...the mountain lion sizes me up and down, closing the space between us. The face says nothing, while the tail twitches like a lie detector.
A powerful voice in me says, Run, before it gets closer! Find shelter, safety, hide! The voice wants the lion magically gone, it wants to flee to my pack and bunch into a tiny ball. The lion is pushing my button, scrambling the innards of my instinct. Never have I felt fight or flight like this. My only choice, the message going to the thick of the muscle in my legs, is to run. Get as much space between me and danger as possible. The animal is too big, too wild. I've got to get out of here before it's too late.
What I do, instead, is not move. My eyes lock onto the mountain lion. I hold firm to my ground and do not even intimate that I will back off. If I run, it is certain. I will have a mountain lion all over me. If I give it my back, I will only briefly feel its weight on me against the ground. The canine teeth will open my vertebrae without breaking a single bone, like thumbing between pieces of paper.
Some of the larger animals push their faces toward an attacking lion. It can't get anything at the face. It has got to have a clear shot at the neck, from behind or the sides. It tries to intimidate and push the panic button with this kind of doubtless approach so the prey will turn. When the prey runs, the kill is sealed.
The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild, Craig Childs
And yet, and yet . . . Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.
Other Inquisitions, Jorge Luis Borges
What looks playful could be desperation. So late in the season, the bear is diving deep for one of the few remaining salmon carcasses at the bottom of the lake.
Treadwell keeps filming the bear with a strange persistence.
And all of a sudden, this.
Is Amie trying to get out of the shot? Did Treadwell wait till his last tape to put her in his film?
And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food.
But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend, a savior.
Amie Huguenard was screaming.
Grizzly Man Script, Werner Herzog