An Excerpt from Cougars on the Cliff
Preface
When a mountain lion kills, it relies on stealth, not savagery. Instead of recklessly pursuing a fleeing elk or deer, the cat stalks until opportunity strikes, then bursts from hiding like a missile to seize the hapless prey with crushing jaws while using its forepaws to apply lethal leverage and snap the quarry’s neck. That same incredibly powerful predator will also turn tail, run from a barking dog, and climb a tree to become an easy target. Human hunters have long capitalized on this behavioral incongruity to kill and ultimately push the mountain lion toward extinction. More recently, researchers began treeing the cats to save them.
I wrote this description more than three decades ago after many years of cougar research in central Idaho. I’d started a book about the adventure—and stopped. Got busy with other stuff, like studying big secretive cats throughout the world.
All the while, colleagues and friends kept encouraging me to resume writing the “cougar book.” But I kept setting it aside. Then I passed my ninety-first birthday and figured it was time to reboot the memoir you’re about to read.
I write now as mountain lions continue to make a miraculous recovery. After decades of study by myself and many researchers who followed, wanton killing of the cats by humans has given way to science-directed management. And the cougar, an extraordinarily adaptable animal, has responded by repopulating much of its historic home range—notably without ever being officially declared threatened or endangered.
Amid this turnaround, the mountain lion’s mystique lingers. So I share this never-before-told adventure story to both explore the past and lend new understanding to the great cat’s aura.
Few creatures on this planet elicit the level of fascination and fear that cougars do. We hold them in awe for their embodiment of the wild. At the same time, as increasing human–cougar encounters make headlines, we dread they’re out to kill us. Despite researchers’ continued attempts to inform the public that these animals prefer to hunt in solitude and avoid humans, cougars remain the stuff of erroneous legend. Like a feline version of Big Foot, the mythical quality of the mountain lion lives on.
My early study of these elusive predators will always be the underpinning of the professional legacy I might leave behind and maybe the reason some people still call me “that cougar guy.” In the name of science, my colleagues and I have captured, released, and followed hundreds of cougars over thousands of miles. But author Wallace Stegner, penning words I wish were mine, best captured the cougar’s nimbus in his “Memo to the Mountain Lion”:
Once, in every corner of this continent, your passing could prickle the stillness and bring every living thing to the alert. But even then you were felt more than seen. You were an imminence, a presence, a crying in the night, pug tracks in the dust of a trail. Solitary and shy, you lived beyond, always beyond. Your comings and goings defined the boundaries of the unpeopled.
Stegner’s words still prickle the now-silver hairs on the back of my neck.
Like most wildlife biologists of considerable eld (age), my name is strewn throughout professional journals where research findings are rendered matter-of-factually onto gray pages of print. For the most part, these are compendious narratives that include charts, graphs, data, and boiled-down conclusions. Such succinct publications are invaluable because peer-reviewed documentation is absolutely necessary to further our understanding of wild creatures that share the earth with us.
On the other hand, writing a memoir has allowed me to shed the constraints of technical writing. I’ve tripped my memory in this liberating exercise by poring over copious documents ranging from government agency letters and memos to newspaper articles yellowed by age. I also reexamined a decade’s worth of field notes and sifted through hundreds of photographs stored in large cardboard boxes. It’s been like lifting a curtain to reveal the who, what, when, where, why, and how — to borrow the journalism credo — behind scientific endeavor. It’s also been a study in human behavior—not only my own and the many people who helped shed light on these enigmatic predators but also of other people who challenged the research and some who tried to sabotage it.
The Idaho cougar project, conducted between 1964 and 1973, set the stage for everything that followed in my career. The study led to my applying for and getting the position as leader of the Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit at the University of Idaho, where I served for eighteen years. Following that, I created two private nonprofit research institutes that became vehicles for continued funding and long-term studies on many species worldwide.
As a result, I’ve had the good fortune of laying hands on virtually all the world’s species of big cats that hunt in faraway places. I’ve been privileged to steal into the unpeopled environs of the world’s foremost felines. And I’ve learned that there’s nothing to fear about these creatures — except the fear of not learning enough to understand and save them. Healthy predator populations mean healthy ecosystems. And more work is always needed to enhance our understanding of all animals, especially those that kill for a living.
So let’s rewind more than half a century to a less defined time in 1964, not necessarily to the beginning of this story but to a place where the world’s first mountain lion study took root—to Idaho’s wintry wilderness. It was there, in the treacherous up-and-down folds of the Payette National Forest’s Big Creek drainage, that a population of mountain lions had retreated for survival and I naively set out to unravel their secrets.
Chapter One
Big Country
We hunted like wolves churning through heavy snow, one in front of the other breaking trail, then switching off to save energy. It was late afternoon, Christmas Day 1964. A single mountain lion, the second in what would become a decade-long quest, had been captured, tagged, and released hours earlier. Our two redbone hounds, their frenzied bays echoing in the canyons below, were chasing a third cat in the bluffs above.
Late December 1964, Idaho Primitive Area: trekking with full packs toward Horse Mountain early in the study.
Then, in waning daylight, the landslide struck.
It began typically, stones skipping loose far above us, perhaps dislodged by the pursuing hounds, then slabs of rock and snow sliding downhill, followed by boulders and snapped-off trees. Within seconds, the entire top of Horse Mountain seemed bent on burying us. Up to our rumps in snow, already exhausted by the pursuit, furious that our hounds had left the tree and allowed possibly two errant mountain lions to escape, Wilbur Wiles and I were instantly faced with a force too powerful to flee. The advancing rumble built to a loud groan. Trees were now being uprooted. The earth rolled underfoot. The onslaught became a thunderous roar. It was impossible to tell from where the landslide, bolstered by tons of avalanching snow, was descending, only that it was charging down in our direction. No time to run. Frankly, no will to run. It was as if the long day of chasing mountain lions had drained us of any idea of how to escape. If the earth was about to deliver death, there seemed no way to evade it. So we stood our ground, anchored on a precarious trail that cut across the steep slope, sharing a silent wish that the hurtling onrush from above would spill ahead, behind—anywhere but on us.
Instinctively, I turned my back, looked downhill, and crouched—as if the fifty-pound pack I carried might offer some protection. Wilbur did the same. In retrospect, I suspect there is no better place for two men to consummate a lasting respect for one another than in the path of a full-blown avalanche.
And then, as quickly as it started, the landslide lunged past us some fifty yards ahead, totally erasing the sparse path we’d been following and taking a chunk of ground the size of a downtown parking lot in tow, retrieving its fury as the roar subsided to a rumble, then a groan, and finally the staccato of settling stones. Afternoon light had given way to dusk. All was silent—except for the crashing of my heart and the distant baying of Duke and Chub somewhere above, still on the trail of the cougars we’d been following.
“My . . . my god,” I stammered as I turned toward Wilbur.
“Rockslide” he flatly replied. “Avalanche. Take your choice.”
I gawked. There Wilbur stood in his wool clothing, his steady breaths visible in the bitter cold—this quintessential master of understatement stationed within spitting distance of what could have caused instant death, this rawhide-tough contemporary mountain man I was beginning to know as a friend and would eventually consider kin, this woods-wise oracle of precise words gradually unfolding a matter-of-fact grin that came with knowing how big country can swallow the foolhardy.
“Time to quit,” he said with a deadpan expression.
Looking back on that Christmas Day nearly six decades ago, it’s still hard to explain how something as harrowing as an avalanche would eventually pale in significance to what the next decade would bring. We had come to the rugged, often intimidating, sometimes sinister, always awesome backcountry of central Idaho to attempt something virtually everyone said was impossible—study mountain lions on their own turf. Too secretive. Too aloof. Too enigmatic. Too dangerous. Frankly, too challenging to collar with any real scientific understanding, said the doubters. And we were doing it in the depth of winter, with snow piling up daily, making the worst of a bad situation.
But the same snow that seemed to be forever collapsing on the high country and impeding our travel was necessary. Today’s telemetry technology wasn’t available. And even though we’d be first to radio-collar mountain lions six years later in the study and be able to follow them year-round, we initially worked only in winter and relied solely on snow for trailing and scent hounds to tree this mystifying animal that some people claimed to have heard “screaming like a lunatic” in the wilderness. The cats wouldn’t come to us. We had to go to them. In many ways, Wilbur and I felt like pioneers trailblazing our way into a vast unknown. Or were we foolhardy dreamers?
I remember hiking in Montana, long before studying mountain lions ever crossed my mind—up on the Bitterroot Divide, looking off into the seemingly endless mountains of Idaho. Around Missoula, Montana, people talked about “Idaho Country” as if legendary mountain man Jeremiah Johnson himself balked at entering. It’s that intimidating. All you have to do today is park your car atop Lolo Pass on U.S. Highway 12, take a short hike, look west, and you’ll understand. The country hasn’t changed. It still gives me pause. In Montana, you see the eastern slopes of the Bitterroot Range. You see valleys, gorgeous foothills, and I love it all. But Idaho lends perspective. It is so big and so vast, and you just know those mountains go on forever—perhaps beyond imagination—or at least to the Big Creek drainage where we’d established a study area pocked with makeshift camps and stored provisions to ensure our survival.
In the 1950s and into the 1960s, very little carnivore research was being done, especially on large carnivores. Most of the wildlife investigations were on trophy game species like deer, elk, and moose. The ungulates had big recreational, monetary, and, in some cases, subsistence value. Predators, on the other hand, were dismissed as bad with no positive benefit. So my aim with mountain lions was to mark all individuals in a distinct population unit, then study the makeup of that population and its function in the environment. This had never been attempted.