The Lion’s Tooth
He’s an American legend a rare few know. Like Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone, he’s a nomadic man who’s made his heroic legacy by killing a full-grown mountain lion with just a two-inch fold-out buck knife.
To the world unknowing, he’s merely Jake Tates–the cutest of names for a somewhat cute young man–who roams modern America, a place with no more frontiers, in his bland white, rust brown-striped Mini-Winnie motorhome. A 21st century nomad. An outsider. No one at all.
But, on the internet, he’s e-famous. The traveling storyteller of America’s least-known corners, diners and most obscure histories. Though he never shows his face or his ride for the millions of his fans to see, he’s ‘Tater Totes’, founder of the indie website ‘Tater’s Notes’, exploring the finest dining, richest histories and strangest stories America’s smallest towns, nooks and crannies have to offer.
Yet, even more, known only to Jake, his rare few closest friends, and one unfortunate, now deceased mountain lion in the Colorado foothills, he is the Lion’s Tooth. A man who wears long sleeves in summer to hide the scars from an all-too close encounter one winter dawn with one of nature’s finest killers, who chose one of humanity’s finest killers, unluckily, for its prey.
Jake meant to die that winter morning, one way or another. He’d gone to war less than a year before, and came back with scars no one could see. They pained the young man so terribly, he could stand it no more; thus he set out for Colorado, a rough land for rough people inhabited by rough animals, seeking to disappear completely from humanity, slipping away, perhaps one frigid night, and what a relief that would be.
He did not expect to fight back, when the mountain lion pounced on his back from the rocks above his head, catching Jake with his head down, resigned to his fate, trekking to nowhere in particular, his ruck empty.
But it came naturally, in some place the young man and once soldier did not yet realize, to fight for the fight, like he’d been trained by the Army.
Jake spun the big cat off, his ruck catching the predator’s claws, then pulled his buck knife out from his pocket without an accompanying thought. The small knife flipped out with a small, satisfying shenk, as the stainless steel locked into place.
The mountain lion spun back and pounced again, long arms and large paws spread wide, black claws as long as Jake’s knife blade extended, savaging its intended prey’s arms he’d raised in a guard.
Predator and man rolled together, over and under each other in turns, going back down the slight hill below the rocks from which the predator had pounced, claws and blade flying, savage hisses and cries mixed with the primal screams of a man making his last stand.
Jake doesn’t remember what happened between the mutual death roll and his next vivid memory: the big cat’s fangs sunk into Jake’s left forearm, and Jake’s pocket knife inside the creature’s forelimb guard, stuck deep into the predator’s throat.
He remembers looking into the mountain lion’s black pupils rimmed with a ring of orange, seeing realization dawn in the creature’s cunning. And then Jake yanked his buck knife left and up, slicing through the mountain lion’s throat, severing the jugular, then leaning his body in, under the reach of the predator’s dying attempts to claw him, nestling into the creature’s embrace.
The would-be predator hissed, its blood spurting into Jake’s face, and for just one flick of his tongue, Jake tasted his victory–an event and taste he’d never forget, changing the young man’s life forever.
The big cat died under Jake, who bled too from his own wounds. The young man felt the cat’s embrace surge one more time, then go limp. The creature’s death knell was not a roar or a hiss, but a kitten’s helpless mew. And that too would stick with Jake for eternity.
Jake remembered his Army first aid training, but he’d carried no bandages. What futility was that, when he aimed to die, anyways? So he removed his coat–just a formality from once before, getting him to his end–and cut up his shirt, leaving him bare-chested beneath his winter gear. But that was not enough to bind his wounds.
Jake skinned the mountain lion on the spot, doing the work poorly, but claiming the fur to soak his own blood. He sawed off the big cat’s tail, using it as a makeshift tourniquet, which worked better than he expected. And in a moment of thirst he would not confess to any other, having brought no water for one last trip, he leaned down and drank of the dead predator’s throat, thinking, perhaps at the time, in shock and pain, trying anything to survive, that the creature’s blood might replenish his own.
Jake pulled himself up, extracting himself from the limp cat’s embrace, meaning to head back out of the woods, to find help in civilization he had originally meant to leave behind, eventually collapsing from blood loss in the backyard of a hunting family.
The family hounds found Jake first, the young man fighting to stay conscious. The hounds howled, alerting their masters, who came out to see what all the ruckus was about, finding Jake savaged, face down, covered in massive amounts of blood, wounds wrapped in the remains of the mountain lion they did not then know he had slain.
The family’s father urged Jake to fight, too, and fight Jake did. He pulled through after eight hours of surgery; the mountain lion had taken a grievous toll on the man’s body, and was left in recovery, his arms thick with gauze, to sleep the first night in since he was back from the war without nightmare.
The doctors let Jake sleep a day, then brought in the local police and people from Fish and Game, who had a hard time believing Jake’s story. It wasn’t until the doctor brought in a broken fang almost two inches long in a sterile jar, pulled from Jake’s arms, that the authorities could begin to believe a most unbelievable story.
They let Jake keep the tooth, the root of his rarely known name, the Lion’s Tooth, which he now wears on a double-strand of hemp around his neck as a talisman against nightmares and despair.
The authorities never found the mountain lion’s corpse. Perhaps, they figured, it had been claimed by another predator, or perhaps coyotes, or all other sorts of things in nature’s amoral food chain.
And to this day, Jake ‘Tater Totes’ Tates roams American roads, born again one dark winter day, the blood of a mountain lion in his own veins, and its fang worn over his heart, exploring America again, in the frontiers down forgotten roads, chowing down at diners with Mom ‘n Pop names, telling the world of how much more there is than one life could possibly see.