I had been camped by the side of the lake for three days and today I saw another person for the first time. An old man had walked into camp about noon and shared lunch with me. After much struggling with my poor Spanish and his non-existent English I found him to be the caretaker for the ranger. Seems I’m in a park, after all.. I knew it said that this was a park on the map but there have been no signs and except for the cattle and a road in, no mark of human activity.
The countryside here in the mountains of Northern Baja California is beautiful in a stark way. There is none of the thick aspen and pine forests of a few miles south but the grass is green and thick and there are pines scattered about. I’m on a large plain next to a shallow lake and huge boulders are scattered around the plain and the lake. These boulders, big as houses, were perhaps dropped by some long melted glacier from a colder time. They make the landscape slightly surreal and alien.
The old man had been pleasant enough and had refused when I offered him a fee for camping. We "talked" through the afternoon, though we really didn’t understand much of what was said. I found that he lived in the village I’d passed through on the way up and that I’d caused quite a stir as not many gringos came up this way. He’d come up to check on me and see if I was OK.
I asked him about bandits because I’d been warned in Ensenada that I’d surely be robbed and maybe killed if I went into the mountains. The old man laughed and waved his hands across the landscape. "There are no bandits here" he said "there is nothing here to steal only a few skinny cows. The bandits live in Ensenada, where all the money is."
He finally walked on his way, in the other direction from which he’d come and I had no idea where he could be coming from or where he could be going, there was no road or building or anything in either direction that I could see.
That night I sat next to my fire and listened to the night sounds and thought about heading down the mountain the next day. I needed to hit a store soon and besides, the solitude and the silence were beginning to get old. There were few sounds here and except for the occasional sounds of the cows or the ducks on the lake, it was eerily silent day and night.
I spread out my bedroll and watched the stars for awhile before drifting off to sleep.
Suddenly I was awakened by the sound of cows bawling in the night. I sat up and looked all around in the bright light of a newly risen full moon. Across the plain I could see the boulders and the small dark shapes of running cows in the silvery half light. Suddenly I became aware of yipping sounds and made out smaller forms running among the cows. A pack of coyotes were running through the herd. These were range cows so they didn’t run far, but would turn and face the coyotes after a short distance and the coyotes would break off the pursuit and wheel back to find another cow to run. It seemed more of a game than real hunting, though I suppose they might have been trying to cut out a calf, I could not really tell in the half light. I watched the ghostly forms dancing across the plain for some time but there seemed no end so I gathered up my blankets and moved into the bed of my pickup. The ground seemed suddenly less inviting. Again I drift off to sleep.
Howling! Hair rising howling so close it froze me where I lay, eyes open wide. As I lay there in the bed of my truck, I realized that the pack was all around me. I could hear their feet on the ground and the breath of their sniffing through my camp and around the tires of my truck. Every so often one would howl and the hair on my neck would stand straight up. I grasped the handle of my machete and listened for an eternity until I could not hear the sniffing or the feet and the howls grew further away and then stopped. I sat up and looked around. There were no cows to be seen, no coyotes, only the ghost boulders and the silvery plain shining empty under the full moon.
