It’s not unusual to spot a housecat in a tree. They are natural climbers. Even some of the bigger wild cats will climb. But finding a long-extinct saber-toothed cat in your golden willow registers as fairly remarkable.
Weirdly
enough, that very thing happened to me.
More
on that in a minute.
During
the Ice Ages, Montana was home to a variety of exotic fauna, including
mammoths, ground sloths, and saber-toothed cats. Fossil evidence suggests the
big cats roamed the northern plains alongside herds of bison and other large
prey. These cats were built for power and ambushed the herd beasts when they
wanted dinner. All of these large animals disappeared around the end of the
last Ice Age (10,000 to 12,000 years ago), likely victims of a changing
landscape and possibly the growing presence of early humans across North
America.
So,
while on a walk along the lakeshore yesterday, I spotted a saber-toothed
cat—not of the flesh-and-blood variety, but rather a flat version of one
fashioned from metal, wood, and composite materials. The big cat was fastened
to a limb by means of lag screws. The obvious work of my neighbor, this.
The
cat in my tree came from a now “extinct” and dismantled display of the
Pleistocene epoch at the old Montana Historical Society Museum. Surprisingly,
I’m not opposed to keeping the big kitty in my tree. I’ve always liked cats. Even
flat ones.
I’m
sharing two photographs of the cat in my tree:
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—Mitchell
Hegman
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