There’s a regrettable pattern to be found somewhere here. Only this time, thorn bushes played no part. What happened was this:

My first day out of Superior was drawing to a close. I’d poured over maps and decided on a probable camping spot for the night. Flat, with lots of promise. But when I reached the spot sometime around 5:45 in the evening, I found a wrinkle in my plan. The wind, which had been gusting all day, was being funneled neatly by the mountain sides into the small saddle where I’d hoped to camp. It was noisy even before I’d stretched out the synthetic sheets of my tent. If I wanted to sleep peacefully, I’d have to find someplace new.

This wasn’t a problem. I had lots of time. I could head deeper into the White Canyon Wilderness, down the mountain to the next flat spot in a mile or so. The trail seemed clear enough and I wasn’t worried about thorn bushes this time. I headed down, down.

The trail leveled off briefly just ahead. I could see tent-sized spots from up on the hillside, just waiting for me to shrug off the weight of my backpack and settle in for the night.

It was quieter here. So quiet, in fact, that when bushes rustled in the gully to my right, I immediately knew the sound wasn’t just wind. Or birds. Or any small animal. It was the delayed sort of thwack caused by branches being pushed far out of the way by something big, so I paused in the middle of the path, straining to see.

There it was again – the noise. A second later, I caught a glimpse of a shape, something the size of a large dog, as it slipped behind some large boulders. It moved like a cat. Exactly like a cat. The most likely explanation was an unsettling one: it very well could be a mountain lion.

I stood frozen, waiting. If I could just get a better look, maybe I’d see it wasn’t what I thought. But the animal remained up behind the shadowed rocks, shifting just enough for me to feel like it was checking to see if I was still there before it faded back.

It was nearly dark now. Call me paranoid, but the last thing I wanted to do was set up camp directly below a possible mountain lion den. No sense in inviting myself to the dinner party.

I booked it out of there.

Moving rapidly forward along the path, I noticed paw prints in the dust. No sharp claw mark indentations that I could see, just the rounded pads, which fell in line with my mountain lion assumption. Great.

The only thing on my mind was space. I needed as much space between my camp and the animal as I could manage before dark, because once it got fully dark, I didn’t want to still be hiking. There wasn’t much time. Everywhere, shadows grew.

In the end, I settled for a sloped hillside. No flat spots for me that night. I threw up my tent nervously and found myself huddled inside with one hand clutching a whistle. (I’d heard bells were a good mountain lion deterrent, so it fell to reason they might not like the shrill sound of a whistle.) I’d never heard of a single case of a mountain lion attacking a hiker’s tent, so the odds seemed to be on my side. Still. No number of statistics could change the way it felt to hear the sounds of the night slowly come alive around me as I wondered what was out there.

The night passed without incident. Later, in the bright light of the morning, my restless night seemed distant. But as I groggily packed up camp, I felt certain of one truth: in the future, I’d welcome the comparatively peaceful lullaby of the wind.