Ambush Story

I ever tell you my jaguar story? No? It's not like my black bear story or my lemon shark story. There was actual contact when I met up with those characters. It's not like my twin albino deer or wolfpack stories. Those were semi-mystical. There's really not that much to it at all.

I saw a jaguar, not a car, in the wild once. I was the rear guard for an ambush out in the jungle when I was a kid. It was either late or early. I no longer remember. We had set up an ambush along a slightly worn trail for some folks who never showed up. The jungle was dark, but not completely dark. It was kind of gray beneath the canopy.

The rear guard for ambush is a two-person job. The other guy was sick. I was senior. I sent him off to find our corpsman (medic). I was alone. So, I thought. Something leapt 30 or 40 feet in front of me then moved in a few feet. I had been silent and stationary for some time now. It was a cat. It was more than a cat; it was a jaguar. I could not believe my eyes.

I would have thought that it would have picked up my scent, but I guess I was pretty grungy. In the jungle one never wears deodorant or anything like that and one rubs jungle mud on their exposed skin in order to smell like jungle rot and crust the skin against insects. Guess I did a decent job.

Except, I must have moved after I saw the cat, because the cat saw me almost as soon as I saw it. Startled, it ran away from me. Thank goodness. Just as startled, I moved my post several feet back towards our main body as I was a corporal, and I did not want my sergeants to know I had let the other kid see a medic on my own authority.

Nothing happened. Just one of those things that stays in the back of one's mind for a lifetime. Beautifully athletic animal.

Stocks sold off fairly hard shortly after the opening bell on Thursday morning. Then, we all went for a ride. For about two hours, it was "risk-on" in response to Wednesday's nearly day-long sell-off. Just one thing. The buyers ran out of gas with about half an hour to go. The sellers were waiting in ambush... and ambush is what they did.

Except, with the Dow up 800 points, with the S&P 500 up 250 points and with the Nasdaq Composite up 83 points, exactly who was ambushing who?