Cougar Close Encounter

Here’s how I heard the story from my friend Bill.

It was on a backpacking trip in the Cascade Mountains somewhere in Northern California or Southern Oregon.

Bill’s backpacking companions were members of a single family including a mother, a father and two children. Tired at the end of a strenuous day of backpacking, they built a campfire, cooked and ate their supper and laid out their sleeping bags. They chose a linear arrangement with the four sleeping bags of the family lined up between a tall pine tree and the dying fire.

Bill rolled out his bag in line with the others but on the far side of the fire.

A few minutes after they had climbed into their sleeping bags and were dozing off, they were jolted awake by the anxious voice of the mother saying to her husband, “Honey, I hear something.”

Her husband raised up on one elbow and listened intently. “It’s only the breeze, dear. Go back to sleep.”

Bill, a bit annoyed, wiggled his head out from his mummy sleeping bag and listened. Nothing. The two kids wiggled down deeper into their bags.

Twenty minutes later, the mother, who hadn’t slept a wink, shook her husband awake and implored him to stoke up the fire. “I really do hear something, and I’m scared. I think it is something in that tree.”

The husband, more from the pains a long day of hiking than from the annoyance, groaned as he unzipped his bag.

Bill said in the dark, “Lie down. I’ve got it.”

A waning moon cast a faint silver light on a fat stick that Bill had strategically placed within reach of his sleeping pad. He reached his bare arm into the cold air and picked up the stick. Rolling toward the fire on the other side and stretching his arm full length, he prodded the glowing coals and gently placed the stick on them. Then he groped and found some smaller sticks to add to the fire, all the while being careful to avoid creating sparks.

The coals caught the small sticks and flamed. In the increasing firelight, Bill glanced at the tree and listened carefully. Again he heard nothing. He settled onto his back and zipped up his bag.

Before closing his eyes once again, he took another more careful look at the lowest branches of the pine tree. He thought he saw a movement but dismissed it.

And then he saw the tawny cat streak silently over the line of would-be sleepers: over the mom and the dad, over the kids, over the whelming fire and finally over Bill’s tense body.

The next morning Bill had temporary proof of the encounter: a bruise on each leg where the fleeing cougar’s tail had whipped them on its landing just inches beyond his right knee.

Photo Credit: Malcolm

by Richard Davidian, Ph.D.

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