My wife pieced together a kill in our driveway, sending me pictures of deer tracks posed in a casual walk followed by a sprawl, deer fur in the snow, and faint signs of melt, a couple hours old at most. The next picture was of cat tracks the size of an adult human palm, a good sized mountain lion dragging the deer. A path like that of a saucer sled was left down the drive where the mountain lion gripped the deer’s throat in its teeth and pulled it a couple hundred feet to the canyon’s edge below our house. My wife took pictures and video all the way, and where it hauled the body over the snowy rimrock, her text said she stopped following it. If she were with me she might, but alone no way.
Later, we laid together in bed in the flicker-light of a fire and she recounted finding fresh tracks and studying the kill pattern. The deer, she said, were coming through together, a line of them, no sign of scatter before the attack, so it was swift, not a chase. The kill, she said, struck her as quick, quiet, dutiful, and done.
It happened right behind the house, between the firewood and solar panels, which gives a person pause going out for wood or clearing snow from the panels. We see plenty of cat tracks around here, benches of rimrock in a high desert piñon-juniper biome, perfect place for travel and ambush. In winter they follow deer like sharks trailing a shoal. When deer tracks are around, there will be mountain lions. The rest of the time, snow is mostly blank.
Lately, we’ve been seeing lots of deer tracks and a fresher mountain lion moving through. I go out for wood not afraid so much as aware. I don’t often worry about being attacked. When deer and elk populations dwindle in mountain lion terrain, they tend go down in size, targeting porcupines and house cats. Attacks on humans are rare. Where we live, deer and elk are plenty and lion health is generally good, making a physical confrontation with humans less likely. Bad encounters tend to come from starving or curious juveniles or elders barely holding onto their teeth, not a cat that takes down a full-grown mule deer in a single pounce.
In a popular outdoor magazine, I recently saw the headline, Why You Shouldn’t Be Afraid of Mountain Lions. The article is accurate and well-written, but the title rubbed me wrong. Fear is not an irrational reaction to a predator that has the ability to kill and eat you, though the chances are low of it actually happening. Since 1890, there have been 27 documented humans killed by mountain lions in North America. Cows, by comparison, kill about 20 people each year.
You should be afraid of mountain lions, just not all the time. Wait for the tingle on the back of the neck, a sense that you’re being watched. It feels like being touched by the tip of a feather. Or it might be a small bell ringing deep inside your head. It’s called being aware, and it can feel like fear.
When I read the magazine piece, I agreed with its sentiment, you shouldn’t walk around biting your nails thinking the next thing you’ll feel is the weight of a mountain lion and its claws. That’s no way to be. We are not a targeted prey species for a predator that kills namely deer and elk, a co-evolved design of feline and ungulate like a hand in a glove. We are more like a hand in a shoe. For mountain lions we may seem like fleshy beasts with loose and buttoned hides, known to be dangerous and unpredictable. Our meat must taste like bubble gum or gasoline, our skin freakishly hairless, like fish that walk on land. This is a reason not to fear mountain lions. They fear us.
A friend who raises sheep in southwest Colorado keeps a radio in the barn playing talk radio all night and he swears it keeps the mountain lions away. The sound of the human voice is a trigger. A 2017 study out of University of California at Santa Cruz played either the sound of frogs near mountain lion kills or the sound of human voices. Researchers found that the cats “fled more frequently, took longer to return, and reduced their overall feeding time by more than half in response to hearing the human ‘super predator’.” This term, super predator, is laid on us because we kill terrestrial carnivores at nine times the rate of their natural predators.
In about any room from South Dakota to California I could ask who has seen a mountain lion, and a small number of hands would go up. Asked if anyone has been watched by a mountain lion, every hand should be in the air. This could be the case even in Wisconsin or Florida, and the way Puma concolor is in motion these days, showing up in former habitats along the Eastern Seaboard, there will be more and more hands. The tickle on the back of your neck is called awareness.
Fear leans into aversion, anxiety, and dread. The trick with mountain lions is to lean the other way, more toward the awe side of the spectrum, at least the side that opens your eyes and turns up the senses. The tingle you feel on the back of your neck may not be a mountain lion watching you, but the lay of the ground you’ve walked into. Shadows and hiding places reveal ambush terrain where a good idea in general is to keep yourself alert. If that’s what fear does, it’s done its job.
Photo by Craig Childs
That’s a beautiful cat in your photo, Craig. It reminds me of a pair of cougars I had the pleasure and privilege to meet at a wildlife shelter where I volunteered. Both born in captivity, Cuffy, the male, took merde off nobody. Once I touched the hairs on the end of his tail and he pivoted so fast, he was a blur. Samantha, on the other hand, loved to have her head scratched. We had a ritual where I would lean against the chain link fence and she would come over and press her head against the fence. I would dig my fingers in behind her ears and under her chin. She loved it. During one incident where I had to clean her water bowl without help from a distractor, she watched and sniffed. When my supervisor came to help, I looked away from Samantha briefly. Then my supervisor screamed. I turned and Samantha had her mouth around my wrist, teeth gently touching the skin. I pulled away quickly, but later wondered if she really meant to bite me. Wouldn’t she have already done it in the second or two it took me to turn around? Was she just making contact? A love bite to a friend? Am I incredibly stupid and naive? Except for the latter question, I will never know for sure.
As you probably know, Craig, I live below the Catalina Mtns. here in Oro Valley, close to Oracle. There are a lot of deer here, drawn to the peace and quiet of the wretched golf courses. Mountain lions are seen quite frequently here and I did hear one once, crying out in the distance. I know they took down deer outside my old house. I am aware when I walk, turning once in a while, scanning the brush for anything that looks unusual. If anything, the coyotes are getting bolder. I carry a hardwood pestle about 10 inches long just in case. I appreciate your piece, Craig. I always take your advice and thoughts seriously.
25 years ago I was building an off-grid cabin in northern California. One winter day after finishing my days work I went to look at a rare geological formation about 1/2 mile from my cabin. I saw a mountain lion about 50 yards away, watching me. I returned the stare until it turned and evaporated into the forest and gathering darkness. I followed, crossed a stream, climbed the other side of the draw, and suddenly saw it again watching me. I slowly walked towards it and again it evaporated. I began walking towards a trail that would take me back to my cabin. It reappeared three times, staring at me. I thought I was being stalked. Then, as it was getting pretty dark, it ran down the slope and over to where the trail I’d planned to use started at the creek’s edge. I walked away from that to an old unused logging road and quickly splashed up the runoff running down it. It was 3 or 4 times as far to my cabin as the trail I’d planned to use but it felt much safer. It was full dark about 1/2 hour before I got to the cabin. I realized later on that I perhaps made it feel threatened by my initially following it, but it sure turned the tables on me as dark was falling. My senses have never been that attuned and on such full alert any other time in my life. Thank you, Craig, for reminding me of this experience and of your precise writing about so many animals over the years.
Thanks for this essay, Craig! As someone who has a variety of mountain lion encounters including tracking them (and being stalked by them!). Magnificent creatures that do stimulate the awareness … not a fear, but rather a knowing … that does give the hair on the back of the neck reason to rise … becoming aware of being watched is among other senses, a powerful connection to the Gaian cosmos.
I appreciated this piece. I live in the Mid-Atlantic area of the East Coast in Northern Virginia in a forested area next to an 800 acre national park. No mountain lions in my immediate area, occasional Bobcat, but an increasing number of coyotes. Nothing to really be concerned about except for my cats. But I appreciate the need to be aware and to evaluate my surroundings when I am out hiking or walking. I believe it is healthy to give your senses a regular workout — it is part of being alive and interacting with the world around you as well as sharing the space with other creatures.