It was early in the morning when my brother and I set out for the hill. Our plan was to do a little trail running and I knew how tough it was going to be. I don’t like getting up early to run. I like getting up early to read or look at the mountains with a cup of coffee in my hand, not to shock my body with a lot of aerobic stress. But my brother wanted to and because I was home visiting I wanted to spend as much time as I could with my family and also because I’m older than he is and couldn’t let him think I was a wimp.
The hill was so green, a huge green mound peppered with granite boulders, wild with scrub oaks and brambles. I stepped out of the car at the base of the hill and felt the cold, dry air fill my nostrils. I knew this was going to hurt.
We started out fairly easy, along a flat trail that skirted the northeastern side. The hearty grass was wet with dew and the clay earth of the trail was soft from the previous week’s rain. Almost immediately, water soaked into the toes of my shoes, then into my socks. I hate that.
We turned to follow the trail curling up into the hillside. I pushed myself hard to make the initial ascent and could feel the pressure in my knees. As we neared the top I was losing steam and because of the steep grade of the trail I was walking more than jogging now. I bit off more than I could chew, I thought, as I watched my brother bound up the hill like a deer.
Soon after, I stopped completely, lied down on a flat, mossy boulder and tried to keep myself from vomiting. I think I was done jogging for the day. My brother reached the crest of the hill before coming back to see if I was all right.
“You ok?” he chuckled.
“Yeah, I just need to take a little break,” I replied quietly as the blood pounded in my ears.
He waited for a moment at the edge of the rock I had collapsed on and looked out across the quiet valley that lay below.
“Hey, Ben,” he whispered, almost as if he were waking me up from a nap, “check this out”.
I managed to get to my feet; my head swishing like a fish bowl and peered over the edge of the boulder. He pointed to a tiny clearing in a thick briar patch just a few feet down. I didn’t see it at first, but when he made me take his place on the rock to look, I saw it. There, in the clearing, among the rambling arms and thorns of the briar was a little brown cottontail rabbit. Its ears were laid back against its body and it remained completely motionless as if it were convinced that we couldn’t see it if it didn’t move.
How my brother spotted that thing, I’ll never know. But here’s the thing about my brother, he’s always been like that, ever since we were kids. He has a special sense when it comes to natural things. I can remember once, we were walking through this alfalfa field near our house; the dense green plants coming up to our waists, and he stopped in his tracks because something caught his eye. Turning and kneeling down in the alfalfa, he showed me a toad halfway buried in the damp soil.
By now, my strength had returned and we decided to resume our trek over the hill. The sun was warm and clear up on the ridge, a perfect day for being outside. Occasionally, we’d come across some range cattle grazing among the rocks and trees. A couple of them would stand their ground for a moment, out of curiosity, then trot away to join the rest of the herd. We jogged down into shaded gullies then back up following narrow paths winding through the brush. Sometimes we came to barbed wire fences and had to crawl on our bellies or vault over them to pass.
Finally, my brother and I decided that it was about time to start heading back down to the car. We gazed out across the face of the hill to see if we might find another trail to lead us down.
“Hey, what’s that?” he said, shielding his eyes from the sun. “Do you see that?”
He pointed to something perched on a rock near a gathering of trees; about forty yards in the distance.
“It looks like it might be a bobcat,” I answered. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one up here before.”
The bobcat probably saw and smelled us long before we ever spotted it. It paused for a second to check us out, then leaped off the rock and out of sight.
“Let’s go after it,” he said, with a grin on his face, heading off in the direction of the bobcat.
We scrambled down a gentle slope and into a quiet, grassy area lined with more scrub oaks and tall, craggy boulders all covered with moss. A perfect place for a bobcat’s den, I thought. The ground was soft with a thick layer of compost from fallen leaves and dark earth, making our steps silent. We had to hunch down low, at times, passing under the great, twisted branches of the trees. We whispered to each other as we explored, wondering where the thing had gone to or if one of us had seen anything resembling a den. We searched for tracks and the bones of prey, but found neither.
My brother and I used to do stuff like this all the time as kids. We caught lizards and built forts. We’d run through the fields and orchards near our house or, with BB guns over our shoulders, trudge through thick sagebrush on “expeditions” out at our grandparents ranch in the hills above Salinas. To this day, I can’t help but think of those times when I catch the scent of sage on a warm summer afternoon.
The bobcat had vanished, it seemed. But it was in those few moments that I was reminded of the relationship I had with my brother. We were always going to be like this, even when we’re old men. We’re always going to be Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, always fascinated by nature, always hunting bobcats.
