For days I've been carrying it in my head waiting for the chance to tell you about it. A young bobcat has taken up in my small plot of woods across the road. He is marking territory, telling bobcats passing through that this plot is taken. Occupied.

My heart jumped for joy when he confirmed my suspicion that he is, indeed, taking up here. That seems to me a male thing to do, so I went with the male side of the gender coin in my mind.

A few months ago, walking into the woods one evening after work with my four-legged friends, we found a place that looked like a cat had been there attending to business. A small pile of last year's leaves, about two hands full. Scratch marks radiated out from the leaf mound where a cat's claws had dragged the leaves from around into a pile over where it had left its signature. Like a no-trespassing sign, Bob Cat's Place.

He'd put a mound of leaves slightly to the left of the trail at the place one enters the forest, where the canopy overhead becomes dense and the light dims. Something about that particular place looks to be important to the animals. Near that spot is a place that is an oval of bare ground in the trail. It gathers water during a rain as a small puddle and dries right away as the water soaks into the ground. When it's dry, that oval has a thin layer of dust on it.

The cats stop there and roll in the oval. Tar Baby especially seems attracted to the spot. He will lie down on it for awhile and wait until the rest of us are going out of sight before he gets up to rejoin us. Once I saw where a buck had scratched around in the dust oval signaling his name, Big Bad Buck.

I've wondered what it is about that spot, so I stood there once, and several times since, to feel whatever I felt. I was able to decipher from pausing and paying attention to feeling that a soft, steady, barely perceptible breeze flows through there following the branch from Air Bellows Gap to Whitehead.

It's a place where the breeze enters the trees thirty or so feet into the foliage after flowing over smooth meadow. This may have nothing to do with why the animals like it. It's just all I felt there.

Two days ago, walking into the forest in late evening, I noticed Aster up ahead sniffing where Bob's leaf pile had been. Tar Baby went to sniff of it, too. The paw the first time was larger than Caterpillar's, who has large paws, enough to tell me it was not a feral housecat, but not big enough for a full grown bobcat's either.

This second time, a few months later, the paw marks, going by the width of the claw tracks, were about half an inch wider. I supposed from that way of looking at it this probably is the same cat and he grew, meaning he's perhaps in his first year. He found some vacant territory not long after he was weaned and staked his claim.

I was so glad to see that he'd been here again and left the same mark I became curious to know about him what Aster and Tar Baby knew. I gave myself permission to kneel down and sniff of it. I leaned over to take a whiff, and phew! It definitely was tomcat.

My immediate response was that it had a sharp stink to it, and right behind it came a feeling that I had stepped through a doorway into a new place of understanding Aster and the cats. I felt I knew them in a way I'd never before experienced.

At the same time with that came a feeling of bonding just a bit deeper with the mountain. The after-smell was strong and lingered in my nostrils for some time. Again, first response when I noticed this was, yuk! Then it came that this is an opportunity to discover, first-nose, what the four-leggeds find so interesting in that scent.

Sitting on the rock beside the water at my own special place hearing the flow, looking at the faces in the trees, I studied the aroma during inhalations, attempting to imagine myself able by nature to catch a rabbit with my teeth, take it to some shaded spot, sit down and consume every bit of it while the blood is still warm. To me it's gross, to Aster, a delicacy, a special treat better than the chocolate with the cherry.

I smelled the earth in it, reminding myself that topsoil is made of detritus and decay from which life springs in abundance. By the time the scent in my nose faded completely away I'd begun to miss it, having received so much insight from it.

A little bit different person came out from among the trees that evening in last light from the one that went in. I felt my roots reach deeper into the earth under my feet.

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