Mike Forsberg has really nifty equipment for taking pictures of things that sneak around at night. The camera is a Nikon and it’s encased in a weather proof box that is connected to a laser trigger by little cables. He has a bunch of lights and an array of mounts and tripods that can be used to anchor all this equipment to trees, or rocks, or the earth herself. He has camouflaged duct tape that he uses to make it all invisible.
In a motel room, laid out on bed, the equipment looks very effective, high tech, bullet proof. Mike loves it and caresses it as if it were one of his children. He believes in the potential of this technology. Of course, I am skeptical. The things that sneak around at night are professionals at detecting strange objects, unfamiliar smells, things that go snap in the dark. It seems to me that getting a photograph of a night walker that is up to the quality that Mike demands, without looking through a view finder, is a real long shot. At this point I don’t know the sort of night walker he has in mind. “So what are we after? An elk? A badger?”
“No, no,” he waives my guess away and goes back to fiddling with his gear. “A lion,” he says. “This stuff is to photograph a mountain lion.”
Now, I’ve spent most of my life outdoors on the Great Plains and I’ve never even caught a glimpse of a mountain lion, let alone seen one long enough to take a picture. Of course, it is common knowledge that they are experiencing a slight comeback in portions of their former range. But, in relative terms, mountain lions – like all predators ñ were never plentiful. Its simple math: you need a lot of prey species to feed a single predator. All the big predators were killed off by humans who saw their normal activities as a competitive threat. On the Great Plains, mountain lions ate mostly deer and it took a lot of deer to sustain even a small population. When the settlers killed the deer, the lions turned to cattle, and particularly horses. In the cowboy culture of the Great Plains, eating horses is a capital offence. Mountain lions have been on the edge of oblivion ever since that first horse was found partly devoured, but Mike still has faith that is going to get a picture of one.
I’ve seen a few pictures of mountain lions, but they are not up to Mikes standards. The pictures I’ve seen are mostly caramel colored blurs taken at great distances. “I want to photograph one’s eyes,” Mike says. He wants to see what’s inside.
The next morning we’re packing back into a not so remote ridge lined with western red cedar trees. I check the hair on the back of my neck and find no indication of a lion observing me. Mike is looking down at the ground like he knows what he is doing and I’m thinking that he couldn’t track a locomotive to the train station. But I’m quiet. I am only a porter in this expedition; my lack of faith excludes me from participating in tactical decisions.
Mike stops and looks at a small outcropping of limestone. “I’ll bet they walk right along here,” he says. It looks like a million other places I have walked. There are no tracks, no exotic scent, no mysterious aura whatsoever. He’s trying to talk the big cats back into existence, trying to create them through the power of positive thinking.
The spot seems chosen at random but I’m supportive. I carefully unload wires and batteries and electric lights and rain-proof cases. Mike stands back and holes his hands out to visualize the back ground of his imaginary picture. His belief strikes me as a little sad, but I do as I’m told. I uncoil the cables. Affix strobe lights to trees with wire ties. Mike picks his spot and lines up the laser eyes that will trigger the camera that is screwed solidly to a stout tripod. It is all very substantial and I try a joke about how large a cat it would take to swallow the Nikon.
The joke is barely acknowledged because Mike is lying on the ground, sighting through the camera to the exact spot where the phantom cat will appear, the precise juncture where it must cross the laser trigger. “Could you crawl through there?” He points, “Right where the lion is going to come?”
I thought for an instant about what he had just said. “Crawl through where the lion is going to come.” And I was thinking: On my hands and knees, vulnerable? But what the hell, Mike was so focused on what he was doing that I went ahead and pretended that I was a mountain lion. I crawled through the invisible plane and the lights and camera snapped. “Again,” Mike said. “A little different angle.” He was making tiny adjustments. “Just crawl through about the sped of a strolling lion.”
He was serious so I crawled through the laser again. More lights and snapping. A few adjustments and I crawled through again, and again, and again. We’d been there several hours and Mike, wrapped up in focus, angles, background, and composition was paying no attention to me. I crawled through again.
“Step over that little branch,” he said. “Raise one foot.” The foot he was talking about was my hand. It was soar from the strolling and my knees too were beginning to hurt. I stepped over the branch, snarled, and took a playful swipe at the camera as it snapped. I knew there would never be a mountain lion caught in this situation but I imagined how high it might leap if the lights snapped on and the shutter clicked. It cracked me up to compare a hundred and twenty pound mountain lion to our house cat that could jump as high as the top of the refrigerator if you frightened him just right.
I was in my own little world, crawling back and forth ñ the stunt double for an imaginary mountain lion that was staring in Mike’s imaginary movie. Somehow he never saw the humor in the situation but a few weeks later I got a wordless email from him. It was nothing but a couple pictures. They were both lit perfectly and the backdrops were identical, hazy, and aesthetically exquisite. The first picture was me, crawling through the laser, one hand swiping at the camera and an inane snarl on my face. The second picture was of a mountain lion, moving out of the same backdrop that I had crawled through a dozen times. There was no silliness on its face, no sense of being startled by any of it. This cat was simply moving through, back from the foggy edge of extinction and into the bright scrutiny of the modern world.