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Outside Magazine May 2003

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Stalker
He's a loner, he's lethal, and he's got your scent. Feline phantom, ultimate predator, the cougar has ghosted back into the American wild—and your backyard. (Hey, Marge, have you seen the poodle lately?)

By Elwood Reid


	Nice kitty: a female cougar prowls near the town of Kalispell, Montana. (Gail Shumway/Taxi)

One evening last December, on a snowy ridge in the Absaroka Mountains outside Livingston, Montana, I cut some cougar tracks. They seemed to materialize out of nowhere, rising up a steep hillside tangled with wind-fallen trees. I bent and fit my fingers into one of the cold depressions, trying to conjure the cat into flesh and blood. It was dusk, and even though I could see the glow of porch lights in the valley below, the unexpected discovery of the cougar sign instantly transformed the woods into a dark and wild place. Shadows shifted, the wind battered dead branches, and I felt that old electric snarl of adrenaline that comes only in the presence of a large, meat-eating predator.

I'd been casing this neglected place for weeks; here at last was proof that I was walking where a cougar had walked. In some ways I'd been looking for this cat for years. Cougars have haunted my dreams, refusing to reveal themselves; when I was 12, scrambling alone up a moderately wild mountain in Pennsylvania's Sullivan County Highlands, I thought I saw one, watching me. In that moment of trail fatigue when tree stumps become bears, I rubbed my eyes, looked back, and saw . . . nothing. But those few seconds of doubt and fear were enough to permanently rearrange my idea of wilderness. It hooked me deep, and I've spent a lifetime looking for places where I'm not at the top of the food chain. Twenty-five years later, the thrill was still there, clanging around my heart as I followed the tracks around a large boulder where the tight bunching of prints suggested the mountain lion had paused—perhaps to check out the dense folds of brush below, studying how best to approach dinner.

I kept climbing, hoping to cut fresher tracks farther up the ridge, but by the time I reached the timberline the sun had fizzled out behind the Gallatin Mountains and I'd lost them. I didn't want to stumble around in the moonless dark, so I decided to head back. Halfway down, I picked up an iced-over deer trail and followed it until, bang, I hit the lion tracks again, big as my fist and frost-free—fresh. Remembering stories of cougars doubling back and tailing unsuspecting hikers for miles, I looked around. There were rocks and small pines, but no cat, so I followed the tracks down until I was nearly on all fours, scanning for a blood trail.

I'd topped a fold and begun the last scramble to my truck when something streaked across the snowfield a hundred yards in front of me. I squinted. At first I thought it was a deer, but the animal had a lower profile and ran like a wolf or coyote. Or possibly even a cougar. OK, I thought, a small and very scared yearling. But it didn't bound or hop, and when I finally allowed myself to think that it really might have been a cat, it had disappeared over the hill and into the blackness below. By the time I retreated to the truck, the only thing I was sure of, besides being tired and cold, was that I wanted more than ever to find a mountain lion.

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ELWOOD REID is the author of the novel Midnight Sun and the short-story collection What Salmon Know.

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