COUGARS CORNER
Meet Sam and Felina Mountainlion
Sam and Felina Mountainlion are a pair of mated cougars with the rare ability to telepathically communicate with human beings and other species besides their own. I first met the male of the pair when he was a kitten in the Pacific Northwest and was privileged to record the first several years of his life for a small press in Bellingham, Washington. It was at about the time Mount St. Helen erupted and Sam was, in fact, partly responsible for that event.
He and I have stayed in touch down the years and I’ve transcribed editorial columns he’s “dictated”of his observations on the human species for several rural newspapers. He also interviewed Santa Claus for the Portland Oregonian’s Sunday magazine one Christmas and a story of how he helped a troubled truck driver rescue a snowbanked stationwagon full of kids during a Rocky Mountain blizzard was written up in a national trucking magazine. For columns published in the Whatcom Weekly Times (Bellingham, Washington), the Society of Professional Journalists awarded him an Excellence in Journalism citation. To the best of our knowledge, he is the only cougar to be so honoured.
As a couple faintly reminiscent of Tracy and Hepburn, Sam and Felina were editorial mainstays for The Northstar Journal, a general interest monthly ezine which published for three years in the late 1990s. They were well received and also carried by the Canadian arts ezine Cream.
It is both an honour and a pleasure to be sharing them again.
Rusty
Felina: Well, dear, isn’t it nice to be back in touch with our human neighbours? It has been quite some time now, eh?
Sam: Felina, sometimes that really depends on how you define “nice”. But yes, it’s been awhile. I was counting on a longer’awhile’ but it’s an election year in the Land of the Eagle. And from what I can gather, not a particularly dignified one, either.
Felina: I know, Sam. The Land of the Maple Leaf is not so different. Except perhaps, that since we are not a majour player, less attention is paid.
Sam: Canadian humans have an advantage. Most of them are descended from fur trappers and professional canoe paddlers. A good stretch of white water or a clan of beavers doing construction work makes a lot more noise than any of them could.
Felina: Whereas American humans? Since we’re obviously indulging in stereotypes?
Sam: By their own admission, refuse of teeming shores.
Felina: Humans of a rather large spectrum of diversity.
Sam: And an extremely interesting process of assimilation.
Felina: Certainly a complex one, eh?
Sam: Sure makes you appreciate the simple life.
Felina: Perhaps that is why they are here?
Sam: To make us appreciate the simple life?
Felina: Sometimes even a bad example serves a good purpose.
Sam: Like that sculptor who got asked how he could take a block of marble and make of it something entirely different.
Felina: By knowing what that block of granite was meant to be and chipping away anything else.
Sam: I’m sorry, but I don’t see that happening.
Felina: Perhaps not among the candidates, Sam. But among the voters, among those millions of private citizens, it may be different. They have lived for the last four years especially under a national executive who has told them that it doesn’t matter to him what they want, he knows best.
Sam: The average American human’s worst nightmare. Alfred E. Neumann at the end of the red phone.
Felina: If this is true, they will not make the same mistake again.
Sam: And if they do?
Felina: If they do, we can only have compassion for them.
Sam: And continue to learn from a bad example.
Felina: And with that, gentle readers, until next time, take care, stay well and may the Creator bless and keep you.
