dashes back up the tree. My camera was smoking.  In this shot, he had started to charge, then stopped in mid rush. Get the whisker position here--all systems GO!

The phone chose that exact moment to ring. It was a telemarketer. I answered it just to shut it up. James fixed a cold eye on me, there inside the studio, speaking in low, urgent tones, trying to get rid of the caller, who was telling me I was due for a refund from a company that doesn’t even supply my electricity. No. No I’m not. Who cares? Get lost.

 Must you? I’m hunting.

I abruptly hung up and returned to my study, only to see James melt back under the spruce. 

I felt bad that I’d inadvertently intruded on his hunt, unsuccessful as it was. I smiled a few seconds later to see his legs through the thick boughs; he was standing just behind the spruce in indecision, in deference to me, who had no wish to be deferred to. It reminded me of what the whitetails do at night, when they run just enough to get out of the headlights' beam, and wait for your car to pass. 

To my great joy, he re-emerged. He knew I was there, watching him, and he was not afraid. Neither was he tame; he was simply untroubled. He raised his lovely face to the birches, looking at the teasing squirrel, and I snapped my second favorite shot of him, the best, I think, being the one I grabbed the first time he visited, staring me down with an ironweed backdrop. This one, though a bit soft, captured his spirit, his peace, his knowing who he is and where he belongs in the Ohio woods and, most amazingly, in my Ohio sideyard. Everything about him, perfect.

He panted a little in the heat, and I got a look at his ivory canines. The same that had punctured me as a youngun'. 

 I thought about some friends’ expressed fears that James might attack Chet, or even me. Perhaps oddly, the thought never occurred to me; fear is my last reaction to an animal this rare, this secretive, this beautiful.

 A partial answer might be that we’ve observed that James has not attacked the pair of baby raccoons that frequent the ground around the feeders. They’re about ¾ grown, and they’re out there most of every day, and Liam came home from school one afternoon, walked up the sidewalk, and scattered all three—the coons and James—from the yard at the same time. If James had wanted coon, he’d have had it by now. If he chose not to attack young raccoons (wise choice!) weighing perhaps 4 pounds apiece, why would he tackle a 24-pound Boston terrier made of India rubber and steel?

James strode out of the shade and into the sun. He picked it up from a lazy saunter to a trot.

 Positioning myself for a better shot (I was shooting at a bad angle through two panes of glass), I tripped over a box of Baby Birds, making a loud crash. DUH.  Arrgh! Worse than answering the phone. He slammed on the brakes and listened.

Strike two, Zick. But oh, the detail I can get in the sun!

 With an animal this secretive and special, I never know when I’m saying farewell. I try to save as many souvenirs as I can. I shot as he walked calmly out the orchard, away from ringing telephones and clumsy artists who trip over stuff trying so hard to save him to look at later, again and again, forever.

It is no small irony that I wrote this post in a gigantic Boeing 757(?), anyway, a widebody beast with four seats in the center rows and three on either side of that, somewhere over Namibia, on my way to South Africa to see...wild cats, perhaps. It was so, so hard to leave James and the baby warblers that were beginning to stream through the gardens; to leave all the young hummingbirds that were just massing around the cardinalflower beds; all these things I care for and about. More than that it was so hard to leave Liam, Phoebe and Bill; Liam just starting classes at the local community college while still enrolled in high school; Phoebe soon to return for a few days from a summer in San Diego and then fly off to Panama until December. It gave me real pain to miss her, having not seen her since June. But one can't plan around schedules not yet decided; jobs not yet landed. The schedule rolls on, and things must be committed to months in advance; the trips must be taken, and in the end I am a very, very lucky girl.

Hoping so hard that James will show himself for Phoebe before she leaves. Sending him a message to appear, if it pleases him.  Ah, James, I could just squeeze those perfectly lined furry cheeks,  and kiss you right on the bridge of that velveteen nose, but I'd likely come away perforated again. 

xoxxooo jz