Dear Instagram Hiking Influencer,

It is me: a hungry mountain lion. You have not seen me. I see you. I watch from the bushes as you point your phone at my natural stone arch—yes, it is mine, it belongs to me, I live here—enticing the hairless hordes to leave toilet paper outside my den.

Could I kill you? Yes. I could. So, so easily.

But first I would like to know, oh rugged manchild, how sharing my arch on your “internet” sakes the human purpose. I live at the arch because I have to, because it is my habitat and territory, because I make a mess when I eat and cannot use indoor plumbing (believe it or not, I have tried). You come here uninvited, wishing to “get away from things.” Or so you say on daily posts tagged #vanfreedom. I wonder, do you truly know what freedom is? Freedom is finding a new mate under the coruscating Sonoran stars, the two of you circling like planets (yes, I know about the planets) in shrinking orbit until you bonk uglies with a terrible caterwaul that wakes the entire plateau, even the heavy-sleeping lizards. Of my proclivities, your Wikipedia says, “Copulation is brief but frequent.” That is #vanfreedom.

Freedom is not your petty need for acknowledgement, photo upon photo of your ugly smile (really: it is ugly, look at yourself from above and to the side as I do), your beard caked in acrid chemicals, olive shorts riding up your pathetic man-hair legs. Oh my freshly showered, tooth-flossed influencer, how I could rip those legs to barbacoa-like bits with my ghoulish canines!

Is it insecurity that drives you? Undemonstrative parents? Others trek these paths phoneless and photo-less – I speak of others such as the decrepit skeleton man Craig, shambling the PCT in flight from his broken marriage. How do I know about Craig’s marriage? Not because he posts idiotic tags (#secondchancing, #movingtowardsomething), but because he talks to himself in his tent. The divorce has driven him batty.

Unlike your juicy barbacoa legs, Craig’s would be like chomping down onto a metal survey rod. This is why Craig will not survive the wilderness. Alas, neither will I. In this way Craig and I are brothers.

But you… you are not my brother. When you spread my home around the interweb like jackrabbit entrails, I see the weakness in you. I see a man who cannot experience his own life unless the world reaches into his trifling soul and experiences it for him, second-hand, at a discount price. Influencer, o influencer… you do not know the evil you beget!

Unless, of course, you do, and the oversharing is a ruse to smoke me out, such that all wild things might disappear from this earthly heaven. What will you do then? Will you even notice? Will anyone? Listen to me now, sweet barbacoa man. When you next drop trow on my lawn of chuparosa and lupine, you #won’tevenhearmecoming.