Snow Leopard I

SNOW LEOPARD I Two months ago at the municipal zoo, Zena the snow leopard gave birth to Asa, a spotted ball of fur with big floppy paws Eventually he will grow to two hundred pounds of muscle and teeth, cunning and claws and a forty-foot leap – beautiful, terrible, perhaps released to the wild! Wouldn’t it be wonderful if duplicitous diplomats, nefarious negotiators, disingenuous generals, oil-slicked oligarchs, and knee-jerk jihadis had the simple integrity of the perpetual predator, or better than that, could be released one at a time in the snow leopard habitats of east-central Asia, and that, stripped of their immunity, their bodyguards and weapons, their bunkers and tunnels and propaganda apparatus, and their private assassins who make everyone afraid of the last head of lettuce in the marketplace stall, of the lingering individual near the elementary school, of the wind in the trees or the patter of rain that disguises their footsteps on the stairway at night……..? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if these much-feared moguls of mayhem and murder would have to navigate the terrain of the sleek, silent hunter and discover, if only in the moment of sensing a shadow in their peripheral vision or a feathery whisper in one ear or the other, that the natural kill would be clean, quick and guileless, impersonal and just?