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Outside Magazine May 2003

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Stalker (cont.)


	The hunter: Arizona rancher and environmentalist Warner Glenn has tracked cougars all his life. (Antonin Kratochvil)

IT's ONE THING TO SLING BIOLOGY about cats. It's an entirely different thing to seek the lion out in this increasingly crowded continent. For me, the how and why of the cougar's return wouldn't mean a thing unless I could step into its world. Call it a quest for wildness—and by that I don't mean ungroomed trails and blackflies. I wanted to find a cat, have it hiss and turn on me with those green-gold eyes and bare its teeth at me before it bounded away. I wanted to understand the lion on its own terms.

Warner Glenn knows cougars better than almost anyone in the country. Glenn is a second-generation cat tracker; lions are his life. I'm a meat hunter, but I can't fathom wanting to shoot a lion to hang on my wall. Still, I respect men like Glenn, who represent a melding of the old and new ways of dealing with the tricky question of hunting. The Glenn ranch lies east of Douglas, Arizona, in the southeast corner of the state, down a washed-out two-track swarming with Border Patrol agents, trash, and sagebrush, the purple-mountain glow of the Peloncillos and Chiricahuas hovering in the distance. It's a few thousand dry acres of prickly pear and red-rock earth, dotted with stubborn-looking cattle broiling in the desert heat and mule deer looking on with ungulate schadenfreude.

Glenn, 67, is not some pressed-Wrangler rich guy running down cows in an air-conditioned Range Rover. He wears chaps and boots, a tattered Carhartt jacket, and a white hat. He rises at 5 a.m. and, after some eggs and a quick prayer for rain, works and rides until the sun beats him indoors. It's a life he inherited from his father, who started hunting cougars to protect his herd and pretty soon became the go-to man along the border whenever a lion decided to munch on a cow or snack on a few sheep. In addition to breeding calves and colts, Glenn earns a living taking clients out for guided hunts and stalking the occasional problem cat for local ranchers. He's passed that living on to his daughter, Kelly, a licensed guide and 41-year-old poster girl for the Ruger gun company. Kelly has hunted with her father since she was 12, working the hounds and mules as they track cats for days across the desert.

Hanging in the living room of the Glenns' modest cement-block ranch house is a life-size poster of the Duke, and a mounted cougar head, its plastic eyes locked in some approximation of predatory rage. "I've seen lion numbers increase more in the past ten years than almost any time I can remember," Glenn told me, the wall behind him full of framed photographs of cougars in juniper trees.

When he talked about killing lions, Glenn became serious, almost shy. His voice dropped to a rasp. "I'm not a killer," he said, giving me the Old West, high-noon eyeball. "I'm a rancher and conservationist." He described how, for him, it's no longer about the killing. "You have to have a tender place in your heart," he said. "Even though the animal needs to be managed, it's sad to see one shot. But it's what I do."

Years of sweat and toil have made Glenn realistic about land use. He doesn't see ranching as anathema to good environmental stewardship. In 1994, he and his wife, Wendy, helped found the Malpai Borderlands Group, a coalition of ranchers, scientists, and government agencies working with the Nature Conservancy to promote sustainable ranching and other livelihoods that support open space. Run out of the Glenns' house, the MBG's aim is to preserve the area's unfragmented landscape and its diverse human, plant, and animal life—including a new arrival.

In 1996, Glenn ran into an animal that would speed his transformation into an environmentalist. Out hunting with his daughter and a client in the Peloncillos, on the Arizona-New Mexico line, Kelly's hounds cut a hot track. But something about this cat was different. Not only had it gone a long time without treeing, but its prints were unusually large and oddly shaped.

In the rugged terrain, Kelly stayed back with the client, leaving just Glenn and the dogs, who finally bayed the cat on a steep rock outcropping. Warner dismounted, and was astonished to find himself face to face with a jaguar. He'd heard stories about the endangered subtropical cat the Mexicans call el tigre, seen pictures of dead jaguars hanging from trees, and knew that the cat had once ranged throughout the Southwest. But nothing had prepared him for the surreal orange-and-black creature staring back at him. He knew right away that he wasn't going to kill it. He ran back for his camera, wrestled the dogs away, and watched the cat leap off. Glenn's photographs forced officials to change the jaguar's U.S. status from extinct to endangered, and biologists have since confirmed the presence of a tiny itinerant population in northern Mexico.

Early one morning this winter, just after dawn, Glenn and I went for a ride. He saddled up the mules, holstered his pistol, and unleashed the hounds and we were off in a barking blur.

Picking a trail over the mesa with Glenn felt old and practiced—the dogs doing what they were bred to do, Glenn jumping down to neck troublesome hounds together and stopping to scan the horizon. For a moment I felt plugged into an ancient game, as the hounds sounded and darted ahead and Glenn turned to check on me, his eyes bright and alert. The land, which at first glance seemed relatively featureless, gradually revealed hundreds of arroyos and small valleys, rock overhangs and brushy draws—plenty of places for cats to hide. Overhead, the sky vaulted high and blue. It was easy to see why Glenn wanted the land to remain open and unaltered, full of lions, people, and other wild things. "The minute you've got roads and 40-acre parcels," he said, "you've broken the landscape forever."

The day passed without the hounds catching a scent, which was just as well, because Glenn will track cougars only on hunts with paying clients or when one is involved in a livestock killing. I left with the sense that, after so many years on the chase, lions were as essential to the Glenns as rain, that here was a rancher for whom a land without lions was not an option. But I was no closer to seeing one.

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