Night Encounters

When I turned nine, my paternal grandmother took me fishing with her at Baker Lake. I wasn't keen on fishing so before evening faded to nighttime I asked if it was okay for me to go walking around the lake. She agreed and off I went to explore a favorite place during a favorite time of day. Scaling the slope up to the top of the dam, I walked its length at a leisurely pace then turned and walked back a bit more quickly as darkness began wrapping around everything. Near the end of the dam a distinctive rattling alarm startled me to instinctively stop in my tracks. A pit viper I knew well from photos and TV shows aired by herpetology staff at the zoo in The City reared up and bared its fangs so I understood unquestionably that it would strike if I continued blithely blundering along my way toward it.

As dusk transitioned to a perfect night almost four decades ago, my final cast of the day using a hula popper I never caught anything with drew a strike, not from a stout lunker lurking below the lazy waterway's surface but from a stealthy predator on keen hunt in the darkening sky. The owl deftly snatched the lure from the water and soared with a couple of strong wingbeats toward a perch on the other side of the wide stream. Startled, I set the brake and began cranking in line, worried the pair of barbed treble hooks on the lure would become embedded in the raptor's talons. The owl lost its grasp and the hula popper dropped back to the water, but before I could reel it in the owl swiftly swooped and made another pass at it. I managed to keep the lure away from it, removed the hooks and tossed it out a few more times. Each time the owl successfully grabbed it without a miss and carried it to a nearby tree branch. Then I began thinking about the energy it was expending in futility on the fake prey and stopped playing the lure out over the glassy, flat water. The owl waited and watched as I prepared to leave. Paddling back in the dark by slight cues of light and shadow, memories of the owl encountered soothed and reasurred. The universe is very cool.

On the way back to the boat landing, a distant blinking light high in the sky drew my attention. It wasn't blinking regularly as an aircraft does, it blinked randomly as its position in the sky changed radically between flashes. At first, its sudden positional translations seemed miniscule but as it drew closer it became obvious that they were proportionally vast, spanning tens, if not hundreds, of miles. Thinking of the immense enertial forces such manuvers would inflict upon the vehicle's pilot or pilots, and possibly its passengers as well, my thought cycles amplified and intensified my emotional reaction to what I was seeing and not fully understanding. Whatever it was, it was moving really fast and it was moving toward me. Sitting in a canoe in the middle of a broad expanse of water I suddenly felt exposed and vulnerable, irrationality seized my consciousness. Was it actually coming at me? What was it going to do when it got close enough to confront me? Who...what would its occupants be? What would they do to me with who knows what kind of offworld technologies, and why?

Then is was upon me. Right in front of me. I froze, stunned and immobilized by stark fear. Suddenly swerving on its flightpath, it collided with the right lense of my eyeglasses. A firefly.