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Outside Magazine May 2003

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Stalker (cont.)


	The cat: Yellowstone cougar F125 stares down from a Douglas fir, moments before taking a ketamine-laced dart. (Antonin Kratochvil)

ALL FELINES, WILD AND IN LITTER BOXES, share a certain hard-wired hunter's view of the world. Fellow predators they eye with cool disdain, while prey bring out that empty soup's-on stare.

On the night of February 8, 2001, after attending a yoga class and enjoying seafood fettuccine at a local restaurant, 52-year-old tugboat captain Jon Nostdal began the long bike ride back to his boat in Port Alice, British Columbia. The road ran along an inlet and was lined on both sides by heavy woods. There was a full moon, and stories of recent cougar sightings swirled through Nostdal's head as he labored up and down the hilly road. He heard something he later described as "fingernails on a chalkboard" as he slowed to work his way up the last hill. The next moment, Nostdal felt something smack into his daypack, and he lost control of the bike. "The back of my head felt like it had been hit with a two-by-four," he said. "When I tried to get up, it was like I was drunk."

Nostdal quickly shrugged off his pack and saw a young mountain lion gnawing on his yoga mat. His scalp burned, and blood ran down his neck from where he'd been clawed. The lion abandoned the mat, exploded off the pavement, and clamped down on Nostdal's arm. For more than ten minutes he fought with the cat, repeatedly dislodging it only to have it lunge again. "I was both terrified and enthralled," he recalls. Mill worker Elliot Cole was driving home when the lights of his truck illuminated the scene. "I saw this man sitting in the road with a cougar wrapped around his neck and I thought, Oh, boy, this guy's gotten himself in some trouble," Cole says. Without thinking, he grabbed a heavy book bag and began bashing the cat, and when that didn't faze the animal, he punched it several times in the head. It wasn't until he grabbed Nostdal's bike and pinned the wheel against the lion's throat that it finally released its victim. Both men report that the lion's utter silence, even as they were beating it, was the most unsettling part.

Canada strictly regulates cougar hunting, but Nostdal recalls that soon after the attack, a cat was found dead, tossed on the clubhouse lawn of Port Alice's golf course. Whether or not it was the homicidal cougar, it wasn't the only cat in town. In August 2002, 61-year-old retired mill worker Dave Parker was out for his nightly walk when a 100-pound phantom ambushed him from an overhanging cliff. Man and cougar went to the ground as the cat stripped the flesh from Parker's face and prepared to sink its teeth into his neck. Parker had the presence of mind to reach into his pocket and pull out his knife, a three-inch blade. He managed to stab the cat twice before it pulled away, cutting its own throat on the upheld knife. Parker watched it crawl a few feet and then bleed out. He staggered nearly a mile to a pulp mill, where workers recall him looking like something out of a horror movie. Severely injured and in need of reconstructive surgery, he survived.

Most experts agree that a person attacked by a cougar should fight like hell. Unless you resist, a puma will treat you like food. Lions attack by ambushing, wrapping their powerful front legs around the neck of their prey, and sinking their fangs into the base of the skull. An adult cat weighs between 70 and 175 pounds and can measure eight feet from nose to tail, with the largest tom ever recorded tipping the scale at 276 pounds. The blast of their initial pounce is often enough to snap the spinal cord of a smaller animal; larger prey may require that they lock on to the throat, cut off the air supply, and go to work with claws and canines, severing arteries. Quick, clean—and solo. Except for mating pairs, or mothers with kittens, cougars travel alone, hunting roughly a deer a week to survive. Or whatever else is around.

Barbara Schoener, a 40-year-old endurance runner killed in Northern California's Auburn State Recreation Area in April 1994, probably never saw it coming. A female lion hit her so hard they tumbled 30 feet down a steep hillside before Schoener got away and the cat chased her for 25 more. Deep slashes on Schoener's hands and arms suggest that she struck back at her attacker at least once, but in the end the cat delivered its fatal bite and, after feeding, cached Schoener's body under leaf molt and dirt. When lion hunters killed the culprit, they found that she had a kitten, who was put in a zoo and given the ridiculous name of Willow.

According to Paul Beier, a conservation biologist at Northern Arizona University who's studied cougars in the increasingly developed Santa Ana Mountains, southeast of L.A., anybody who's spent a lot of time hiking out west has probably been closely watched by a cat. "They see this big hunk of meat walking around and they're confused, because it's on two legs instead of four," Beier says. "Basically, they're trying to figure you out and see if you run like prey or stand your ground." Given our often oblivious proximity to mountain lions, Beier is surprised that there aren't more attacks.

Children are particularly tempting targets. I've seen cats in zoos watching the smallest kids, ignoring their parents—back hunched, tail straight, wishing the Plexiglas gone. Children have been snatched from campsites, mauled on trails, dragged from family tents, or, like one four-year-old in eastern Washington in 1999, attacked in their grandparents' backyards. When I related these stories to a father I met at a local hot springs near Livingston, he said that although he's never seen a cougar, he keeps a pistol in his backpack. I told him I didn't think the gun would do much good, that by the time he fished it out of his pack the damage would be done. The man shivered and walked away, clearly rattled, probably imagining all those times he'd let his children dash ahead of him on hikes. I've been guilty of the same thing. And yet I don't want to scare my curious daughter when she's blasting down a trail by warning her that a cat may be waiting to eat her.

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