It is difficult to explain the scale and peculiarity of the Catlow Valley. It’s as if everything is stretched out wider and thinner here in this mysterious part of southeastern Oregon. Distances between things are far, far, as if the land were inflated beneath you like a balloon. Such strange places, with such vastness.

Catlow Valley is classic basin-and-range topology; the floor of it dropped down flat as a puddle and its eastern rim scarped up sharp like cliffs, hundreds of feet. Far far west you can see Hart Mountain and Poker Jim Ridge. Closer in and south, buttes. And east, of course, beyond the rim, the flat oblong of Steens Mountain.

Deep dusk and we’d already had a close-call run-in with a jackrabbit, driving north on the far eastern edge of the valley, just under the sinuous rim. Within the past hour we’d seen antelope and mule deer and prairie dogs and ducks. It’s that crepuscular hour that bodes of automotive collisions with wildlife. So we are not surprised when a mammal lopes out ahead of us across the highway.

What does surprise us is that it’s not a deer, nor a coyote even. It takes us a moment to realize it’s tailless and tawny. And that its ears were tufted. A bobcat!

I have never had the luck to see any sort of wild cat. So this, for me, was a startling and wondrous moment.

(Just a few minutes before and near the bobcat.)