There is a time of day... hours before first light, when adventurers - climbers in particular; rise to set out upon the earliest alpine start... These are hours of the deepest darkness; where the intense mystery and the quiet may close in upon you in either comfort or anxiousness...
On my solo scramble that particular very early day, I was following the old saying of adding time to your day by being earlier up; rather than hoping for extra hours at the end when energy and weather are more unpredictable... I was moving on the trail before three am, amidst that crispness and cold air the mountains are known for...
It was so very pitch black; such an intense quiet, only the crunch of my boots and uphill nature of my breathing was apparent...
Then... What I saw I was not sure; not sure at all... A sense of something, a glimmer of not one but two small points of light...
Just two small points of light - and then they blinked; closed for a short second and then turned and looked more directly, very intently, upon me...
I was no longer alone on that trail, maybe never was, but whatever was now sharing the path, of it all I could see were its eyes... only its eyes...
Eyes with a light behind them; reflecting an intelligence of another kind; wisdom of another nature. I do swear they shifted color ever so slightly as they watched me watching them...
After a few moments of quiet stillness my fears and anxieties diminished, were no longer as intense, and were replaced more now by curiosity and a feeling of kinship... It was a moment of reminder; of looking back to our ancient selves and where we have all come from... I was reminded too that our four legged fellow companions are always out there, we most often simply do not see them as they view us...
In a playful way as I have often done with my own furred companions, I made myself blink in a long, slow manner, as this is what many animals do when first meeting each other, deciding neither is a threat, and are then prepared to begin to trust...
And these two bight eyes blinked back just as slowly...
It was a connection; an understanding of sorts that I sense may have passed between us then... I moved further along the trail to see what would happen next, feeling clumsy in my movements and the noise I made... This creature moved along with me, yet only the eyes could I see, and it moved in total and absolute silence... We continued to share what I believe were a few more moments where each of us was wondering about the other... and then with a wisp of what may have been grey... it was gone...
Many say or write that the eyes tell all... When I looked into those eyes I saw our wild past. It affirmed for me yet again that we are not so far from our other family out in the wild places as we may think...
I will never forget those eyes.....
DSD
(The bottom image above is thanks to Blomquist, while I have misplaced my note regarding the top image.)
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