I can see the leaves as our headlights brush past them on the curves.

The aspen are turned.

But it's an hour or more after dark, and all I can see is the yellow leaves low by the road. And I know I won't be back here for five days. A lot can happen to fall colours in five days. As we continue up the winding canyon to the divide, I wonder if a flash would work on an entire hillside.

As we drop over the divide, headed towards home, the aspens disappear and the road passes through heavier conifers, my lovely ponderosas. No more golden leaves in the beams, just the narrow gravel road lined with black timber.

It occurs to me this would be a wonderful time to catch a mountain lion in the road.

Should I get the camera out of its case? Just in case?

Well, hardly.

First off, the camera takes forever to warm up. A lion would never hang around that long. And secondly, I have discovered that when shooting through even slightly dirty windows, this wonderful little machine will focus on the grime and heeler nose prints on the glass, not the objects of interest outside.

And besides, been driving this road at night for 26 years, and have never surprised a lion.

Less than a minute later (Literally. Really.), a half-mile down the road or so, we swung around a curve in the narrowest part of the canyon, and there it was.

A large, dark brown, amorphous shape in the left side of the road.

Which quickly morphed into a large, tawny feline shape with a looong tail, doing an about-face on top of itself as it turned to bound across the road in our headlights, make a leap onto the right embankment, and climb up into the darkness.

A lion!

Heeler heads flew out the open crack of their window as I skidded to a stop on the exact spot the lion had passed. And calmly wrote my notes, and recorded the GPS coordinates off the unit mounted on the dash. The little maskless heeler uttering a low, gutteral "grrrrrr" at something up the hillside in the night.

A lion.

Only my second sighting in the wild.

And no, when we checked the last wing barrel less than a mile away, the heelers did not get out of the truck to run and play.

'Course, neither did I.