Thirst is an odd thing to build a hunt around, but that is what Dave Bonta does in «Lynx rufus», named for the bobcat. The poem puts us inside the animal at the moment of waking and follows one need, a drink, across the landscape until water starts to look like another creature, something to be tracked, read and possibly caught.
The opening is half-asleep on purpose. The bobcat is woken by "a hot gaze / from the mouth of the shelter" and can't tell whether it is the sun or its mother "dangling some new, / wet chew-toy for her grown kitten." Warmth on the face feels like being watched, and being watched feels like being looked after. "Chew-toy" is a small shock, a domestic human word dropped into a wild den, as if the poem were admitting it is a translation of an animal's mind. Even the dreams stay feline: the "dream visions slink / back behind the rocks, where / it's always night," retreating like smaller animals from the light.
The turn comes with a flat, almost proverbial statement: "Water has no scent of its own." A hunter would naturally follow its nose, so the poem switches senses. Water has to be tracked by sound, "by its purr," and the metaphors that follow turn the landscape into a body. A ravine has "a throat, a pulsing vein," and the moving surface "trembles, the loveliest of pelts." The bobcat understands water by comparing it to bodies like its own, so running water becomes both quarry and kin. The word "loveliest" also lets a flicker of admiration into what is otherwise a practical search.
The second half introduces a harder case: water that doesn't move. Pools on the mountaintop are "Silent, & therefore / something to be wary of." That is the logic of a predator, for whom silence is suspicious, and the next lines are almost funny in their frustration: "Impossible to ambush." The hunter has met something that can't be stalked because it doesn't act. The syntax goes still along with it. Fragments pile up without main verbs ("Moving / only when the wind disturbs it"), and the line breaks hold back the key words so that "therefore" and "Moving" hang at line-ends before their meaning arrives.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. Its short, uneven lines run on through enjambment, and sound does the work rhyme might otherwise do. "Slink," "purr," "buzzing" and "gust" are verbs you can almost hear or feel. The ampersands, in "Woken by thirst & a hot gaze" and in "Silent, &," give the voice a quick, shorthand look, as if it were moving too fast to spell things out. Their casualness also keeps the poem from sounding like a nature lecture.
The ending completes a loop. "Daylight buzzing in my whiskers, I gust through the newly molted leaves" fuses the bobcat with the weather. It becomes a gust, which is the one force the poem says can disturb still water, and the leaves are "molted" as though they were fur. The last phrase, "that fierce glint," answers the "hot gaze" of the opening. At the start the sun looks at the bobcat, and at the end the bobcat looks for light that looks back from water. The "Yellow eye" it addresses halfway through could be the sun or its own eye, and the poem lets that blur. The search is never finished, and we never see a drink taken.
The poem matters because it manages empathy without sentimentality. It doesn't claim the bobcat thinks in verse. It finds poetry in the animal's own logic: the suspicion of silence, the preference for sound over scent, and the habit of seeing everything as something that might move, bite or hide. In doing so it shows how metaphor can be a way of knowing, since the bobcat understands the unfamiliar by comparing it to what it already is. It also makes the familiar thing we call water strange again, as a creature with a throat, a pelt and a purr, and one that goes quiet when it is most dangerous to a hunter.