Essays

Wild On The Prairie: Mammals

A thief in the night – the ringtail
August 28, 2011

A recent report of a ringtailed cat seen in a warehouse  on the east side of Odessa set me to remembering the ringtails of the Guadalupe Mountains. For many years I visited a canyon that has to remain nameless (the folks that know about it and go there do not like other folks to know about it.)

I visited the canyon many times, in every month of the year, in every sort of weather condition. It is a long all day hike to get to the places that we camped, with lots of scrambling up sheer rock faces, and even a place where one had to wade cold water.

Ringtails adopted us. They saw us as sources of new and unusual food.  They steal. Stealing is so much more honorable than begging (to a ringtail.) Both critter and camper have to watch out for each other carefully -- a lively interesting game.  We named the ringtail "Rustle,"  as in Rustler, as in the noises he made as he scurried about in the dried maple leaves on the forest floor.

About the size of a housecat, but skinner, and lower slung, with a longer nose, bushier tail, and big bug-eyed pop-eyes, ringtails are personable. Two of their dens were easy find, for they were at the best camping places (about a mile apart.) We rarely visited one camp, for it had ancient pictographs ornamenting a huge overhanging cliff where 30 people could camp out of the rain. At that camp, when we found evidence (in the form of trash) of someone else camping there, we hauled it out, and scattered the rocks of any fire rings and hid the flat places under piles of wood.

That ringtail lived behind a big slab of rock 15 feet tall and 10 feet across on the side of the overhang. The slab had been part of the roof and blocked part of the entrance to the site. Behind it was his den, and on the very top of the slab was his latrine. Ringtails often have a place near their den that becomes their regular place for the "evening constitutional." On one trip we purposely left food out for him on another rock near the camp, and not more than five feet from our bedrolls. We spent an hour watching him choose from the array of nuts, dried fruit and dried meat. He ignored our flashlight.

At another camp in an overhang well up the canyon wall had a steep slope of bedrock directly beneath it. We  couldn't climb it, but the ringtails could (and so can mountain lions, but that is a different story.)  Their expressions do not reveal much. A very small mouth line grimaces under the long pointed nose, and it is framed by the eyes which are twice as big as they need to be. When discovered, they balefully stare back, unblinking,  without any body movements or positions that indicate fear.

At a fireless camp, under a huge old madrone tree, and right next to a giant "sotol pit,"  where Apaches and the people before them used to roast the hearts of sotol and agave (for their major source of starch), another ringtail would visit us in surprising ways. The first time we saw him, we only saw his tail sticking out a backpack, and watched in disbelief as he scurried off carrying a bag of homemade granola. We chased him in the darkness and lost him, but found the empty bag in the morning in a small escape den below the slopes of the sotol pit.

The next time we saw that "Rustle" (for all of the ones we saw we gave the same name) he first appeared as two glowing red eyes high in the madrone tree. When we spotted the red eyes, we got nervous, and stood up, dropping our books being read in lantern light.  He slowly worked his way down the trunk, walked in between the three people in the camp, a few feet from the lantern hissing, and proceeded to visit each backpack in turn, carefully pulling on the straps and strings. By then we had learned of their manual dexterity and always cinched up our supplies nice and tight. He left, but not in any hurry. 

Folks also call ringtail miner's cats, for the old time prospector that lived in remote cabins often allowed the local ringtails free rein and considered them pets that you do not pet. Ringtails are rare on the flat, treeless Llano Estacado, but if you go camping anywhere in the mountains and mesa country where  there are sheer rock faces and good sized trees in the desert southwest, expect to have your own Rustle.