Wild Things

The greatest part of my childhood was spent living next to a four acre lake in an unincorporated area near Independence, Missouri. There I was first exposed to wild things that became just as natural to me as the other twenty or so kids that shared my idyllic up bringing. Nothing was unusual about how or where we lived according to us.

Even when I was much older and the army allowed me to go on camping trips to Germany, Italy, and Panama, living and communing with the great out doors, nothing seemed that special, I had done it all before.

When I moved to the Alaskan tundra and lived in Eskimo villages next to the Bering Sea, along the banks of the Yukon, and seventy mile north of the Arctic Circle, all seemed normal enough.

I have seen almost all the wild animals in their natural habitat Alaska has to offer, minus a Polar Bear, encountered enough wild things in the jungles of Panama to realize that is where they need to stay, and knew almost on a first name basis all the animals that called my four acre lake theirs.

The odd, some might say sad, thing is that I never really was impressed by any of it. Hiking and camping was just a hazard of the military trade and un-caged animals were just things to be avoided.

However now on the front side of retirement I am beginning to develop an appreciation of our four legged and legless friends, albeit some what grudgingly perhaps.

I live in a gated community that butts up to the desert. I am not sure if the fence and gate are to keep the wild things from wondering in or keep the old people from wondering out. I don’t know if I have just never noticed before or if there is something going on in the far horizon, but animals seem to be popping up all over the place and they don’t seem to want to leave me alone with my nightly Rey Del Mundo and Grand Marnier.

There is a rattle snake that insists on sharing my cactus garden, a desert frog that leaps across my patio each night followed by another sort of long black looking snake that I have yet been able to identify. Seldom seen, except by me it appears, is a desert lynx that sits very close to the fence with a frequency that makes me some what uneasy. He just sort of glares at me. When he isn’t around a road runner comes scampering down my side of the fence followed by a coyote on the other. Of course there is the extended family of creeping looking lizards that have taken up domicile under my shed and meander all over the place day or night. I have begun to find them all amusing, entertaining, and interesting.

As the early evening fades I know longer see my little wild things but I know they are there. The fence vibrates now and then, I hear the pounding paws along the trail on the desert side of the wash, something going through the brush, and all sorts of bumps in the night. I enjoy them immensely and it becomes a soothing event each night.

However every few nights I hear a faint rattle, a thump - like flesh hitting flesh, and a quickly muted squeal coming from the direction of my cactus garden. I then down my Grand Marnier extinguish my Rey Del Mundo and retreat to the inner sanctum of my permanently attached mobile home. The wild things are lurking about.