Where the Mountain Lion Walks

Although we didn't come bearing handfuls of hazel catkin, or juniper berry; although we didn't come scattering mica in our wake or chanting or praying or walking down on our knees in honor, it still felt like a small act of communion, or pilgrimage. At least it did to me. To come to deep and lonely forest canyons, to high and misty ridges, for the sake of mountain lions. For the big cats who call Mt Tamalpais home, more so than I could ever dream. 

I said it quietly, to myself, to the trees, to the serpentine outcrops and into the mist so the message might somehow be passed along—I love and honor you, great cats. I always have. 

The equipment of this pilgrimage came in the form of plastic bags full of data cards and a plastic box full of dozens of different keys. I like to dream that reverent words and juniper berries left at tree roots, stories written with a strange and wild seam through their hearts, might be enough in this world to change the way we relate to the animals and plants around us.

 But the truth is, wildlife cameras help a great deal. I daresay a great deal more. Especially in places like the Bay Area, which are rich with open space (a huge, blessed amount of wild open space preserved largely in the 1960's by heroic & saintly human beings who fought hard and long), but also very dense with human beings, and only becoming more so. The Bay Area Puma Project, part of Felidae, an organization that looks to protect big cats world-wide, came into being originally in the South Bay, tracking and tagging mountain lions in the Santa Cruz mountains, because of legitimate fears that the encroachment of development in the Silicon Valley would start to cut off wildlife corridors, creating a kind of island out of those mountains that could result in inbreeding, more aggression toward human beings, and therefore more lion fatalities at the hands of Fish & Game.

Now the whole project is moving into Marin and the East Bay, putting up wildlife cameras in all the windy wooded wild places that mountain lions like best, to try to make sure that they always have room to roam, to hunt, to stay secretive and silent as they are most wont to do. 

A lot of the work involves actually tracking and tagging mountain lions with radio collars, great bulky things that make them look strangely like pets. And while the romantic and the luddite in my heart both balk a little at some of the implications here—I've read terrifying plans to create Facebook pages for wild radio-collared animals, to affix tiny needles to the collars that release a sedative into the bloodstream of an animal too close to a road or a livestock pen (seriously, this sounds like science fiction; but then we seem to be living a lot of the fantasies of science fiction all around us, don't we?)—this is deeply important work.

We've made a mess of things, and while we can work to deeply re-align our stories and re-wild our bones, in the meanwhile development can happen brutally fast, and without hard data that says--mountain lions use this ridge, this canyon, right here, right now—no amount of reverent words will be worth a damn. So I am really grateful for Felidae, for the scientists of the Bay Area Puma Project-- and very happy to be tagging along to check cameras and walk the canyons where the lions come down in the quiet hours to roam and hunt and rest and love.

Since I was a little girl, big cats have always held a special, fierce place in my heart. They've always stirred an almost painful longing in me. I remember a very clear memory of wanting so badly to know what it was like to be a cheetah, running at the speed of wind over a savannah, that it made my heart hurt. As an an adult, I went through several years of intense mountain lion dreams, in which I would finally, at last, encounter one face to face, and it would  lunge at me, ready to bite-- and then I would wake. When I started tracking animals almost four years ago, the dreams stopped. I've seen the flash of a mountain lion, golden and quick, only once, so fast and stealthy across a trail and up a fallen log I almost could have imagined it. It was fluid as a dream. When I walk alone I walk with mixed nervousness at the base of my belly, and intense, quivering longing-- to behold this quiet, beautiful animal. She has such a hold on my soul. 

To walk up here on the misty ridges of Mt. Tamalpais, near Kent Lake, where serpentine outcrops grow deep green under the hands of fog, in honor of mountain lions, for the sake of mountain lions; even if it is a small thing, this makes me feel happy inside. It feels like an honor. Like I am reaching out to her with my head bowed.

And the serpentine looks on, with stories in its creases about time, about stars, about fire, about the great fleeting beauty of animal life.

Tarweed is in bloom now up in the dry hills, one of those hardy, resinous wildflowers of our summer season, a thousand fallen suns.

The mariposa lilies, which look to me so delicate, so enchanted, wait for this dry time of year to bloom too, opening up the furred cups of their bodies to the heat and to the fog-drip.

And the pearly everlasting blooms have arrived too, white and papery and smelling so warm, like incense.  Like summer heat held in tiny hands.

Past all of these, the lions pad silently, leading secret lives of deep rest and sudden blood-sharp strength, of languid tenderness and terrifying precision. It is so good to remember that other feet pad where our feet tread; that other lives are watching ours with light, knowing eyes as we pass through the dry grass.



I learned recently from a friend that the spiders who build tunnel webs, or parachute webs, only do so once in their lives. The classic webs of orb weavers are often re-spun daily. But these webs, hammocks full of mist in the chamise brush, are the work of a spider's lifetime. What sacred baskets, these little homes. What a precious thing, a wild home, safe in the hands of the hills.

I pray that we begin to see, more and more clearly, with gathering strength,  in greater numbers, that we are not the only ones deserving of homes, and with a right to space and security. That in preserving the homes of the more-than-human people, we are also preserving a home for our own souls. As Jay Griffiths writes of the English poet John Clare, in her magnificent A Country Called Childhood (Kith in the UK)— "as a child he could feel safely nested only when the land around him was a safe nesting-place for every other kind of creature, knowing that the human mind can nest or make a home only when the ecology provides a home for all species." (p. 25)

Yes. Yes. (Thank goodness for Jay Griffiths.) And may we do what it takes to honor again all the nests, all the homes, all the quiet cat-lit dens of this world.

Mountain lion image caught on a Bay Area Puma Project Camera

Leaping Harvest Moon Leveret Letters

Today the first chapters of the Leveret Letters should be arriving in the post-boxes of little children, middle-school children and adults alike, from my very own village, Forest Knolls, to faraway Australia! Truly, it has been a deep joy to get this project out into the world. It took a tad longer than expected, due to summer vacation and slow sign-ups, and then a bit of a sea-change for me in the story plotting itself. But now Comfrey and Tin are well on their adventurous ways through a folkloric post-collapse Bay Area. I have to give great thanks to the books of Philip Pullman, which I reread this past August, and which re-informed my whole attitude and approach to the Leveret Letters. I hadn't read these books since I was 11, and, oh my, I was even more hooked this time.

Pullman writes with deep intelligence and strange, dark, living magic. He writes in some ways above the heads of his younger readers, but Lyra is the lifeline, the golden thread. As a girl of 11, I felt like Lyra in the world of His Dark Materials. A little overwhelmed, a little bit afraid, wholly and deeply and deliciously enchanted, and cosy too. As a woman in my mid-twenties, I was in deep awe of the whole world Pullman created, a world that holds the adult mind as well as the 10-year old. I threw my back out rather badly at the beginning of August, and these books kept me cheerful and enchanted as I was forced to lay about and try not to groan often at having to be cooped up!

I am by no means comparing the Leveret Letters to His Dark Materials. Oh my, no. Only saying that those books reminded me of the particular kind of magic that took me by the heart as a younger girl. These Leveret Letters are written for that girl, and for my partner Simon when he was a boy, and for my brother when he was a boy, and on, and on.

And I daresay, in the writing, Comfrey and Tin and Mallow and Myrtle quite swept me up in their world! It felt like warming my hands near a good fire, the writing. Or filling my arms with miraculous flowers. 

The adventures of Comfrey and Tin are very much rooted in the fireroads of the mountain I grew up near, the fireroads and oak-madrone-bay laurel ridges so near the great sprawling cities around the Bay, so near the very large state prison, San Quentin, on the left side of this photo, jutting out cream-colored into the bay. A strange place, this whole area, full of many unlikely juxtapositions and tensions and much beauty too.

So imagine the Greentwins rolling along a fireroad very similar to this one here, where my love and I took a birthday stroll a week past, our feet travelling the dusty trails we know so well.

Here is an excerpt from the very beginning of the first Leveret Letters, to whet appetites!

Prologue

Fir boughs reach out over the cart, its wooden wheels trundling and creaking on the wet dirt road. The mud and the wet air smell damp and sweet. Four female tule elk pull the cart, which is painted green with yellow stencils of weedy plants climbing in spires and vines and spiky leaves all over the sides. There are three glass windows tinted a reddish-rose, a silver chimney-pipe coming out one side and a balcony at the back, painted blue, with a driftwood railing. Most often one or two jackrabbits can be seen sitting on the balcony, grooming their white belly fur and smelling the breezes. Several pots full of herbs, of the weedy variety, are perched on the back balcony—the kinds of plants people in the City pull and poison from all sidewalk cracks and patios. Nettles, dandelions, plantain, chickweed and one blackberry bramble, which grows all over the back wall of the cart, staining it a permanent darkish-purple.

On this particular morning in late December, the morning of the winter solstice, the Greentwins are passing in this strange green caravan along a fireroad on a ridgetop that looks down at a large reservoir. The twins are conjoined at the hand, brother on the left, sister on the right. Just the forearm and hand are shared between them, no other parts of their bodies. It is their charge to track and tend the whole wild Country around the Bay. Some mornings, it is the brother who greets and gathers the yerba santa leaves, the plantain, the chamise, that grow thick beside the roads and trails, while his sister places her palms over the pawprints, scratches, burrows and scats left by animals. Other mornings they swap jobs, one tending to the animal life, the other the plant life.

 In either case, their shared hand is always used to make the Medicines. Dandelion infusion for a bobcat who ate several lizards who themselves had ingested some non-degradable pocket of insecticides. A comfrey poultice for the leg of a white egret who broke the bone while escaping a hungry coyote. Elderberry tinctures for a whole pond of frogs infected with a strange and sudden fever. Bucketloads of kelp for small oak trees struggling to grow again through the cracks of 300-year-old abandoned sidewalks. False Solomon’s seal ointments mixed with the petals of weedy St. John’s Wort flowers for the constricted or sore places in the landscape: paths that people feared to walk alone, places animals still avoided because of the memory of fast cars on the freeways of Before.

To the Wild Folk, the brother and sister in their green caravan are known as the Witchtwin Doctors of the Land. To the people of the Country who live in small hamlets called Camps, which are situated in meadows, clearings, or near marshes and creeks, they are not known as anything more important than a strange pair of Wild Folk, to be left Offerings like the rest. Children who catch sight of them call them the Greentwins, and pass on stories of every last glimpse of that green cart pulled by elk. People in the Camps do not know that the Witchtwin Doctors of the Land are the most important of all Wild Folk, and held apart. In the City, nobody knows about the Wild Folk, let alone the Greentwins. The Greentwins, of course, know more about all the people of City and Country combined than anyone would care to imagine.

Nobody is quite certain how far they range either, only that they seem to keep to the watersheds around the big blue-gray Bay that drains the rivers of the faraway Sierras, and in particular to those regions to the north of the Bay, where the hills and valleys hold the most wild creatures and flourishing plants. In the darkest nights when there is no moon, they also skirt the edges of the eighty-foot high metal Wall that seals the City off from everywhere else. There, they listen to the news from the rats and pigeons and crows, from the little patches of grass and old puddles of rain.

From the fireroad ridge where their cart now passes, its wheels crunching and squeaking through the mud, they can see the silhouette of the City, sharp-lined and tall, across the water. They stop in a wide patch of road where the view is the best and light a fire in the belly of the woodstove.

“Now listen, Mallow,” Angelica, the sister-twin, says, stroking the ears of a young hare-leveret who sits in her lap. Her brother Gabriel holds a big barn owl in his own lap, and Mallow, the young hare, eyes it in a panic. “She isn’t going to harm you. We’ve worked this out. She knows it’s for a larger good so she’s going to curb her appetite and carry you gently.”

“Abominable,” hisses the hare, blinking his dark eyes and lashes, kicking out his back legs. “This is what you did to my sister too? After all this time feeding and caring for us, and teaching us the language of humans, it’s for this? This blasphemy to the name of haredom? To allow oneself to be—” Mallow stutters here—“held by an Owl? An Enemy?”

“Calm down, Mallow,” says Gabriel in a stern tone, touching the hare with the hand he shares with his sister. This seems to soothe him slightly.

“You have to trust us,” says Angelica. “What would be the point of feeding you to an owl after all this time? Now listen. Let her carry you, and don’t fight. If you fight she’ll loose her balance and drop you. Now, the owl knows her way straight to the Cloister of Grace and Progress. She’s going to drop you there in a courtyard at the second hour past midnight. You are to find a boy named Tin. Tin is your charge.”

So if you'd like to run along and sign yourself or some young one you know up for the Leveret Letters, come along here and do so right here! Your subscription will start with the first chapters, and roll on accordingly, arriving at every full moon. A little magical escape....

Oh yes, and one more very important tidbit. My partner Simon is going to be doing little line illustrations for the Leveret Letters, and here is the first! I won't post them in the future, so they come as a surprise, but you can get a sense of his magical dark slightly haunting but also rather cosy style right here:

Simon Woodard (c) 2013

Marvelous, eh?