1 HARBINGER

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HARBINGER

The white mountain lion, an albino female, is rarely seen in this county, though she seems to roam only here. The astonished few who have caught a glimpse of her remember the place, the day, the hour, and the circumstances as vividly and indelibly as they recall any event in their lives. Like others of her species that are of a more common coloration, she mostly sleeps by day and stalks the world in darkness. Whether she appears pale and fluid in a shadowy forest, striding through a meadow at dusk, prowling a ridgeline in little more than starlight, or crossing a highway at night, her eyes like yellow lanterns, she is beautiful and terrifying, a majestic three-hundred-pound predator that inspires awe and terror in the same instant, a kind of sacred love.

She has been seen in a moonlit cemetery, gliding like a spirit among the headstones. She has lazed on the steps of a church in the first radiance of the hidden sun before it rose above the mountains. She has been observed drinking at dusk from the water in the deep lakelet that formed in what was long ago a stone quarry. These sightings and certain others have led some to attribute to her a dire prognostic power. They claim she's an omen of death because a groundskeeper died of a heart attack a day later in that cemetery, because the minister of the church perished in a rectory fire soon after the lion's dawn visit, and because two children drowned in the quarry pool less than twenty-four hours after the big cat drank from it. Those who give credence to this superstition call her Azrael, after the angel of death. Of course, people die with regularity whether Azrael appears or not. Perhaps the only death she will truly foretell is her own, when her twenty years are behind her and she retreats to some place deep in the forest, there to lie on the couch of her own everlasting sleep.