Womad Ways: Bobcat Medicine, Excerpt from WILD ROAD HOME, the next book

I was grinding the morning coffee beans when movement caught my eye. About thirty yards outside the sliding door, across the little river, was a bobcat. She sniffed grasses and alder thickets in no obvious hurry. I glassed her striped body. She was small with sharp edges. She proceeded to the mineral block, looked at me for a few seconds and disappeared into the brush. I hadn't asked for a sign, but had just received one.

For the next few hours I delved into Lynx Rufus. Cat energy had long permeated my soul. I was a Tiger by the Chinese calendar. I’d had several potent encounters with mountain lions and a jaguar had named me. With this sighting I moved from big cats to small, from thick, mighty tails to minute bobs.

Bobcats were solitary prowlers of the dawn and dusk, immersed in a silent, secretive world, like crepuscular me. They prowled through river bottoms; I prowled, pen in hand, through thickets of imagination. Bobcats were stealth hunters with keen senses. They had an uncanny ability to blend in and survive their environment. They averaged two to four feet long (including the tail), fifteen inches tall and twenty five pounds. The bobcat was my competition when it came to spotting a snowshoe hare. The white wonders were the bob’s preferred diet. Thus far I’d seen many tracks but not the hare. I longed to spot one again. To catch those pointed ears with my camera.

The bobcat was often associated with wind in mythology and paired with coyote. Coyote as chaos, bobcat as order. My friend across the river was also considered the cosmological protector of Venus, the evening star and Goddess of love, which happened to be my astrological ruling planet. In my ancestors' Norse mythology, bobcat was associated with Freya, Goddess of love, beauty and destiny, who rode a chariot pulled by two cats (to whom Hobo, of course, claimed to be a direct descendant).

They range far and wide

A bobcat traveled up to seven miles a day and had a range of one hundred square miles. I would be lucky to see her again, as I reviewed the qualities she symbolized: stealth, power, camouflage and clairaudience – hearing sounds and voices not audible to most. Lynx Rufus. Lynx, from the word for light. So named for gleaming eyes; the ability to see in the dark, traits I could sorely use at this point.