Cougar Town

Over fifteen years ago, I first laid my eyes on our property, I fell in love. Grassy rangeland surrounded by mountain peaks. Immense, blue skies crisscrossed with contrails. Being on top of a plateau, it felt like I was in the center of a perfect circle. The feeling of safety was overwhelming. I knew that this is where I wanted to live.

Every now and then, we get reminders that we don't live in the big city. We live in the wilderness. The occasional rattlesnake under the porch. Plenty of prairie dogs. Bald eagles in the trees by the lake. Herds of pronghorn. I even once saw a badger. And coyotes. Lots and lots of coyotes. Not only do they serenade us at night, but our cat population suffers because of it. Cats have a lifespan of about one and a half years at my place.

Once, a few years ago, the kids were playing outside, and a black bear ran down the hill not more than fifty feet away from them. They ran into the house, screaming. Martha got into the van and chased that black bear for about a mile. Poor bear.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that - back in December, 2009 - we had a mountain lion sighting only yards away from my house. No one was home, but all the dogs were barking, including my indoor dog Cookie. My sister stepped outside to investigate just in time to see a mountain lion run up the hill, clearing a juniper tree in a single bound.

After this, I became a bit obsessed with this. It was a reminder that WE are the intruders. We are in the wilderness, in their terrain. I forbade my kids to play outside alone and at dusk. If kids had to go out early in the morning to do chores, they always went out in pairs. I read every documented cougar attack in the last twenty years. They are vicious animals and opportunists. And they are creatures of habit, returning back to the same locations frequently.

I was very worried about my children. At nights, sometimes Cookie would awaken us with her barks. When there is a stranger coming to our house, she has a certain bark. Late at night, this bark was different. It was a little... frightened. At nights, when I would go out to the faucet to fill water containers, I could swear that I could feel something watching me. It was probably paranoia.

It took us several months to kind of relax.

My six year-old son Alex is kind of a loner. He loves to play alone. His favorite game is to put on a backpack, grab his toy rifle and run up the hill. He will run around up there all day playing Army guy. He is determined that, when he grows up, he is enlisting in the Army. Temple, his mother, is very worried about this behavior.

"I don't want him to join the military!" she says. "We need to discourage him!"

I laughed about this. "EVERY six year-old guy dreams about being an Army guy. I did! There's nothing wrong about that."

So I took aside Alex and asked him why he wanted to join the Army.

"To serve my country," he told me. Can't argue with that.

"Who are you going to fight?" I asked.

"The Japanese," he answered.

Whoops. I guess I've been watching too many war movies.

But I would love to be sitting on the couch, looking out the window and seeing Alex - his little, plastic rifle cradled in his arms - running up the hill with determination. He would stay up there all day, if we let him.

At the end of March, Alex started to have nightmares every night about animals attacking him. Bears, wolves, etc. He would wake up terrified, asking to get into bed with his mother. Then one night, in his dream, he was attacked by wolf, and suddenly the wolf turned

into a mountain lion. Then the next night, the dream was about a mountain lion, and the night after that.

I was out of town, but Temple was at home with company staying over. One quiet afternoon, our guest was looking out the front room window - just in time to see the unmistakable body and tail of a mountain lion slip over the rocks of the hill - just thirty yards from our swing set. The swing set where our kids had been playing just about an hour earlier.

That was our second mountain lion sighting in the last year. That's enough. I decided to call Arizona Game & Fish. First of all, they wouldn't take my testimony. So I had to get my guest - who was here from California - to call Game & Fish to give a first-person account.

I thought that my report would get lost in a sea of paperwork. But surprisingly, Game & Fish called me that afternoon. They would be sending a local hunter to scout our property. The reason that they took my report seriously - our sighting was during the day. Most mountain lions keep out of sight during the day, only venturing out at night.

The next day, a pickup pulled up, and the hunter showed up. He sent his teenage son up the hill to scout things out. They found some tracks, but it was windy. They couldn't tell for sure if those tracks were made by a mountain lion.

He told us that the cats usually range about fifty miles and always come back to the same places at the most once a month. There was a particularly troublesome, old female that they had problems with occasionally. He instructed me to call him if it snowed at all, no matter how late. The snow would give them the advantage in tracking it.

After he left, he spoke to my brother. He expressed doubt that any mountain lion would be in the area.

"There's no water source," the hunter told my brother. "Mountain lions only go to where there is water."

"But there is a regular water source!" I said. "Our well."

Our water tank has no shut-off valve, so the excess water always go out of the overflow, making a constant pool of water next to the tank. There is always standing water about one hundred yards from our house. We always have problems with cattle stopping by to drink. Perfect for a mountain lion.

My brother called the hunter, and he came back and posted motion sensor cameras around the well.

That night, we got a skiff of snow. I immediately called the hunter. He said that they would start the hunt at 2AM that night. There had been a mountain lion sighting at a ranch several miles south of us.

His dogs got a scent of the mountain lion and gave chase for quite a while. They treed a female and two cubs. The cubs were already quite large, big enough to run from the dogs. Once up the tree, the female fell out, and the dogs roughed her up a bit. They collared the female and let her go. From all appearances, she seemed like a good mother, and the hunter didn't think that she posed any threats to humans.

But he said there were two problems - 1) The pronghorn were fawning, which brings the cats down from the peaks. 2) There were several males in the area, trying to kill her cubs to bring her into estrus. The threat came from them. He advised us to resume being cautious.

The tree where they caught the lioness and her cubs was only three miles from my house, near a cinder quarry owned by my in-laws. I am posting a photo. The dark spot at the base of the mountain is the quarry where she was caught.

I've lived here fifteen years. And I don't think the cats are new to the area. I think that they've been here all along. We just weren't aware of them.

In the weeks since this happened, we haven't heard from the hunter. One night, I noticed headlights up on the hill. I was recovering from surgery, so I couldn't go run up the hill. So I called the hunter. It was him, retrieving his game cam. The photos turned up several cows and some crows, but no lions. He reset the cameras to see if anything shows up.

It has now been about a month since the sighting. All in all, I think my kids are safer here than in the city. But still... Every night, when I step outside to turn off the generator/ inverter, there are only yards of black night separating me from the spot where the cougar was sighted. I can't keep but wondering - how often do these cats come back to my place? And how quickly could it cross the darkness before I am even aware it is there?