The Last Word On Nothing

I received the unusual gift this season of a stuffed mountain lion. On any other day I’d politely turn it down, but it was a thing to contend with and now it is perched in the den, a Christmas gift with its clawed catcher’s mitt of a right forepaw extended for a swipe. The pose is not serene, nose curled in offense, mouth displayed half-hissing. Putting this creature, six feet long from nose to tail, in the living room didn’t seem fair to our house cat, nor to the poor puma who I’d rather not have to watch us eat and watch movies. It went instead to the den where I write.

My stepdad, an adventurous gent, had shown me this strange creature years ago in a house in the woods abandoned by a divorce and left to rot. A realtor had told him about it and he saw the taxidermy through the window. When he took me there, it was a prank. He wanted to show me a den with a mountain lion in it. Those were the words he used, not a lie, and my mind ran with a snow drift framing a nest of tree roots where I imagined its entrance and exit strewn with sticks and dabs of mud and blood.

What I took my stepdad to mean was that he’d found an active den, not with an actual puma in it, but with fresh sign, maybe a kill dragged into a shelter. When he led me down behind the abandoned house, I thought how ingenious for a mountain lion to den among construction piles and pieces of equipment covered with half-rotted tarps behind a big log cabin. Who would bother it here? Snow three-feet-deep would have been good for tracks but I saw none, thinking the cat must have been gone from here for weeks.

He opened a back door and let me into rooms used as storage, the living room bearing a giant elk head with a passel of antlers. He said to follow him and now I thought the strangest things. There must an crate, a den made of wooden pallets, a hiding place for hinds and quarters of deer the cat dragged in through maybe a broken open window. I love it when animals use our half-wrought intentions as shelters. I once found the dried afterbirth of a puma who have birth in a cliff dwelling in central Arizona, and it pleased me to know that our species could offer something to their species. As we walked through the house, around drywall stacks and a circular saw under a shawl of dust, I looked behind cabinets and down halls, wondering how strange it would be to see a mountain lion striding from room to room.

My stepdad stood back to let me enter the den where I saw a puma mounted on a table top, standing on a tableau of fake rock. A mountain lion in its den, get it? I laughed out loud. You got me. A clutter of mule deer antlers lay on the fake rock as if implying the cat were somehow caught at its kill site. The taxidermy was decent, nothing ill-proportioned about it, entry wound of a bullet invisible. Mice had chewed at the tips of its ears, but otherwise the monstrosity was in good condition. In about ten years, it wouldn’t be. It needed to be cleaned and sheltered, not left out in a work zone.

After he showed me the stuffed cat, I talked for years about stealing it, liberating it. To do what, I didn’t know. I hadn’t thought it through. Put it in the forest maybe, let its fur peel and fall, whiskers dropping like needles. Junking a plastic corpse in the woods seemed grotesque, though, and turning its remains into performance art gave me the shivers. Give it to a friend, I thought, and I know a few who’d relish the irony of having it in their house, but that would have been a cheap handoff, making a joke out of a joke. 

What I got out of my stepdad was that he made arrangements with the house’s owner, and it had been killed somewhere in the canyon country of western Colorado, past the mountains, but not yet into Utah. It was a legal kill, he said, meaning it wasn’t shot in truck headlights or taken off a golf course. He’d elaborately planned this whole thing, as if saying, you wanted it, so here it is.

On Christmas night, our house cat wouldn’t come inside. My wife at first said we should put it up in the living room, bringing out the tape measure to pick out a spot for all to see, but in evening light she noticed it was more menacing than she’d remembered, its false, plastic tongue curled into the start of a hiss, glass eyes fixed on the colorful sparkle of our Christmas tree as if wanting to kill it.  When I unwrapped the gift, brought into the house on a ladder carried like a divan, and packaged in box cardboard, packing tape, a blanket, and some wrapping paper, my wife had put a hand on it amazed. She was puzzled by its beauty, running her hands through its fir. She thought this was the right place for it, not shut up and dusty in an abandoned house. It didn’t seem right in the living room, however, as if we’d taunt it with our daily activities. It needed a more intimate space, a den of its own. 

My son and I hoisted it up a ladder to a loft overlooking the room where I write and keep my books and a small day bed for napping. Now I puzzle how to think about this stiff beast. I wanted it and now here it is, a lion in my den, a cat who once purred and is now frozen over my head between fight and flight. It is a horror, a wonder, and as I write, I imagine its glass-eyed gaze on the back of my neck, good for a deadline, and for a dead lion.

Photo by Daiva Chesonis