Cougar!

With over thirty years of trail hiking under my (steadily more prodigious) belt, I suppose you could imagine that I’ve experienced a number of close encounters of the critter kind. Given the time and daylight, I will often stop to study those that will stay relatively still long enough for a close examination, whether they be newts on a mating mission, ants on a raid, or a Phoebe on a fencepost.

The hills and dales and trails of the California wine country surely do boast a wide variety of native animal species. And while I’ve seen a lot of the more common ones (or let them crawl upon me), there’s one species of fauna that can be exciting to see, even when most times I’d rather not see it. Or wish that you would.

Because the astrological charts have determined that we today enter the sign of Leo, I thought it a good time to take a tip from Nature and share a few personal stories about lions.

The mountain lion that roams the forests, mountains, and deserts of California is not indigenous merely to California, but actually ranges across the U.S. and from southwestern Canada through Mexico all the way into Argentina. Puma concolor is called a variety of names, including puma, panther, jaguar, and even jaguarondi (a short-legged variety), but here in California we often opt to call this big cat a cougar or, simply, mountain lion.

Solitary, nocturnal, and therefore seldom seen, cougars can grow to be pretty big, as much as five feet long or more, tip to tail. The cougar tracks I spied one day on a trail last Spring in the Livermore hills suggested a full-grown adult; the paw prints were at least three inches wide. I had earlier seen another adult lion in those same hills, thankfully from the comfort of my speeding truck. This lion had been hunkering just off the roadside and staring intently downslope at potential prey, tail switching, while my buddy Adam and I rolled by. Even at 35 miles per hour, our view of this great cat had been unmistakable.

About six years ago, on a red-letter July 4th day, I had been vacationing at our rural family property near Clear Lake and preparing for an afternoon picnic with friends on the shores of the Lake about two miles away. My property existed in a fairly populated area, yet while I was walking my cooler out to the truck, I chanced to sight down my easement across the road toward an open creekside hill.

Sure enough, there was a cat. Not a full-grown one, mind you – its coat was still mottled black and tan, and it wasn’t quite twice the size of a housecat. It was therefore surely an adolescent. But that long, low-slung crouch, that arrogant, slinking way of walking, and that black bulb on the tail – a clear giveaway – coupled with the realization that there was nothing more than 75 yards of air between me and that – that lion! – suggested I pack the cooler quickly but keep both eyes fastened. Fortunately the cat vanished, slowly, uphill and into the tall grass, away from my side of civilization. My friends and I, though intrigued by the cat’s presence, chose not to follow it, instead keeping our plans at the Lake where the sighting later of a Bald Eagle on the wing really made our Independence Day.

The best view I ever had of a cougar, though, was early in my experience and late in the school year, on a hike in the local Saratoga hills. Though I hadn’t yet considered hiking as a lifelong pastime, I had experienced a handful of backpacking trips to the high country, and I had quickly become hooked on being outdoors. So here I was, exploring a trail to Goat Rock off Skyline Boulevard with a high school friend, just for the view.

I was a kid of 17, and not a very tall kid. Yet. In retrospect, I am glad I had not been hiking alone! My buddy Phil and I had been walking and talking, not paying much attention to anything but our own banter, when we trudged up a low knoll to suddenly freeze in our tracks. There, not more than 20 feet away over the knoll, was an adult mountain lion!

I’ll never forget the steady gaze with which our eyes locked onto each other, the black-tipped ears, the pure rippling sinew heaving beneath that beautiful pelt, the fraction of an instant in which that memory seared into my brain forever.

Fortunately for Phil and me, we were, together, bigger than the cougar and, fear being more attributable to most fauna than it is to us silly humans, the cougar immediately turned tail and vanished down the far side of the hill. Phil and I, blinking briefly at each other, chose to follow the cat, but by the time we gained the hill, the cat had disappeared into the trees far below.

Even now, when thinking about that moment, my heart still skips a beat. At the time, I truly did not yet know how to react in the face of a lion attack. If I had been alone – small as I was – I might have become kitty food that day.

They say things come in threes. I don’t know if that’s worth believing, or even if predictions based on star patterns can have an impact on our lives. But I do think that, with the frequency of my wanderings, I’ll see another mountain lion again, somewhere out there, someday. And if I do, and you’re with me, then take heart, my friend, for we’re both a lot taller now.

~winehiker

Related posts:

• When a mountain lion attacks, why do we shoot first and ask questions later?
• The trails, they are a-callin’
• Perambulating the Perfect Perimeter

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 2:02 pm and is filed under grape squeezins, winehiker's trails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.