Sitting, leaning against the warmth of the tree my eyes grow heavy.  Suddenly, but gracefully, a Bobcat silently scampers past me.  The fur on its feet allowing it to glide across the rocks and weeds like a ghost, like a whisper, something older then time.  She does not see me.  Instinct in her eyes, she slowly walks a small circle before resting under a tree, only yards ahead of me.  She’s so close I can hear her breath, revealing the length of her trek.  The wind blows and she closes her eyes against its unyielding course.  The light snow collects on her fur for a moment, and melts away leaving a dark damp spot across her coat.  She opens her eyes, raises her head slowly, and gazes down the hill and across the desolate field below to the horizon.  She sees something, but looks out towards it with indifference, with no concern.

I try my hardest not to move, but feel no sense of fear.  She fascinates me.  How I long to acquire her native feelings, her virtues, her simplicities that stem from a savage life, and to find in them a pleasure of suffering, a novelty of uncertainty that can only be found in a tireless pursuit of adventure.  Her realities however cannot be mine, for even in this place my ponderings and reflections still influence my human perceptions. I always remember. Reflecting on times of joy to great to describe, and times of grief upon which I dare not dwell.  It’s the essence of her instinctive life that draws me to watch her, a weaved sense of jealousy and pity for her inherited feral routine.  She stands up slowly, still unconcerned, and makes her way lazily down the lonesome bank, a calm course of existence under a turbulent western sky.

By: Michael (me)

DARK SPRUCE FOREST frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The

trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of the frost, and they seemed to lean toward each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness- a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It

was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.

- Jack London - Call of the Wild -