21. It Caught My Eye
There’s an old abandoned road behind my house that winds down the mountain beside the ski hills. It was abandoned because no one lived on it and it was costing the town too much money to maintain it, but it’s a cool spot to go hiking now. One day I was hiking down towards the river at the bottom of the road. It was fall, so all the leaves were gone, and it was very bright in the woods. I came around a corner to a section of the road that was washed out, so I was focusing more on my footing than my surroundings. That’s when something caught my eye.
I look up, and there’s a cougar frozen in fear about 10 feet away from me. It was probably thinking the same thing I was. “Holy moly, now what do I do?” So, we just sit there staring at each other for a minute or two when suddenly a stick cracks behind me, which makes me jump which scares the cougar. The thing scrambled to turn around and run just like a house cat, quickly disappearing into the trees.
I turned around to see what made the noise and it’s a deer. A freaking deer scared off a cougar by just stepping on a stick. Granted if I wasn’t there to put the cougar on edge already, that deer probably would have died. Similarly, if that deer hadn’t been there, the situation may not have ended as well for me, so we all survived based on sheer luck.