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Outside Magazine May 2003

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Stalker (cont.)


	Toni Ruth examines a bighorn sheep killed by a cougar. (Antonin Kratochvil)

WE NEVER FOUND the kittens, but nearby we uncovered a flayed bighorn sheep, its horns and hemorrhaged eyes giving it a slightly satanic look. Ruth went into full C.S.I. mode, snapping on latex gloves and flipping her Gerber knife open; she expertly peeled back the fur and gore to reveal a ruined throat and the deep, purple entry wounds of the cat's fangs. "Feel that?" she said, guiding my fingers into the cold flesh. "She crushed the voice box and tore open the jugular." Pointing to some fur hung up on a snag of fallen logs, Ruth re-created the kill, describing how the lion must have ambushed the sheep, ridden it down the steep slope, and then, after finishing the job, dragged it down here to this rock.

Even after all the blood and hair samples, the zoned-out lion whose fur I'd run my fingers through seemed no less mysterious. It felt more comfortable to imagine the cat as I'd first seen it, powerfully bounding away. As we crawled back up the cliff, I kept thinking how easily the lion used this steep, tucked-away corner of the park, and how it must have rushed the sheep, like some deadly dream, the bighorn not knowing what hit it until it felt the clamp of teeth and saw its own blood. This was the cat I'd been searching for, and when I told Ruth later, she agreed. "I hate watching the cats come out of the drug more than anything else," she said. "My favorite thing is simply being out in cougar country, tracking a cat, thinking that around the bend I could find a kill or knowing that a cat may be watching me. I find great comfort in this. I've enjoyed curling up under a sunny ledge next to a cat track and taking a nap—a world of difference from how I am walking the concrete streets of some city."

We should all be so lucky to experience a nap on a cat ledge, but the fact is, cougars will never attain the cuddly image foisted on other megaspecies to ensure their survival. Lions remain stubborn and untameable symbols of a wilderness as rightly unknowable as they themselves are. "Pumas are such masters of invisibility," says retired Arizona Game & Fish Department biologist Harley Shaw, author of Soul Among Lions, "that even when we researchers began to collar and collect data on them, only a little of their mystery was lost."

Once, when Shaw was giving a lecture at Saguaro National Park, a woman rancher asked him, "What good are they?"

"Instead of answering with the usual cliché about how lions are necessary for the balance of nature," Shaw says, "I told her that I liked knowing they were out there." For Shaw, they represent the part of him that will always want to forgo civilization and live in a wild landscape—as he puts it, "a rather mythical vision of perfect freedom." For others, the cougar is something else—a focal point for hostility, a survivor worth protecting, a night stalker, a Native American talisman of power. "The secret to the allure," Shaw says, "is how we each incorporate the creature into our own private myth."

We have conquered the West, transformed the shrinking forests into safe places to stroll and sweat, but sometimes the woods bite back. And when they do, we respond with ancient fear and loathing. We forget that wilderness is supposed to be wild, that a hundred years ago almost nobody went into the woods without a gun or the sharp awareness that there were things out there that could kill you.

Today more people die from bad egg salad than cougar attacks, but that does nothing to diminish our fixation on the remote possibility of a silent hunter pouncing on our backs. The wilderness crank in me says this is a good thing, because even the most used-up patch of forest, river bottom, or rock field comes alive once you know there is something out there that will eat you, or at least try to, given the right circumstances. It forces you to pay attention, to unplug. Each cougar lurking out there is a stubborn reminder that, even as we pave ourselves into tight grids, they'll keep coming, against long odds—ghostly relics of a time not so long ago when the forests teemed with their predatory presence. And if we don't understand their place in our midst, all we'll have left is our fear.

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