The fog brought me a gift this morning. When I woke in the pre-dawn stillness to relieve myself it lay over everything like cotton ticking. I stepped out onto the porch and held my hand in front of my face. I could barely see it, a splayed dark outline, the space between the fingers like webbing in the half-dark.
I went back to sleep and when I awoke again the fog was thinner. Not completely gone, but the sky had that bright gray look like there was blue up there somewhere. On the porch railing, next to a small potted cactus, was the head of a mountain lion. There was a dark, irregular stain on the wood underneath it and the fur around what was left of its neck was torn and bloody. Its eyes were open and its mouth was fixed in a snarl. As I watched, an ant crawled up the matted fur of its cheek, explored for a moment, and disappeared into a nostril.
Even in death, there was something magnificent about the creature and I thought of Egyptian gods in hieroglyphic profile. I looked beyond it to the sloping, rock-studded hill disappearing into the fog still hugging the ground.
I had been looking for that cat. In the last month I'd lost two sheep, and the day before, I'd come home to find my goat, Mama Cass, lying in a pool of blood, eviscerated and partly eaten. There was no sign, nothing to track--the killer left about as much spoor as the fog.
I walked to the head of the rickety wooden stairs and looked around, hoping to catch a glimpse of whoever or whatever had graced me with this offering, knowing I wouldn't. I had an urge to shout, just to hear my voice damped, absorbed into that mist like rain into dry dust. I didn't see anything I didn't expect--just the fog, the gentle contours of the hillside, and off to the left, just visible through the whiteness, my old, blue Chevy rustbucket sitting under a listing, tin-roofed lean-to.
Beyond the truck were the woods. They went on for miles, almost all the way to the ocean, uninterrupted except for patches of clearcut. I remember, years ago, flying low over the coastal range in a small private plane, seeing miles of deep, mysterious green scarred and broken by wide swaths of nothing. Dead zones. It made me want to cry. Not too much of that this far out in the boonies, but the lumber companies and the Feds managed to make a sorry mess of things before they stopped. Before everything stopped.
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