Tiger Country

Epigraph

EPIGRAPH

You ever meet my karate instructor? He doesn’t talk much. He’s a big Korean, probably about sixty-five, and still moves like a cat. His body looks like it was built with an axe out of hardwood, and his face is like a granite boulder. He has about as much hair as a bowling ball. We were driving from Silver City to a ranch in northern Catron County that day and stopped at the Aldo Leopold Overlook to stretch our legs and see the country. We went back to the truck for the binoculars and spent a long time looking over the land, glassing it carefully. Finally he said to me “You got tigers up there?”

“No, sir,” I said. “Lots of deer and more elk, and we got more antelope than anyplace but Wyoming. Little bears that go up trees, and we used to have big bears that won’t. We have a thing they call a lion, but it isn’t really, and a rare thing called a jaguar–it’s more like a leopard. We used to have big wolves. What we don’t have is a tiger–never had and never will.”

He spat at the ground, looked me in the eye like I was a little slow, and growled, “Looks like tiger country to me.”