BY JACOB BENEDICT DREW
This is a story of three wild cats. The first Cheever I’d met before arriving in Woody Creek. My girlfriend, Jen, had named him after the writer out of respect for the man’s literary talents and because the animal shared a promiscuous nature with him that, alas, was also stifled by an overbearing societal custom: in this case the removal of his balls. Jen had adopted the cat off the streets of Dorchester (a rough neighborhood outside of Boston) where he was lingering around a crack house and feeding off scraps left behind by the junkies. She took him to the vet and clipped his claws, but no matter how manicured the cat had become, the beast in him remained. Never mind that he spent his formative months sleeping in trash cans, dodging bullets, and tiptoeing around needles: since he’d been fixed after reaching sexual maturity, he was frozen in a state of pent-up desire. Some eunuchs have deep voices.
Cheever found an outlet for his aggression in attacking my naked arm. When you play with this cat he curls up around your hand, latching onto you with his front paws, sinking in his fangs, and bringing his hind legs up to attack your wrist with quick, churning, double kicks. It’s a bit like plunging your hand into a kitchen-sink garbage disposal.
A moon as bright as a Klieg light shone in the sky and fresh snow covered the ground the night Jen and I arrived in Woody Creek — she’s the writer-in-residence at Anita Thompson’s house and had met me in D.C. for a road trip west. We were staying at George and Patti Stranahan’s Flying Dog Ranch; they had generously offered us their beautiful guest house. My little Japanese car couldn’t handle even the drive’s moderate slope, so we walked, enjoying the whitish-blue late-night fields after a long week of riding in the car.
“Look,” Jen said, about halfway up the hill. “Bobcat tracks.”
A line of paw prints dotted the ground in front of us. so pristine they could have been made by a rubber stamp. They were beautiful. snaking along the otherwise untrammeled covering: but were they bobcat tracks?
‘They’re probably from dog,” I said. Don’t be ridiculous, is what I meant. The next day I ate crow. George told us the tracks probably were left by a bobcat that had been hanging around Flying Dog recently. Patti had seen the animal just a few days before while walking their two malamutes; the dogs had treed the cat, who was already hot after a wild turkey. I raised my eyebrows as George recounted the story. “Welcome to the Wild West,” he said.
That night, I googled “Colorado mountain animal prints” and boned up on my tracking skills. I learned that there are two significant distinctions between feline and canine tracks. Cats, because they retract them, don’t show their claws when they walk. They are also said to walk “perfectly because they maintain a direct register, which means their legs stay in two straight lines, as opposed to the indirect register of dogs, whose hind paws land slightly to the side of their front paws.
A LINE OF PAW PRINTS DOTTED THE GROUND IN FRONT OF US, SO PRISTINE THEY COULD HAVE BEEN MADE BY A RUBBER STAMP. THEY WERE BEAUTIFUL, SNAKING ALONG THE OTHERWISE UNTRAMMELED COVERING.
When l returned to the tracks Jen and I had seen that first night, they fit the bill of a bobcat, well, perfectly. Soon I was following tracks everywhere. The winter glens of the Colorado Rockies, such as those on the Stranahans’ property, are ideal for this. With near daily snow dustings, fresh prints are everywhere. Magpies look like they walk around on divining sticks. Rabbits and hares leave two little pokes in front of two oblong thumbs. Mice and voles barely disturb the surface. like their tracks are sprinkled on. l found tracks of a strange bird that left sweeping wing-prints in the light snow as if it were having trouble rising off the ground. I could only imagine what it was. A small marmot or squirrel had scurried nearby: perhaps a hawk had snatched a heavy meal that was difficult to carry. That”s the thing about tracks. They’re like the best fiction, or most successful art: they give you just enough to stimulate your imagination.
One morning, during a quiet storm. I discovered bobcat tracks so fresh the falling snow had not covered them at all. I decided to see where they led: first, past an old shed, then under barbed-wire fencing, over a brook, and across a snowdrift. The chase was on. I could tell I was close to the animal. Other than having to crawl through a few tight spaces and duck a thorny branch here and there, the prints were easy to follow. I stepped as slowly and quietly as possible. deliberately steadying each footfall. In the trees in front of me, a clutch of magpies were screaming. They’re not quiet birds to begin with, but these were complaining something fierce. Stepping into a natural lane between the brush, I saw the tail of the bobcat, a short nub like a clipped dog’s: in an instant, it disappeared. I trudged around for another forty-five minutes but did not see the animal again
I had designs on where the bobcat lived and planned to take her picture. My first hike up into the hills of the White River National Forest, which abuts the Stranahans’ property, was a slow-going affair. I spent most of the time trying to avoid the deep snow banks, which sometimes gave way and left me up to my thighs in powder. I found no cats, but plenty of action. On a mesa at the foot of the hills, coyote prints crisscrossed back and forth in wandering, frenetic lines. The intersecting and bumping tracks elicited images of a pack, with the animals running side by side, perhaps nipping one another on the ear and barking and howling.
Soon, the pack would have encountered a herd of sleeping elk. There was no evidence of a hunt, and even a large pack of coyotes would have had trouble taking down one of these giant deer, the males of which weigh up to a thousand pounds and come armed with multi-pronged horns as long as the coyotes themselves. The elk had left oval imprints the size of small boulders in the snow where they’d bedded down for the night. Their tracks — the clean ones look like two ice cream scoops side-by-side in the snow — led into the hills and I followed. On my way, I found a fist of coarse brown hair caught on a stretch of barbed-wire fencing the animals had traversed.
The network of elk trails in the hills is extensive and often as well maintained any man-made paths. They switch back and forth up steep slopes, and they carve smartly around thick brambles and deep banks. I walked them in the hot Colorado sun for nearly an hour before reaching the top of a rise, on the other side of which I found the herd. At first the animals did not move, nor did I. They were less than thirty yards away, all of them watching me warily. When I finally took a step, they scattered. snaking up the next hill, disappearing like smoke through the trees.
Elk are very handsome creatures, much more so than the average deer. Their brownish-orange coats resemble foliage, and their light-colored rumps, suggestive of a baboon’s ass, make them seem exotic. But what I liked most about the herd I saw was that they were edgy. This meant they were on the lookout for predators. This meant forget the bobcat: there was a mountain lion around.
Cliff, who maintains the Stranahans’ property, told me he no longer goes into the hills without a rifle. “They’ll spook the horses,” he said referring to mountain lions. “If you’re lucky, you get one shot before you get thrown. And then you’re on the ground, and those things will kill you.”
There have been as man as ten deaths attributed to mountain lions since 1990 in the United States and Canada: this is not a lot, but enough to make you notice, especially given the gruesome nature of the killings. People often say you’re more likely to be killed by lightning than by one of these big cats, and they’re right, when they’re not considering those who actively seek out mountain lions in habitats where mountain lions live. Jackasses like that get even odds at best — at least, as one of those jackasses, that would be my line.
George offered to loan me his 9mm Beretta for my excursions, but I’d fired a gun only once in my life and figured I was more likely to shoot off my toe than successfully defend myself from a puma. Instead, I carried with me a seven-foot length of steel pipe. It made for a heavy walking stick and probably would have only have been a hindrance if I were attacked, but it gave me (though not Jen) some peace of mind. The one thing I should have done — simply not go, at least not alone — never ever crossed my mind. Instead, I woke up around dawn every morning, donned my wrinkled cowboy hat, slung my snowshoes and my camera over my shoulder, took my steel pipe, and headed out the door.
Mountain lions have a range of about thirty square miles. I covered at least a quarter of this area during my hikes and all told found the remains of at least a dozen kills. On one of my first hikes, I discovered an elk skeleton fresh enough that it still smelled; the meat was gone, but the tendons had not been completely eaten off the bones, the hooves were still intact, and the animal’s hair lay scattered like a blanket on the snow. I found a few blanched skulls, a scapula here and there, and a number of spines of varying lengths. The big cat was no desperate for food; she might attack me if provoked, but it was unlikely she was interested in me as a meal.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t as nervous as a rabbit during these hikes. If you encounter a mountain lion, you ‘re supposed to make yourself look as large as possible (open up your jacket if you have one), stare the cat in the eye, throw things at it, and if it attacks, fight vigorously. Whatever you do, don’t run: you don’t want to stimulate the beast’s predatory instincts. This all seems logical enough, but for Christ’s sake, with every twitch of sound, I was fumbling for my jacket zipper and growling like a madman. Now and then I would shout, apropos of nothing but my own internal nightmares, “Come on, you son-of-a-bitch! You banana-brained-piece-of-shit-mother-fucking-pussy-cat!” This would always make me feel safer for a minute or two.
Just as I was getting cocky, and trekking around with undue confidence, I stumbled upon definitive evidence of the big cat fresh tracks. It had snowed earlier that morning and then it had turned hot. All the south facing slopes were covered in red mud, while the less exposed faces still had snow on them. As I rounded the corner of an irrigation trail I came across the prints. The cat had walked from a muddy bank onto a snowdrift, leaving blood-colored, five-inch wide tracks on the white powder. The snowfall had let up less than a half hour earlier, which meant that animal was no longer only possibly in the area, she was, without a doubt, very much around. Lurking perhaps. I snapped a few photos of the prints (in one, the print is clearly wider than my beamy hiking boot), and then I followed them. Again, it wasn’t a question of what I should or shouldn’t do. Obviously, I should have turned around and gone in the opposite direction.
MOUNTAIN LIONS HAVE A RANGE OF ABOUT THIRTY SQUARE MILES. I COVERED AT LESAST A QUARTER OF THIS AREA DURING MY HIKES AND ALL TOLD FOUND THE REMAINS OF AT LEAST A DOZEN KILLS
But I did not. I followed the tracks for thirty yards. She was certainly a “perfect” walker. Her paw prints landed directly on top of one another, each step a balletic movement forward. I did not walk over the tracks myself because I didn’t want to ruin them.
Eventually, I came to the point where the puma met up with her cub; there were smaller cat prints scattered around the larger ones. I’d read that mountain lions purr and play in similar ways to domestic cats. I imagined the mother licking her offspring, and the cub nuzzling her head against the mother’s powerful legs. I imagined the mother being vaguely annoyed at her child’s boundless energy. It occurred to me that Cheever’s prints were not even half the size of those of the cub. Cheever, whom I no longer played with without wearing leather gloves, weighed about ten pounds. An adult puma can weigh up to 150 pounds.
The tracks led to a creek and I stopped following them. I did not stop because I couldn’t get across the stream and up the hill on the other side. The snow was too deep and the hill too steep. If not for theses natural barriers, I’m sure I would have kept going, just following the tracks, despite the risk and despite the warnings.
Now I’m in Los Angeles, where the only things that resemble herds are traffic jams, where the highways are far more abundant than trails, and where tracks refer to tire burn marks on the asphalt. There are a few places in the world where our dominance over nature is so evident. This is what I miss most about hiking in the hills north of Woody Creek: the restorative effect of giving nature a chance. Sure we can erect buildings that touch the sky, we can paver riverbanks, and live in condos in the desert, but there are still animals, not far from our homes, that can stalk you, that can hunt you, and that can kill you. To walk among them is to remember our place.
