Belonging to the Desert

The ocotillo cacti were sprouting sweet little red-petal flowers from the tips of their spiny exertions that day, an unfortunate hilarity in that my current task was to follow little red pieces of tape the rangers had left to mark the route until the path could be completed. I was on the Arizona Trail, an 819-mile trek across the desert, and now staring at an expanse of little red things, not exactly lost again, but losing sunlight and patience. That was when I saw her. In front of me, about 100 feet away, stood a mountain lion with something dangling from her mouth. I froze, not with fear but in fascination. She was everything beyond words that I sought in the desert. After an eternal moment, a moment the size of the birth of the world, she relaxed and went on her way, directly crossing the path in front of me. After deciding that what I had seen was not one of my exhaustion-induced hallucinations, I continued forward, nervously scanning the direction she had gone. There was maybe 15 minutes of sunlight left, my headlamp was dead, and I would have to make camp. Forcing myself to believe without evidence in her disappearance, I continued, only to nearly trip over something new on the path. At my feet lay an Arizona Ringtail, a weasel-ish desert creature, not stiffened from death but heading there rapidly. Blood stained the area around its mouth, but I saw no bite marks or other injuries. I creatively entertained two possible scenarios that I could now be confronting. The first was that this was her dinner; she had dropped it in her “escape” from me and now saw me as competition for it due to the fact that I was standing almost on top of it. The other possibility was that she had left it there, on purpose, perhaps as an offering of kinship or compassion to a clearly suffering foreigner. I understood that it was a potentially dangerous self-deception to decide the latter was true, but it won in the deliberation and I then had to figure out what I was supposed to do with it. I realize it is true that a real desert queen would have eaten that Ringtail. She would have cleaned the skin and fashioned a headband out of it with cactus needles. But due to my limitations of character at the time, all I could think of to do was to thank her for the food and leave her some of my special slow-cooked dehydrated beef chili. I know that it was a pathetic gesture, but it was the best I could come up with in the time I had. It was already true that I would have to pitch my tent less than 100 feet away from this grand altar of offerings. Of course, I didn’t sleep, but for the first time, it wasn’t the fear of drunken hunters or hungry bears that kept me awake.