Early Morning Fright

I enjoy getting up before the sun does. The quiet of the early mornings is my time for prayerful contemplation, for catching up on reading or paying those pesky bills that show up each month, or spending time in front of the computer screen typing out the stories that post to the blog.

I like to open the curtains to bid the night goodbye and  welcome the birds that are also beginning their day, to watch the heifers in the field behind the house, to see if the cats are mousing out in the hedgerow.

Half the time I am not quite awake when I throw the curtains open during the still gloomy darkness. If I am wide awake may not have my glasses on which is basically the same thing since I can’t focus when half asleep or without my spectacles, the world is a blurry, oozy scene either way.

The other morning when I opened the blinds, I did happen to be both awake and wearing my glasses, so when I looked out into the eastern side of the bull pen I was startled by what looked like a very large cat-like critter. We do have mountain lions scattered around the forest around the area but they are very rare indeed. The last sighting that I recall was about eight miles up the road toward Vernonia but that was nearly ten years ago now. Further toward the Pacific Ocean about twenty miles away, one was spotted out in the deep forest near Camp 18, but that has also been quite a few years ago.

Bears are seen once and a while but have never spotted any closer than orchards or lone apple trees set quite away from structures along Timber Road. And this creature out in the bull pen did not look like a bear, it was too sleek and had a long swooping tail, but it did not look like a mountain lion, cougar or puma. It was too big for any domesticated cat, even too big to be a bob-cat. This critter was much too thick and too long bodied to fit any profile.

I grabbed my camera and started snapping pictures through the window since I was afraid that if I tried going outside the ‘thing’ would be gone before I could get proof of our impending invasion.

The first few clicks gave me nothing but dark blurs since it was such and early time. I kept snapping for fear that I would miss the whole thing. Slowly as the sky began to lighten I got a couple of pics that were good enough to see the outline clearly. It dawned on me that the creature had not moved a muscle since I started documenting it’s existence.

That was when I realized that the critter I had been stalking for the frantic moments of daybreak was a trick of the light that had begun to filter through the trees and grass to highlight a stump of a tree that had been cut down years ago. Within minutes the scary critter was gone as the rotting stump showed itself, by the next morning the growing grass around the stump obscured the scene and it did not look at all like a stalking critter.

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