Marking Your Territory
I lived out of a camper shell I built on the back of a small Japanese pickup I own. I toughed it out in there for about eight months, traveling from the east coast to the west coast and lots of places in between. I was doing some work on a guy’s house in Sonora, California.
He and his family were the coolest of Mormons and they actually offered to let me park anywhere on their eight acres until we got their house finished up. Having a stable campsite, I changed things up and would sleep in my hammock beside my truck, since the weather was perfect that time of year.
The guy’s wife saw me in my hammock on the first morning and told me about the two goats they had lost to a mountain lion the year prior. One day at dusk, while I was there, she and her son showed me a video they managed to capture of a mountain lion walking up the driveway.
It was back. I knew the risk, but figured it would be far too scared of human smells, lights, and sounds to ever come close to me, which is the case for 99% of those cats. Just be noisy before bed and you’re set, I thought. I would live to regret it.
After I turned the lights out at night, I’d sit and browse the web for a while in the cab of my truck, and I could charge my electronics from the inverter I had in there.
I wasn’t done going in and out of the camper shell in the bed of my truck, so I had left both the tailgate and hatch wide open. It was well into the night and I was just reading away when all of the sudden my entire truck lurched from a dip in the rear end. Something was in the back of my truck.
I’d shuttled people around back there before, so I had a good sense of how the rear springs up when it’s carrying weight. At first, I thought it was a person, but since I was parked on crushed gravel, I would have heard someone walking towards the camper shell and jumping into the back.
A useless wide-eyed check of my mirrors sent me thinking of a better plan. All I knew was that I was NOT getting out of the cab. I manually locked both doors and revved the thing in accordance with my heart rate, but I didn’t blast the horn because I didn’t want to wake the family up.
The plan worked—the truck sprang back up, unweighted. The noise did scare the cat. I shut the truck off and waited things out for a good while. When the coast was clear, I decided to try something I had seen on the Discovery Channel in hopes that it would keep the cat away.
I basically marked my territory all over the trees that my hammock was strapped to and around the hammock itself. I did that every night for the next two weeks with no problem until we finished the job. It felt ballsy then, but looking back, I realize how stupid it was.
The reality is, anyone who sleeps outdoors in that area of California is likely sleeping in a mountain lion’s territory, and no amount of “marking the territory” will keep them away.
Story credit: Reddit / tbrowntravels21