The Last of the Old Kings

Up here on this high, lonesome ground, with the wind combing through the grass, let me tell you about who used to rule this country — because these quiet hills were once the domain of animals that could raise the hair on the back of your neck.

Go back not so very long, a century and a half, and the Texas Hill Country was thick with big predators. Mountain lions — panthers, the old folks called them — slipped through these canyons like smoke, six feet of muscle and silence, and a big tom could pull down a full-grown buck without making a sound. Black bears rooted through the bottoms after acorns and pecans. And wolves — the lobo and the red wolf — sang these hills awake at night. To a lone settler down in a cabin in that canyon, the dark was full of eyes and full of teeth.

So the way frontier folk did just about everywhere, they went to war on them. Trapped them, shot them, poisoned them, put a cash bounty on their hides. And they won — if you can call it winning. By the early nineteen-hundreds the bears were gone from these hills, the wolves were gone, the panthers all but wiped out. The country got safer. It got quieter. And it got emptier, in a way you can still feel up here on a still evening, if you stop and listen to how much silence there is.

But here's the turn in the tale. The mountain lion never quite surrendered. To this day, a big cat will still drift through this rough, broken, wild country — rare, and secret, and almost always by night, following the deer down the very canyons you walked today. You could hike these hills your whole life and never see one. But cross this high ground at dusk sometime, and know it is not impossible that somewhere out in that brush a pair of golden eyes is quietly watching you pass — the last of the old kings of the Hill Country, still holding on. Holding on exactly the way those lost maples hold on down in the canyon: stubbornly, secretly, in the wild forgotten corners, refusing to be the last of their kind. Something to turn over in your mind, on the walk down.