a matter of fact now I think of it the chickens weren't in it either. It might have been quite different if they had been. May had quit keeping chickens after old Mrs. Walter died. It was just her all alone there, and Rosie and the cats down in the barn, and nobody else within sight or sound of the old farm. We were in our house up the hill only in the summer, and Jim lived in town, those years. What time of year it was I don't know, but I imagine the grass still green or just turning gold. And May was in the house, in the kitchen, where she lived entirely unless she was asleep or outdoors, when she heard this noise.
Now you need May herself, sitting skinny on the edge of the irrigation tank, seventy or eighty or ninety years old, nobody knew how old May was and she had made sure they couldn't find out, opening her pleated lips and letting out this noise -- a huge, awful yowl, starting soft with a nasal hum and rising slowly into a snarling gargle that sank
away into a sobbing purr.... It got better every time she told the
story.
"It was some meow," she said.
So she went to the kitchen door, opened it, and looked out Then she shut the kitchen door and went to the kitchen window to look out, because there was a mountain lion under the fig tree.
Puma, cougar, catamount; Felis concdlor, the shy, secret, shadowy lion of the New World, four or five feet long plus a yard of black-tipped tail, weighs about what a woman weighs, lives where the deer live from Canada to Chile, but always shyer, always fewer; the color of dry leaves, dry grass.
There were plenty of deer in the Valley in the forties, but no mountain lion had been seen for decades anywhere near where people lived. Maybe way back up in the canyons; but Jim, who hunted, and knew every deer- trail in
182 JT BUFFALO GALS
the hills, had never seen a lion. Nobody had, except May, now, alone in her kitchen.
"I thought maybe it was sick," she told us. "It wasn't acting right I don't think a lion would walk right into the yard like that if it was feeling well. If I'd still had the chickens it'd be a different story maybe! But it just walked around some, and then it lay down there," and she points between the fig tree and the decrepit garage. "And then after a while it kind of meowed again, and got up and come into the shade right there." The fig tree, planted when the house was built, about the time May was born, makes a great, green, sweet-smelling shade. "It just laid there looking around. It wasn't well," says May.
She had lived with and looked after animals all her life; she had also earned her living for years as a nurse.
"Well, I didn't know exactly what to do for it So I put out some water for it It didn't even get up when I come out the door. I put the water down there, not so close to it that we'd scare each other, see, and it kept watching me, but it didn't move. After I went back in it did get up and tried to drink some water. Then it made that kind of meowowow. I do believe it come here because it was looking for help. Or just for company, maybe."
The afternoon went on, May in the kitchen, the lion under the fig tree.
But down in the barnyard by the creek was Rosie the cow. Fortunately the gate was shut, so she could not come wandering up to the house and meet the lion; but she would be needing to be milked, come six or seven o'clock, and that got to worrying May. She also worried how long a sick mountain lion might hang around, keeping her shut in the house. May didn't like being shut in.
"I went out a time or two, and went shoo!"
Eyes shining amidst fine wrinkles, she flaps her thin arms at the lion. "Shoo! Go on home now! "
May's LionA. 183
But the silent wild creature watches her with yellow eyes and does not stir.
"So when I was talking to Miss Macy on the telephone, she said it might have rabies, and I ought to call the sheriff. I was uneasy then. So finally I did that, and they come out, those county police, you know. Two carloads."
Her voice is dry and quiet
"I guess there was nothing else they knew how to do. So they shot it"
She looks off across the field Old Jim, her brother, used to plow with Prince the horse and irrigate with the water from this tank. Now wild oats and blackberry grow there. In another thirty years it will be a rich man's vineyard, a tax write-off.
"He was seven feet long all stretched out, before they took him off.
And so thin! They all said, Well, Aunt May, I guess you were scared there! I guess you were some scared! ' But I wasn't I didn't want him shot. But I didn't know what to do for him. And I did need to get to Rosie."
I have told this true story which May gave to us as truly as I could, and now I want to tell it as fiction, yet without taking it from her rather to give it back to her, if I can do so. It is a tiny part of the history of the Valley, and I want to make it part of the Valley outside history. Now the field that the poor man plowed and the rich man harvested lies on the edge of a little town, houses and workshops of timber and fieldstone standing among almond, oak, and eucalyptus trees;
and now May is an old woman with a name that means the month of May: Rains End. An old woman with a long, wrinkled-pleated upper lip, she is living alone for the summer in her summer place, a meadow a mile or so up in the hills above the little town. Sinshan. She took her cow Rose with her, and since Rose tends to wander she keeps her on a long tether down by the tiny creek, and moves her
184ABUFFALO GALS
into fresh grass now and then. The summerhouse is what they call a nine-pole house, a mere frame of poles stuck in the ground -- one of them is a live digger-pine sapling -- with stick and matting'walls, and mat roof and floors. It doesn't rain in the dry season, and the roof is just for shade. But the house and its little front yard where Rains End has her camp stove and clay oven and matting loom are well shaded by a fig tree that was planted there a hundred years or so ago by her grandmother.
Rains End herself has no grandchildren; she never bore a child, and her one or two marriages were brief and very long ago. She has a nephew and two grandnieces, and feels herself an aunt to all children, even when they are afraid of her and rude to her because she has got so ugly with old age, smelling as musty as a chickenhouse. She considers it natural for children to shrink away from somebody part way dead, and knows that when they're a little older and have got used to her they'll ask her for stories. She was for sixty years a member of the Doctors Lodge, and though she doesn't do curing any more people still ask her to help with nursing sick children, and the children come to long for the kind, authoritative touch of her hands when she bathes them to bring a fever down, or changes a dressing or combs out bed-tangled hair with witch hazel and great patience.
So Rains End was just waking up from an early afternoon nap in the heat of the day, under the matting roof, when she heard a noise, a huge, awful yowl that started soft with a nasal hum and rose slowly into a
snarling gargle that sank away into a sobbing purr.... And she got up
and looked out from the open side of the house of sticks and matting, and saw a mountain lion under the fig tree. She looked at him from her house; he looked at her from his.
And this part of the story is much the same: the old woman; the lion; and, down by the creek, the cow.
May's Lion "A.185
It was hot Crickets sang shrill in the yellow grass on all the hills and canyons, in all the chaparral. Rains End filled a bowl with water from an unglazed jug and came slowly out of the house. Halfway between the house and the lion she set the bowl down on the dirt She turned and went back to the house.
The lion got up after a while and came and sniffed at the water. He lay down again with a soft, querulous groan, almost like a sick child, and looked at Rains End with the yellow eyes that saw her in a different way than she had ever been seen before.
She sat on the matting in the shade of the open part of her house and
did some mending When she looked up at the lion she sang under her breath, tunelessly; she wanted to remember the Puma Dance Song but could only remember bits of it, so she made a song for the occasion:
You are there, lion. You are there, lion....
As the afternoon wore on she began to worry about going down to milk Rose. Unmilked, the cow would start
