September 1984. Cocha Cashu Biological Research Station, Manu National Park, Peru

My headlamp was a spotlight in the nighttime Peruvian jungle, a beam from the middle of my forehead that lit up a tunnel of light. It lit up the trail, moist and thick with leaves. It lit up lianas. It lit up buttresses of huge ceba trees (but not their tops towering way over my head). It lit up broad leaves still wet from the afternoon rain. In the night, everything was colorless. Black and light.
 
But the other thing my headlamp lit was eyeshine. Eyes reflected back to me, glowing like bright headlights. They shone in very different ways, depending on the animal they belonged to.
 
A string of eyes like a teeny necklace in the middle of the trail belonged to a spider. There were millions of spiders here and dozens of webs across the trail, at face level. If I was lucky, I saw them and ducked under. If not...blech.
 
Unblinking eyeshine resting on the lake surface, bright red. That was caiman. The calm water reflected those eyes to make four red eyes. If the water rippled, like when the caiman moved, the reflection danced with dozens of red undulating eyes.
 
Unblinking eyes close to the ground, almost lost in the huge-leafed ground plants, might be a horned frog, with a mouth so big it can swallow small mammals.
 
Blinking eyes always belonged to a mammal. A foot off the ground, it could be capybara. But lower could be an agouti or rat, higher probably a deer.
 
I saw all these as I made my way along the trail, following large cats all night—jaguar, puma and ocelot— cats we had radio-collared earlier in the season. I tuned my radio receiver, held the broad, branched antenna up in the air, and listened for beeps that signaled the identity of one of our radio-collared cats. Since I was the youngest field assistant at the Cocha Cashu research station (short straw and all), my shift went from 6p, when the sun set like a dropped rock, til midnight. No one else wanted a shift that was dark the entire time.
 
So, that’s the setting. This is the story.
 
At 2200 hrs, I settled in to listen to a group of ocelots sleeping. The characteristic sound of the ping told me they were lying on their sides. I read, then checked the radio signal, wrote notes, frequencies, and directions in my field notebook, then read again. At midnight, I packed up to return the two kilometers home to the field station.
 
As I was packing, I turned and there was the eyeshine, right in the middle of the trail about 20 meters away. What was it? Two feet off the ground, it blinked.  The eyes moved up, then dropped down. Probably afraid of me. It must be a deer, I thought. 
 
Then the two glowing eyes moved sideways into the caña along the trail and rushed towards me. My heart leaped. Do deer charge? Now 15 meters away. The eyes winked in and out behind the caña. I was riveted on those eyes, I couldn’t lose the eyeshine or I wouldn’t know where the animal was. What was it!? Now 10 meters away. It rushed closer and closer. My throat tightened. Now it was 5 meters away. Now it came out of the caña straight at me. Deer definitely do not do this, was all I had time to think before…
 
It swept past me. In my headlamp's beam, I saw chiseled ropy muscles under the shortest of tawny fur. A  narrow body, And then a long cat tail.
 
Puma. You might call it a mountain lion or a cougar. In Peru, they called them puma.
 
When charged by a large cat in the middle of the night in an Amazon rainforest, what you do next probably says a lot about who you really are, deep down inside. Do you defend yourself with your machete? Do you turn and flee?
 
I don’t know what it says about me, but my mind went blank. Absolutely 100% empty. Nada. I’m sure if someone were there with me, they’d have said my eyes went wide and I was momentarily paralyzed. Oddly, when I did move again, I unfolded my radio antenna and turned on the receiver to check all the radio-collar channels. Maybe I was in "automatic" because signals had stopped coming from my brain. When I think back on what the puma looked like, I don’t remember a radio-collar, so it didn't exactly make sense.
 
Of course, once the puma swept past me, its eyes were facing away from me. I lost the eye shine and the animal disappeared into the black night. It could be anywhere. Antenna held high with adrenaline, I spun in all directions searching for a signal and looking for eyeshine. I couldn’t find either.
 
Don’t run, my instinct told me. So, I walked as quickly as I could, trying really hard not to sprint. I raked both sides of the trail with my light, looking for eyes. I swept the trail behind me with my light. Half an hour later, I got back to the research station, but I never saw the eyes or the puma again. I left a note for the rest of the team in the screen-walled kitchen hut. Then I zipped my tent door closed against mosquitoes and puma, and somehow got to sleep.
 
The following morning, I was told by veteran researchers that it’s very likely the puma followed me all the way back to camp, behind me, checking me out. That’s just apparently what puma do.
 
But why did I never see the puma’s eyeshine after it charged me?  I was looking everywhere for it - beside me, behind me, in front of me. Did it cover its eyes with its cool cat shades? Or did it simply keep going on into the depths of the rainforest because who knows what it thought I was…  a humanoid with a single glowing eye in the center of its forehead and antlers that it held on a long arm over its head. Weird. Definitely something to avoid.

I’m in the Sierra Nevada, sitting above Chiquito Creek on a rocky outcrop in Logan Meadow. Beyond the river, a ridge. Granite domes perch on top of the ridge like eagles. One or two of them have their heads turned towards me and their great granite beaks are clearly silhouetted against the sky.  It’s an unseasonable warm mid-October day. The sun is relentless, and the shade from the towering ponderosa pine above me is welcome.

My fingers play around the edge of a circular depression beside me in the rock shelf. There are two other similar holes nearby, now filled with sand and duff. They’re grinding holes, tacoiya, used by the native Nɨm people who lived in this meadow, on the ridge, and on as far as I can see from here, since at least the last ice age. The living Nɨm have been removed from this landscape, but I still feel surrounded by minds and voices. This landscape has eyes and ears, it is still theirs. I scoop the sand and duff out of the holes, then blow out the rest of the detritus. The revealed bowls are smooth and cool.

This is not Logan Meadow, it is Cha:tiniu homeland of the North Fork Mono, the Nɨm. The creek does not drain Chiquito basin, but rather Yauyau, with its deeply secret forests, its sequestered meadows, and – under all – the granite bedrock that gives form to the basin and shape to the domes perched above. The creek flows past Cha:tiniu, over rocks and through languid pools, to – not the dammed reservoir of the San Joaquin River called Mammoth Pool – but to Ewahu, once a free river that cascaded unimpounded down to the marshes below the mountains. It’s easy to imagine women sitting where I am, chatting together with their heads bent, grinding acorn meat on these rocks and carrying baskets of ground acorn down to the creek to be leached in the sand; men and boys knapping arrowheads in nearby shade; young children darting across the meadow squealing, teasing, laughing. Thousands upon thousands of years, since Coyote and Eagle and all the animals spread across the world and became themselves, the Nɨm have shaped and been shaped by this land and its residents.

The USFS map lays unfolded next to me.  The official names in this area, the ones on the map, are names brought in by the first westerners. For some reason these persist, as if these areas were first discovered in the 1800’s. Whisky Creek, Hell’s Half Acre, Jackass Rock... the names speak of a people at odds with the land and uncomfortable. Redinger, Shaver, and Huntington Lakes... named after their founding men, magnates and businessmen whose dreams were apparently worthy of lasting recognition. Legs lifted, territory marked.

A sudden gust of wind tugs at the branches above me and a rain of orange pine needles lets loose and drops into my lap. I look from my lap to the bright orange crown of the pine over my head, weird and surrealistic, like some modernist’s substitution of the correct colors, making a statement both confusing and jarring. Orange needles instead of green, iridescent instead of muted colors, sick instead of healthy. Out across the forest in front of me, orange pine crowns protrude from the forest, killed by bark beetle and drought.  I’m reminded of the autumn colors of New England, how maples are visible in the midst of the forest when they turn red. I can pick ponderosa pine from the rest of the trees everywhere I look -- below me, on the slopes above me, on distant hills... not because of their usual soft, green, tall forms, but because they are brilliantly orange.

I’ve spent alot of time in the Sierra Nevada. I have a small cabin nestled in the pine, beside a meadow, far to the north. I’ve mountaineered, climbed, skied and hiked in the mountains for decades. And, I’ve done research on the same pine species that is staring me in the face right now, in other places in the Sierra.

But I’ve never seen anything like this.

Four years of drought and warmer temperatures, combined with bark beetle, is killing the pine – that’s what the flyer from the Sierra Forest Service office says.

I look beyond the pine to the ridge where the eagles sit, brooding. A charred forest, a slope of empty blackened trunks and scorched earth below them, are all that is left of the trees that once covered the skirts of the ridge. A fire swept through there sometime recently, fueled into a massive, raging blaze because the land had been left to grow into a tangle of flammable shrubs and trees. Historically the Nɨm used controlled fires to sweep out the understory.

But there’s more... not just climate, bark beetles, and a century of putting out fires... add to that the high levels of ozone pollution that I know weakens pine on the lower slopes of the Sierra in this region, and you have a perfect storm of stresses on the pine.  When these diseased pine around me die and dry out, it will be like laying tinder and logs on a hearth. Only waiting for the spark to turn this forest into that skeletal forest on the far ridge. Is this the future of climate change?  An Armageddon of a landscape, demolished by drought, heat and pollution, and finished off by insects and fire.

It’s apparently not the first time bark beetles have laid the pine forest low here. A U.C. Irvine researcher points to the record of local newspaper articles bemoaning “bark beetle destroying the pine forest”, published every 20-30 years or so since 1903. When the timing of the articles is overlaid on the drought record, it shows the panic invariably hits after 3-4 years of drought weaken the trees, bark beetles infest them, and many of the pine turn orange and die.

But perhaps climatic change is a new twist, taking us in a novel direction, popping us out of the cycles of recorded history. Look, for example, at the devastation in Canada, where forests covering entire provinces have been razed to the ground by the bark beetle. Canada’s entire Kyoto commitment of carbon sequestration disappeared in three years, because a beetle that was historically kept in check by cold temperatures has escaped out of holes melted in its icy cage by recent warming. How ironic... climate change kept Canada from doing something about climate change.

The Nɨm would know if recurring bark beetle infestations had happened, not just over the last 100 years, but over the last 10,000 years. As stewards of the land, they embraced wildfire and managed the landscape with slow-burn fires they set, so trees were more widely spaced, not competing with each other for water and nutrients.They also included beetles in their diet. But the land and the Nɨm have been denied each other since the mid 1800’s when all California Indians not only lost their “right” to continue to live on their ancestral lands, but also were denied the legal means to acquire title. Has the USFS been an adequate steward of the land since the loss of Nɨm stewardship? Will they be thoughtful and caring wardens through the massive global changes that are here, around us, already?

I sit beside a tacoiya in Chat:iniu, looking over Yauyau, asking my questions. I recall the words of an American indian addressing a room of us 500 ecologists some 20 years ago. “With your science of ecology, with your scientific method, you’re asking questions, designing experiments, getting results, moving slowly forward towards ‘understanding’.” He told us. “What you don’t see is that you are naive; your science is a young thing. You forget that we indians have been where you are, we asked our questions thousands of years ago. We got our answers. We embrace our answers. We live our understanding. And we have already done so for thousands of years.”