This is a Digital Potlatch presentation from way back, October, 2002, to be exact. I published it originally on the first FarrFeed blog hosted at Salon.com. We lived in a different place then, which will be obvious from the reading. You may want to think of this as a Halloween presentation, but every word is true!
Holy shit, what was THAT?
Our Taos apartment is a single-story building on the edge of a wooded vacant lot, with the back of the place hard up against a patch of woods and brush at the rear of a large adjacent residential property. Along the front and east side of our unit runs a high latilla fence, from which our cat and other critters are able to leap onto the roof and frequently do. The roof is quite solid and we rarely hear anything moving up there.
Some months ago the landlord contracted for painting work on the adjoining units. Due to restricted access at the other end because of a nearby chain-link fence, the painters used ladders to climb onto our section of roof and make their way to the job site. Even the footsteps of full-grown men walking across the roof were all but inaudible.
Last night I was peacefully watching a PBS documentary when all of a sudden something went THUMP rumble thumpetty thump above my head. What the — ?! I turned down the TV and listened, and there it went again: BUMP bumpetty thump bump, and the remarkable thing was how much ground it covered, from one side of the ceiling to the other. Whatever was up there was leaping back and forth in large bounds, not skittering or hippetty-hopping around, and it was heavy. I was actually scared, though I didn’t know why I should be, and looked over at the cat, who had been sleeping peacefully on the love seat: he was now sitting bolt upright, eyes WIDE OPEN, his ears flattened back against his head!
I looked out the back window in the kitchen with a flashlight. Sure enough, the bird feeder I had hanging back there was all askew. That damned skunk! I said to myself, but was it? I’ve never seen a skunk climb a fence, so maybe a raccoon had been messing with the thing. Did that mean a raccoon was on the roof? Why not? — only whatever was up there now had moved across the width of the apartment in two or three jumps. Okay, time to go outside and see for myself.
The only thing going through my mind was that I didn’t want whatever was there to jump down onto me from the roof, but where had I gotten this idea? Feeling more frightened than I had any apparent reason to be, I turned on the outside light: not a thing visible in front. After opening the front door, I bolted through the opening and ran to the end of the sidewalk by the gate, then whirled around and spotlighted the roof from end to end: nothing! But something was there. My body knew it.
After a quick look around to make sure there was nothing in the yard, I aimed the flashlight back at the edge of the roof. The Pueblo-style fake adobe construction of our place means that the actual surface of the roof is behind a low rounded wall or parapet perhaps 18 to 24 inches high, and it was along this raised edge that I shone the beam. AHA! But what was I looking at? I held the light steady this time and made out two large tan-colored ears on either side of a patch of brownish hair. Oho, a raccoon, I thought. But how large are raccoon ears from 30 feet away? And whatever it was wasn’t moving. I held the light as high over my head as I could and craned my neck, but all I could see were the two ears and a bit of head. The rest of the animal was hidden behind the wall, of course, but facing me directly and keeping perfectly still. I thought to reach down for some gravel to toss up onto the roof and did so, but when I looked up again, the ears were gone!
I was still scared and recognized the feeling.
It was the same thing I’d experienced about a year and a half ago hiking in the upper reaches of San Cristobal Canyon as the sun was going down. Less than a quarter of a mile from our rented adobe was a spot under some tall Ponderosa pines where something had literally shredded a coyote. You know the way a cat or a hawk will pull the feathers off a bird to get at the meat? That was what had happened to the coyote, only there wasn’t any carcass, just a bushel-sized pile of what I took to be coyote fur strewn all about. I was certain this was the site of a cougar kill, of course. I had even found what I was reasonably sure was a footprint in the snow, though it was hard to tell. There were mountain lions in the area, in fact. A couple of years before, a leon had pounced on the village drunk, they told me in the post office. The thing was, the animal had only knocked him down and then run off without doing any harm! Laughing, the postmistress said that the big cat had probably left him alone because he smelled so bad.
My body knew what was on the roof. Cougar sightings in town have to be exceedingly rare, but my body knew. Bears show up several times a year, so why not a lion? San Cristobal is 20 minutes up the road. Sure, it could have been a raccoon — or something chasing a raccoon. But I know the feeling, or rather my body does. There was something overhead with teeth and claws that sat and watched me till I bent down to grab some stones.
It’s in the genes, I tell you. Go hiking in the forest, come upon a pile of fur, and see if you don’t find yourself looking up.
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