Mountain lions attack and Ish is injured

The mountain-lion crisis, remembered as the Year of the Lions, shows how environmental change reaches the community through a chain of consequences: after cattle die in a drought, predators that had multiplied when food was plentiful begin closing in on people. The danger becomes personal when Ish is mauled and left with a lasting limp, making the year both an ecological reversal and a turning point in his physical life.

Ecological Causes and Escalating Danger

By Year 7, mountain lions seemed to be everywhere around the community. People were reluctant to walk between houses without a rifle, and they kept a dog close at heel as a warning. The children had to stay indoors. The lions did not quite dare to attack a person, but they had already picked up four dogs, so even the familiar paths between homes felt exposed.

Ish understood the change as the delayed result of earlier abundance. During the years when cattle were numerous, the mountain lions must have bred rapidly. When drought killed the cattle, that food supply disappeared, leaving the predators hungry and drawing them toward the settlement. The lions’ approach was not an isolated threat but one consequence of the community’s changing ecological surroundings.

Ish’s Injury

The danger culminated when Ish missed his shot. Instead of killing a lion, he only grazed its shoulders; it charged and mauled him before Ezra could get another shot home. The account identifies the failed shot, the charge, and Ezra’s intervention as the sequence that turned a general threat into a lasting injury for Ish.

Afterward Ish walked with a small limp and became very tired when he had to sit in one position for a long time, including while driving. The injury persisted beyond the encounter, altering what his body could comfortably do. Its effects coincided with a wider loss of mobility: roads had badly deteriorated, cars were unreliable, and there were few places to go, so driving had already become uncommon.

Naming and Significance

The community called Year 7 the Year of the Lions, making the predators the defining feature by which the year was remembered. The name records more than a frightening encounter: it gathers the lions’ growing presence, the loss of four dogs, the need to protect children, and Ish’s injury into a shared mark of time.

The episode links the community’s safety to conditions it cannot fully control. Cattle had once sustained a larger population of predators; their loss shifted the danger toward the people and animals living near the settlement. Ish’s limp gives that ecological change a personal afterlife, while the deteriorating roads and unreliable cars underline how little the community can rely on the old means of movement as its surroundings change.