"I remember one winter, when I was about five or six, I spent three days with another boy, tracking a bobcat that had been sighted in another county fifty miles away, but which I was sure had come into our neighborhood"
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Childhood is often a small-town epic staged on a postage-stamp map, and Terry Brooks captures that with one deceptively casual flex: a five- or six-year-old “spent three days” tracking a bobcat that was supposedly fifty miles away. The sentence works because it dares you to accept the scale of the claim while quietly tipping its hand. Brooks isn’t asking you to believe in the literal competence of two kindergartners as wilderness detectives; he’s spotlighting the seriousness with which kids inhabit their own myths.
The key phrase is “but which I was sure.” Certainty is the engine here, not evidence. Brooks frames the bobcat as a migrating legend, already upgraded by rumor (“sighted in another county”) and then domesticated by the child’s need for proximity: it must be in our neighborhood. That pivot is the subtext of imagination as ownership. If the adventure is too far away, the mind drags it home.
As a fantasy writer, Brooks is also sketching an origin story for his craft. Tracking becomes a proto-narrative act: you take scattered signs, build a coherent trail, and commit to it for days. The bobcat is less an animal than a permission slip for intensity, companionship (“with another boy”), and self-authored significance. It’s a memory of play, but it’s also a memory of apprenticeship: the moment when a kid learns that belief can create a world sturdy enough to walk around in for three days straight.
The key phrase is “but which I was sure.” Certainty is the engine here, not evidence. Brooks frames the bobcat as a migrating legend, already upgraded by rumor (“sighted in another county”) and then domesticated by the child’s need for proximity: it must be in our neighborhood. That pivot is the subtext of imagination as ownership. If the adventure is too far away, the mind drags it home.
As a fantasy writer, Brooks is also sketching an origin story for his craft. Tracking becomes a proto-narrative act: you take scattered signs, build a coherent trail, and commit to it for days. The bobcat is less an animal than a permission slip for intensity, companionship (“with another boy”), and self-authored significance. It’s a memory of play, but it’s also a memory of apprenticeship: the moment when a kid learns that belief can create a world sturdy enough to walk around in for three days straight.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
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