I really like the part where the mama cougar cougar is teaching the little cougar to hunt!
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True Cougar Tales
Truth is more amazing than myth when it comes to stories about human encounters with big cats


Bob Mottram; The News Tribune
January 9, 2002


It's a little after midnight, only a couple of years ago, and a man has just let two dogs out of his house near Issaquah.
Suddenly he hears an unusual noise outside. He returns to the door and cautiously opens it, and one of his dogs races into the house. The dog is cowering, shaking, whining. And the dog is alone. The man can feel the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

He picks up a flashlight and steps out through the door, into the dark. His frightened dog remains inside. The night is deathly still. He searches for his other dog, but it's gone without a trace. Finally he pauses beneath a tree, his eyes and ears on full alert.

THUNK!

Something heavy hits the ground beside him in the dark. He jumps and flips his light on, and there it is: The other dog.

And it is dead.

The man twists around and shines his light above him, into the tree. And two green eyes stare back. Behind the eyes are 120 pounds of lethal intent.

The man moves slowly, so as not to encourage an attack. He retrieves a rifle from his house. He kills the cat.

South Florida has its gators, Montana its grizzly bears. Arizona has its poisonous snakes. Story and myth have grown around them all.

Here at home we have our cats. They call them mountain lions or pumas in parts of the mountain West, catamounts in the East. In the Northwest, though, we call them cougars, and Northwesterners have no need for myth.

The truth is amazing enough.

When campfires flicker deep in Northwest woods, staving off the darkening night, people shiver and huddle closer to that little piece of light. And then the story-telling starts. When it comes your turn to talk, here is a handful of tales - all true - from among those in the archives of The News Tribune that you can use to weave a spell with campfire friends.

Tug-of-war for life

The time is August 1999 and a man from Aberdeen awakens in his tent about 2 a.m. He's camped at Sol Duc Campground in Olympic National Park. His dog outside is yelping. The night is black.

The man steps out of his tent, and pulls on the chain to which his dog is tethered. Something in the dark pulls back. A tug-of-war ensues. After a moment the pulling stops, and the man sees something melt into the night.

The wounds sustained by his 65-pound dog are evidence that the something was a cougar. The dog survives.

A young cougar's near trophy

It's late June 1994, a Saturday about 7 p.m., on the Skookumchuck River in southern Thurston County. It's broad daylight that time of day that time of year. Mario Troche of Pierce County is fishing with a friend.

Troche, wearing chest waders, has walked up the trunk of a large maple tree whose roots are under water a few feet from the bank and whose sloping trunk rises gradually over the river. His friend, Chris Billings, fishes from the opposite bank. They're joking back and forth.

Suddenly, Troche gets a funny feeling. He turns around, and he catches his breath. On the bank behind him is a cat, its head the size of a volleyball, its forearms the size of Troche's calves. She lies in the shadows, staring at Troche.

But that's just half the problem. On the trunk of his tree is another, smaller cat. And it's coming after him. Troche is amazed. The cat had waded belly-deep in water to reach the tree.

The big cat appears to be agitated. She shifts her rear end back and forth, as though trying to find traction. She flicks her tail. Then Troche's gaze returns to the second cat, the one on his log, whose weight he estimates at nearly 100 pounds. It continues to close the distance; to 10 feet, then to 6.

Suddenly, truth floods Troche's brain. These are a mother and a cub. The mother is teaching the cub to hunt. Troche is the huntee.

The water behind him is 8 feet deep. If he jumps, his waders will fill with water and pull him down. Both men yell, but it doesn't scare the cat. So Troche wields his only weapon. He uses his fishing rod to whip the cat about the face. This doesn't faze the cat. It bites at the rod and hits at it with its paws.

The mother watches, growling.

Finally, Billings throws some rocks. They hit the cub in the ribs and chest. Slowly, it backs down off the log, leaps up the bank, and goes to Mom.

In an instant, they are gone.

The disappearing goats

The night was such a dark and eerie one. Some horses pastured across the road milled uneasily for so long, sending shivers of concern along the spines of those who heard them. A neighbor's dog barked frantically at some unseen presence in the dark. And Alan Galbreth realized how isolated he and his family were on their five-acre plot a few miles outside Marysville.

Finally the sun returned, and when Galbreth went to his window in the morning he could see his goats, all 10 of them, browsing peacefully in their pasture behind the woven-wire fence. The sight was reassuring.

Three hours later, Galbreth looked again. A goat was down.

Galbreth hurried to the pasture, and what he found was chilling. His goat was dead. So was another. And another. So were two more. Not eaten, just dead.

Almost before he knew it, darkness was coming around again. As it descended, Galbreth locked his remaining goats inside their shed, and went into the house. In 20 minutes he returned. No. 6 was gone.

Galbreth slept fitfully that night. Next day he kept his four remaining goats inside the shed, and kept them there that night as well. By the following morning, it appeared the killing had stopped. He released the goats into a little pen beside the shed.

That afternoon he glanced outside, and couldn't believe what he saw. Another goat was down. An animal had pinned it to the dirt.

Galbreth retrieved a rifle, stepped onto his deck, and fired several shots. The assailant curled its toes and died. It turned out to be a cougar; just a kitten, hardly more than 40 pounds. Just losing its baby spots.

Caught between a cat and its prey

The year was 1995, the month September, and Joe Bloomquist of Port Orchard was wrapping up a summer of guiding fishermen in Montana. He was 22 at the time, a fisheries major at the University of Washington.

Bloomquist was on a postman's holiday, tossing flies for trout with his cousin, Mike Herrick, on a creek a few miles east of Missoula. They were fishing their way upstream when Bloomquist decided to leapfrog ahead by cutting across a neck of land where the water made a loop.

In the woods, he spotted a deer among the trees. A buck. A dead buck. But it had beautiful horns. Horns to die for.

Bloomquist had spent a lot of his life in the woods; plenty of time to learn that whatever had killed this buck must have packed a lot of punch. And plenty of time to learn that whatever it was wouldn't want him coming around its prize.

Just chalk it up to the horns. It was the sight of them that drove other thoughts right out of his head. He wanted to retrieve the rack and take it home.

Bloomquist never saw it, and he never heard it coming. It hit him from behind. Next thing he knew, he was on the ground.

When he lifted his face from the dirt, he was looking into the eyes of an angry cat.

He thinks it was his pack that saved him. It contained a couple of 8-by-12-inch plastic boxes in which he carried flies. The cougar hit the boxes with its head and mouth, and that's what saved his back.

The man lay face-down on the ground. The cougar crouched nearby. That's when Bloomquist's cousin hit the scene, running hard and hollering at the cat. His arrival caught the cat's attention, which gave Bloomquist time to grab his rod.

He got to his feet, swinging the fly rod like a switch, and slowly backed away. The cat stayed where it was. Between Bloomquist and the deer.

The cougar and the hot dogs

It happened on a Friday evening in a campground in Olympic National Park. The year was in 1994, and some people sat beside a fire at their campsite cooking hot dogs.

While they cooked, a cougar crept to within 10 feet. Suddenly, a woman screamed. The startled cat jumped one way, and the startled people jumped the other, and the cat raced up a tree while the people stormed their trailer and slammed the door behind them.

The cat was the first to recover its aplomb. As the people peered from the trailer's windows, the cat climbed down the tree, ate the people's dinner and walked into the woods.

Careful who you stalk

Jim Martin of Vancouver was hunting deer and elk in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest one September, armed only with a bow, when he noticed a cougar crouching in the brush about 70 yards away. The cat was staring directly at his eyes.

A shiver of excitement ran down his spine, but Martin wasn't afraid. A logging road about 100 yards away bisected the clearcut in which he stood, and he decided that if he could get to the road he somehow would be safe.

He started to circle away from the cat, keeping it in sight. As long as he could see the cat, it didn't move.

The man passed behind a brush pile, and momentarily the cat was out of sight. When he came out the other side the cat was gone. Martin felt relieved. He thought the cat had run away.

What he saw next unnerved him. The cat was right behind the brush. While the man was out of sight, it had closed the space between them by 50 yards. Now it was only 20 yards away.

Martin now felt terror. He knew the cat was stalking him. The road still was 50 yards away, and he thought the cat would maul him in the clearcut and he never would be found.

Martin headed toward the road as fast as he could go, beating through the brush and clambering over logs, never looking back. When he stepped onto the road, he felt relief. He walked a few more yards, and finally turned to look.

There, in the middle of the road behind him, was the cat.

Martin walked a couple of feet. So did the cat.

He decided he'd had enough.

Martin nocked an arrow, drew his bow and released the shaft. He heard a thud, and the cougar walked into the brush.

It went about 40 yards before it died.

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