Opinion: Cat Tales

So at first all I saw was a pair of gray legs as they hopped off the trail into the brush.

I put my hand out for the boy to to stop and eased around the corner. I didn’t hear a lot of brush busting like something was running away and I knew it wasn’t bear, which means it might have been a wolf, but based on the size, I was thinking more coyote or the biggest snowshoe hare I’d ever seen, because now that I think about it, it didn’t have a tail.

(Unless a wolf or coyote has been in a world of trouble, as you know, they generally have a tail. A big ol’ bushy one.)

I got around the corner and took a step up the bank. A pair of eyes looked back at me.

A lynx.

I have been roaming the hills of Glacier National Park now going on 24 summers and have never seen a lynx in the park. The last lynx (or I suppose I should say lynxes) was about 19 years ago. I packed up the boy and Olivia, my middle daughter and we went to go get up a Christmas tree up the Reservoir.

It was snowing those big fat December flakes and we found a nice tree about 100 yards from the road.

I kept seeing these big old cat tracks but didn’t think much of it, since I didn’t actually see a cat. After we found the tree I left the kids to stand there while I went and got the saw. The road was only 50 yards away. I know, it could have been a mountain lion, but I wasn’t thinking … I had only lived her a couple of years, plus a lion wouldn’t eat my kids right before Christmas would it?

Ha!

At any rate, we cut the tree down without incident and dragged it back to the truck and that’s when three lynx — a mother and two kits, came out of the brush and sat down in the road.

I had my $5,000 camera with me and big old 400 mm lens and got what I thought at the time were pretty good photos.

Of course a $5,000 camera back then was all of 4 megapixels, which meant, if you were lucky, you could get an decent 8 by 10 out of it, but not much else. (The camera was awful in retrospect. It had a bad habit of turning trees purple.)

We still use those old lynx photos anytime we have a lynx story.

But now I have a fresh set.

This lynx encounter lasted all of 30-40 seconds, but I was still able to get a few different views of it before it hopped off into the brush.

These shots were taken with a 20 megapixel camera, so I hope they last another 20 years or so.

Have a good week.