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Outside Magazine May 2003

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Stalker (cont.)


	The prey: one pounce and this cow elk is dinner for a cougar in Yellowstone National Park. (Antonin Kratochvil)

IN THE BAR ACROSS THE STREET from my office, there is a yellowed article on the wall from the March 17, 1953, Livingston Enterprise. Under the improbably long headline MOUNTAIN LION INVADES CITY AND ALARMS WEST SIDE; FINALLY SHOT, there is a photo of a calm-looking highway patrol officer kneeling over a dead cougar, cradling its head in his hands and giving his best Johnny Law stare. The accompanying article details how a "volunteer safari" tracked the "beast" after it jumped through not one but two windows of the H.O. Rice home, causing a mild uproar in this small mountain town.

Hundreds of curious folks visited a local taxidermy shop to see the cat before Chester Lazz, a member of the safari, had the animal

"It's the most amazing big-carnivore comeback story in the history of the world," says biologist Maurice Hornocker. "Lions will hit the Mississippi in the next decade. The East is beautiful cat country—full of deer and cover."

tanned and made into a rug. I imagine that nearly every one of those present looked on the dead lion's body, the massive, powerful jaw and long rope of a tail, and just for a moment put themselves on some dark trail with the animal, the fear blooming in their chests. Here, shot dead, was the beast that had haunted their steps in the mountains and slunk into their dreams. I doubt Chester's own funeral would have drawn as many people.

It's been 50 years since that volunteer safari assembled with their hounds and Remingtons, and the cat, once extirpated across hundreds of thousands of acres of its former range, is back. By cat I mean mountain lion, cougar, panther, puma, swamp screamer, catamount, ghost cat, shadow cat, or Puma concolor—"cat of one color"—an animal capable of snapping the neck of a whitetail deer in one pounce or jumping a six-foot fence with a 50-pound dog in its jaws. And by back I mean: "We've got cougars in basement window wells; we've got cougars running across busy intersections; we've got cougars in backyards and on back porches," says Bill Thomas, who's spent 24 years as a Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks information officer. "We have absolutely no shortage of mountain lions in Montana."

Cougar sightings have been reported in the foothills of Los Angeles, on golf courses in the shrubby Portland, Oregon, suburbs, in Missouri, and in corn-flat Iowa. The eastern puma—a subspecies so endangered that it is still listed as "presumed extinct in the wild" by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—has been sighted as far east as Pennsylvania. And in Michigan, where the state had long denied the eastern cougar's return, DNA testing on scat has confirmed the presence of a breeding population of 50 to 80 lions in the Upper and Lower peninsulas. After decades of retreat and years of sizable "harvests" by hunters, after losing more than half of its habitat to development, cougars are boldly reasserting themselves—sneaking into sheep folds, making guest appearances on high-traffic trails, snatching terriers off treated-wood decks, trailing silently behind unsuspecting joggers, waiting.

"It's the most amazing big-carnivore comeback story in the history of the world," says 72-year-old wildlife biologist Maurice Hornocker, who in the 1960s did the first studies of the cat. Hornocker founded the Bozeman, Montana-based Hornocker Wildlife Institute, which, now a part of the Wildlife Conservation Society, still supports most cougar research. "Populations in some places are higher than when Columbus set foot on the continent." In the early 19th century, cougars were present throughout the continental United States, Canada, Mexico, and large portions of South America, all the way down to Patagonia. But by the 1960s, after a century of bounties and rapid habitat loss, they were long gone in the eastern U.S. (except for an endangered population of the Florida panther subspecies) and reduced to perhaps 6,500 cats out west, a number Hornocker stresses is at best a wild guess.

Cougars are notoriously reclusive, ordinarily impossible to see, much less count. The current estimates—extrapolated from statistics based on the number of cats collared by biologists, culled by hunters, and road-killed—stretch from 10,000 to 50,000 cats nationwide. (Compare that with the number of wolves—roughly 3,600 in the Lower 48—and grizzly bears—about 1,000.) What impresses biologists is that unlike those other large predators, the mountain lion has rebounded with very little management. Endangered in the East, hiding out in the West, cougars have never been reintroduced. They have crept back on their own.

But for every quietly returned Michigan mountain lion, there are the splashy attention-getting cats, like the cougar that walked into an elementary-school yard in Gresham, Oregon, in 1996, thinking bad thoughts. Of the 45 fatal cat attacks recorded in North America, 13 have occurred since 1976. There were 77 attacks in North America during the 1990s—roughly half of the 172 attacks since 1900. Each new encounter is a grim reminder that the cougar is ready to reclaim its historic place at the table.

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