LION

After 3 years in the field and almost a year of editing, the book that I have been working on with Michael Forsberg is done. The finished product is something I am very proud to have been a part of. To introduce it to you, I am using one of the essays from the book as my musing, along with field notes from Michael Forsberg and one of his beautiful photographs. We have autographed copies available for any of you interested. Some of you may remember this Musing from last year. Now here it is in its final edit.

LION

Mike has really nifty equipment for taking pictures of things that sneak around at night. The camera is a Nikon, and it’s incased in a weatherproof box that’s 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 camouflage duct tape that he uses to make it all invisible.

In a motel room, laid out on the bed, the equipment looks very effective, high-tech, bulletproof. 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, without looking through a viewfinder, the possibility of getting a photograph of a night walker up to the quality that Mike demands 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’s common knowledge that they are experiencing a slight comeback in portions of their former range. But, in relative terms, mountain lions—like all predators—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 the animals’ 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 to 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 he is going to get a picture of one.

I’ve seen a few pictures of mountain lions, but they are not up to Mike’s 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. 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 as if he knows what he’s 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’ve 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 rainproof cases. Mike stands back and holds his hands out to visualize the background 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 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 speed 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 sore 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 120-pound mountain lion to our house cat, who could jump as high as the top of the refrigerator if you frightened him just right.

The fabled Obrien Lion

Here's what we were really looking for

I was in my own little world, crawling back and forth—the stunt double for an imaginary mountain lion that was starring in Mike’s imaginary movie. Somehow he never saw the humor in the situation, but a few weeks later I got a wordless e-mail from him. It was nothing but a couple of pictures. They were both lit perfectly, and the backdrops were identical, hazy and aesthetically exquisite. The first picture was of 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.

Michael Forsberg
Field Journal: Blue Creek
Nebraska Sandhills

February 21, 2008

6:30 pm Whenever I come off the high flat and drop down into the Blue Creek Valley, I can usually spot the glow of the Peterson ranch house welcoming me. I have been friends with Myron and Kay Peterson for a dozen years, but tonight, I’m not in their warm house. I’m in a small blind, a one-person bivy shelter that I’ve anchored in tall grass along the edge of a high bank on their land, looking down on Blue Creek. It’s overcast and cold, but a lot of animals are coming to the water this evening.

A half hour before sunset, four whitetailed deer come trotting down a grassy draw and into a ring of trees. A coyote that had been howling earlier finally shows up, following a scent along the meander of the creek. At one point it’s so close I can hear each footfall crunch in the snow.

At twilight the cackling Canadas come in. The smallest race of Canada geese, they’re not much bigger than a mallard, but they come roaring in like a squadron of jets. Side slipping overhead, they tilt their wings to dump air quickly and lose altitude on their way to the dark waters of the creek.

8:00 pm It’s been quiet the last hour, but I just heard a solitary trumpet from a swan far downstream. I sit up and peer out the hole in the blind. Finally, I can just make out six huge white shapes descending like angels in the night.

1:10 am Nothing but darkness now. I can hear the occasional plaintive notes of the swans, the murmurings of geese, and the chatter and whistle of ducks that together rise and fall throughout the night on the roost. Around midnight there had been a particularly large splash and a flurry of wings, but by the time I sat up and looked out of a small hole in the blind, the only thing I could see was the Big Dipper balancing on the eastern horizon, its reflection shimmering in the water from the commotion.

6:30 am Slept hard till about 6 am. When I wake up, frost coats everything inside the blind, and fog lies so thick on the water that it turns the world to gray. Then, for an instant the fog brightens and glows pink. In the half-light of dawn, three trumpeters appear out of the foggy haze. They are surrounded by geese, bathing and drying their wings, preparing for their morning flight.