Fraidy Cat

     More than fifty years ago, I was perched on a barstool in Wisdom, Montana when a stubby older fellow in a hard hat limped through the door, climbed up on the stool next to me, ordered a double shot of Jim Beam with a beer back, looked me in the eye and asked “How you doin’?”

    I allowed as I was fair to middling and asked why he was so stove-up. He launched into a tale about a thieving pack rat that was robbing doodads from his mining partner and how he had laid a trap for the varmint at the end of his bunk, waited most of one night with a pistol, then blew away the rat, sure enough, right along with the big toe off his right foot. He ended the story with “You never learn younger.”

    That chunk of advice has rattled around my brain ever since. It has only been recently, as I have grown impossibly old, that it has begun to make sense. For instance, I have discovered that I am afraid of alligators and mountain lions. 

     There is no objective reason for the fear of alligators. The only time I ever saw a live one was at Reptile Gardens in Rapid City, South Dakota, where my stepsister was hired to “wrestle” alligators twice per hour. This amounted to her in a two-piece swimsuit leaping on the back of a toothless trained critter and flipping it over a few times. Nevertheless, when a gator appears on the television, I get the heebie-jeebies.

     The fear of mountain lions has basis in experience. It can be traced to a remote cabin in the Eel River country of Northern California where my daughter and I were given the task of watching over an opium poppy grow and a pen of chickens while the gardener went back to New Jersey to attend his father’s funeral. 

     We had a blue mongrel named Patsy who was too cautious to work cows but was quite good at barking, rolling in horse turds, and keeping us safe from attack by chipmunks. Patsy’s choice of perfume made her an outdoor dog. 

    It rained for a week, day and night. We were trapped in the cabin except for the fifteen drenching minutes a day it took to gather eggs and feed Patsy and the chickens. My kid clobbered me at every board game we played, so after the fourth day we retreated to opposite corners of the living room where she read Nancy Drew and drew pictures of horses while I did what I do best, pretty much nothing. Even today, when I am accused of being sedentary, I remind the person who tries to pry me out of my lounger that the Buddha was not a jogger. He sat below the Bodhi tree until his skin started to fall off then he went back to partying, and that my skin is still in reasonably good shape. 

     One night the rain let up and the stars came out. We were in our bunks about midnight when Patsy, out in the yard, came uncorked, yapping thirty yards out into the brush then running back to the porch, then repeating the act. I yarded my butt out of bed, put some pants and t-shirt on, stepped into my moccasins, grabbed a flashlight, and went out into the night to see what in tarnation was happening. 

     Patsy led the way. The yard was fenced with four strands of barbwire which she maneuvered much more gracefully than I. Beyond it was a dense willow thicket with a maze of livestock paths tromped into the mud and where, when we turned a blind corner, Patsy led me directly to a cougar straddling a fresh deer kill. 

     If you have ever heard an aggravated Siamese cat, imagine that voice turned up to eleven on a big amplifier. When my flashlight hit the lion’s eyes, it snarled and howled to remind me and Patsy that we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Patsy abandoned the quest immediately and scooted toward the house. I followed as quickly as I could, walking backward and pointing the flashlight in the general direction of any attack that might occur. 

     I do not remember going back over or through the yard fence, or up the stairs onto the porch, but I was able to get through the door without being clawed or eaten. Stinky Patsy had become a house dog. As an indicator of how the experience scared the peewadding out me, I set the dead bolt on the door, in case the lion had learned how to operate a doorknob with its teeth or paws. You never learn younger.