The Story Behind The Vanishing

I lived rurally for many years, so seeing wildlife wasn't particularly unusual. Deer wandered through the yard. Other animals appeared and disappeared with the seasons.

But in all those years, I saw a mountain lion only once.  I was driving along the country road where I lived when I spotted something ahead of me. At first, I thought it was a dog.

Then it moved.

There is something distinctive about the way a mountain lion walk, that long, fluid, unmistakably feline gait. I had only a few seconds to realize what I was looking at before it heard my vehicle approaching and disappeared into the bush.

That was it.  A glimpse. And I was ridiculously excited.

I had lived for years in a place where mountain lions lived too, and that fleeting encounter was the only evidence one ever gave me that it was there.

That stayed with me.

The animals we don't see

Mountain lions - cougars - as we call them here in British Columbia, are extraordinarily elusive. They can live surprisingly close to people while remaining almost completely unseen.

Even now, when I walk through the forest near home, I sometimes find myself looking up. Not because I actually expect to see a cougar perched on a branch above me, but because once you know they may be there, the forest feels a little different.

It also makes me think about the forest where I played as a child.  My family lived right at its edge on Vancouver Island. My brother and I spent hours in those woods. We explored, climbed, built things and made all the noise elementary-school children are capable of making.

Our parents thought nothing of sending us out there. Neither did we.

It wasn't until I was an adult that I understood just how thoroughly we had grown up in cougar country. That realization gave me a rather wonderful, yet slightly unsettling thought:

How many times were they there?

Perhaps a cougar watched from somewhere we never thought to look. Perhaps one heard a gang of noisy children coming through the trees and quietly went the other way.  Perhaps we passed within a hundred metres of one and never knew it.  There is something humbling about realizing that an animal doesn't have to reveal itself to be present.

And that became the idea behind The Vanishing

We tend to notice loss when something familiar disappears.

If the birds suddenly stopped coming to the feeder, we'd notice.  If the deer that regularly crossed a field stopped appearing, someone might eventually ask why.

But what about an animal we almost never see in the first place? How do we recognize its absence?

That question became the heart of The Vanishing.

The mountain lion seemed the perfect animal for the story precisely because it is so good at being invisible. It can move through a landscape without announcing itself. Its tracks may be the only evidence it was ever there. And so I began thinking about disappearance differently.

Not as a dramatic moment, or as the last animal walking away while somebody watches, but as a silence that gradually becomes permanent.

A trail no longer crossed, tracks that stop appearing, a presence that becomes a memory before anyone realizes there is something to remember.

We often talk about protecting wildlife we can see, the ones that appear in photographs, cross our roads, visit our yards or capture our attention. But some creatures live at the edges of our awareness.

Their survival depends partly on wild places remaining wild enough for them to continue slipping through unnoticed. And perhaps that is what fascinates me most about the mountain lion. For most of my life, they have existed for me largely as a possibility.

Somewhere out there.

I saw one once. For a few seconds. Then it stepped into the trees and vanished.

And I suppose that is where the title came from, because sometimes the most frightening kind of disappearance isn't watching something leave. It's realizing one day that you haven't seen it for a very long time.

And wondering:

If we never see them, do we even know when they have vanished?