The danger was real. The big mountain lion could spring any moment. So Russell Maas did the smartest thing he would do all day. He began barking. The end.
The beginning? Oh, right. That’s about five minutes back.

Russell was scouting game near the family ranch with his fourteen year-old nephew, Willie, when he saw the deer. It was bent down, drinking from a spring 100 yards away. The two kneeled in the game trail so as not to startle it.

That was when the tawny animal snapped its head toward them - its small head, which was topped by small, round ears. That was no deer. It was a cougar.

Russell expected the cat to bolt like wild creatures generally do, but instead, it stared. So the hunters stared back. When Russell began to ease backward, everything changed.
“He came at us like he was fired out of a gun,” says Russell.

The cat stopped, but way too close. It dropped low, tail twitching. The boy began handing sticks to Russell. Russell threw them at the cat. Some bounced off the animal, making it hiss and yowl. It danced forward in quick little feints.

Russell has spent his life doing a bit of everything, much of it dangerous or in wilderness. He works his dad’s homestead ranch, crop dusts, takes his friends horsepacking, and hunts all sorts of game, including cougar. He doesn’t rattle easy.

“He’s coming,” Russell thought, beginning to be rattled. “He’s going to jump on me or I’m going to jump on him.”

So Russell jumped, a two foot-long stick in one hand, barking like a dog. The cat bolted. Twenty yards away, it turned to look back. Russell barked again and stepped forward. The cat loped toward the watering hole, then turned into heavy cover and disappeared.

But that’s not really the end.

That night, Russell returned with a friend who owned cougar hounds. They started at the helter-skelter pile of thrown sticks. The dogs began baying, clearly following cat scent. But they didn’t run into the forest. They sprinted back along the game trail until they reached the spot where Russell’s pickup had earlier been parked.

“I figure he watched us all the way back,” the man says.

Then the hounds turned up the mountain, eventually treeing the cougar in a big fir. But by the time the men arrived, it was too dark to see the animal. So they gathered the dogs and left.

And that’s really not the end, either. Russell came back later to find, in the mud, the tracks he and his hunter friend had left that night as they returned from the tree. And atop them, the tracks of the cat.

For those who know cougars, Russell’s story is not surprising. Many houndsman tales feature a quick-thinking hunter barking to tree a cat; many of the rest are about being trailed by a cat the houndsman never saw. It makes sense: the typical cougar confronted by baying hounds behaves exactly like a frightened tabby: it leaps into the nearest high perch. And yet unseen cougars can exhibit a spooky, shadowlike persistence.

It’s one of the puzzles of these big carnivores, which at one time lived across North America but now survive mostly in 12 western states and two Canadian provinces. It’s part of what earned them the distaste of so famous and generally respectful a big game hunter as Theodore Roosevelt, who once described cougars as “ferocious and bloodthirsty as they are cowardly.”

It’s also the best guarantee of safety for ranchers and others who work alongside a creature fully capable of taking nearly every species with which it coexists, from mouse to moose.

Serena Smith, 59 years old, wasn’t thinking about any of that the day she and her husband pushed 20 head of late calvers up to summer pasture, riding together on one ATV. She gave no thought to cougars because she lives in Alberta, Canada, where the big cats weren’t thought common and where ranchers, when they got together, talked about all sorts of problems, but not about cougars. She had never seen cat sign on her ranch or her summer grazing allotment. She didn’t know anyone who had.

What Serena was thinking was that three animals that had turned aside into a messy willow copse should be followed to make sure they rejoined the herd. So she hopped off the back of the ATV and waded in after them, walking within sight of the last one’s see-sawing hipbones.

The next thing she knew, she had tripped and was falling, or at least that’s what she thought. It wasn’t until she tried to get up that she became aware of the cougar attached to her right wrist.

Serena didn’t know what to do, but the scream burst out unplanned, and at the sound the animal released her in apparent startlement. It slipped around to stand in front of her, as if to separate her from her herd. But then it just stood there, staring at her. She screamed louder, beginning to realize that if she didn’t know what to do, well, it didn’t seem to either. Finally, after a few more screams, the big animal disappeared.

“I’m a hefty farm girl. It takes a lot to bother me,” says Serena. So she and her husband finished moving the cattle before she went to the doctor. It was then she learned that in addition to the deep wounds on her wrist, she also had a nasty puncture on the back of one thigh and deep scratches where the animal had first hit her, high on her back, to knock her to the ground.
Hefty or not, she had nightmares for a while, and two years after the attack, Serena still didn’t like to go into the bush alone.

Then, in January of this year, a lone cross country skier, also an Alberta resident, was killed by a cougar, probably tackled from behind much as Serena had been. News of the killing brought back memories, Serena says. It made her feel very lucky.

Of course, most residents of cougar country are much luckier. They never face a cougar and certainly never fight one. That doesn’t mean they don’t deal with cougars and the power the cats have, though. And sometimes the cougar you’ve never seen, like a ghost, is harder to manage than the one you can do something about.

Becky Prunty, her grandmother and her younger sister, Kyla, run the family ranch in Charleston, Nevada, which, at the turn of the last century, was a real town. Now it’s windswept desert, falling-down barbed wire and a dot on a map.

“These days, we are Charleston,” says Becky.

The ranch is small by Nevada standards, a few thousand acres. It has belonged to Pruntys since the early 1900s, but the only Pruntys left to run it are these three, with some help from an uncle. However, the family motto seems to be something like, “Buck up, saddle up and get to work.” And so the ranch lives on.

It takes serious acreage to support a cow in this dry land - the ranch raises only about 350 pairs a year, spread thin.

“You could ride every day all summer and not see all your cows. There’s no way you can keep your eyes on them,” says Becky.

What she can see, any time she wants, is big, round cougar tracks. They’re in the dry washes near the ranch. They cross the dirt road she drives to reach the highway.

They leave her livestock mostly alone. There was the day a couple years back that a Prunty woman noticed, across the wide valley, a white spot. It was Humpy, one of the ranch’s pack horses. When the women rode out to discover why he wasn’t with his herd, they found three parallel gashes in his hide, neat as incisions, six inches long and an inch deep.

Becky, who had been told since she was tiny never to leave the house at night because cougars were out there, has no doubt about what on her land signs its work with such a stark, bloody signature.

And there was the filly that didn’t return last fall. She has never been found. That uncertainty is, if anything, more disturbing.

Becky remembers childhood outings into the nearby Jarbidge Mountains to cut Christmas trees each winter. Her grandfather would stand guard with a rifle in his hands in case a cat appeared. None ever did. She remembers a friend telling her about a forested place where the remains of mustang foals hang in the trees like strange fruit. She hasn’t seen the place.

“Cats freak me out. The idea of them freaks me out,” she says, which is striking because nothing else seems to.

But why not? In the whole, windswept expanse of Becky’s ranch and up into the wild mountains beyond, cougars are the only creatures big enough to do her harm, and yet, she can’t see them. She has never seen one. She’s never even met anyone who had a run-in with a cougar, but that doesn’t matter, either. Because they are out there. The tracks she can find any day she wants prove it. Humpy’s wounds prove it.

One day last November, riding alone through an early snow squall in search of some missing horses, Becky found herself in a narrow canyon. Boulders towered above her, vague through the snow. Suddenly she was certain she felt the weight of a cougar’s eyes. And although this tough young cowgirl says she still gets chills remembering that weight, it seems more likely that what really got to her is that she can never know if those eyes were actually there that day. Or any other.

Dennis Moroney deals with cougars he can see, a lot of them. He ranches in Arizona, the only state, according to researchers, where cougars regularly eat more beef than venison. He wasn’t raised with ghostly cougar stories; you can tell from the way he talks about them.

“[Lions] have all the advantages,” Dennis says. “They’re primarily nocturnal and extremely mobile. They’ll eat anything and they can kill anything. They kill javelinas, which are nasty in their own right. I’ve found porcupines that looked like they had been unzipped right down the midline of the belly and licked clean. That takes skill.”

More important than the cougars themselves, he says, is the way Arizona ranching works. Calves can drop almost year-round because of the mild weather; they’re not brought into protected areas to calve for the same reason; the pairs are spread widely because of the thin grazing; and the biggest calving flush happens exactly as deer numbers are lowest. All those week-old calves wake up from their naps, find their mothers gone grazing, and begin to bawl.

“A lion would have to be a fool not to hear that as a dinner bell,” says Dennis.

Dennis, too, can see cougar prints whenever he wishes. But he also sees the cats themselves. Sometimes a long tawny shape flashes in his headlights as he returns from town at night. Dennis sees cats in his ledger as well, a portrait drawn at a cost of $350 per calf.

For a while, his Cross U Ranch lost about 40 calves per year to the big cats. Now he loses a fourth that many. He cut the losses, not by killing cats, but mostly by rotating cattle out of rugged, brushy allotments and into open terrain during calving. Cougars hunt from cover: open grassland and big, blue sky are seasonings that can make even veal unenticing.

Dennis may be pragmatic about cougars and their costs, but like Becky’s grandfather, he has concerns about his family’s safety.

“I tell my kids, if they’re going to go away from the house by themselves, they’re to carry a stick. They believe with all their hearts that if they do have to poke a lion, it’ll work. I don’t know if it will, but you have to tell them something so they don’t turn and run, because you know if they do, they’re dead.”

And the funny thing about this 100+ pound predator which can eat an Arizona rancher’s profits, take 750 pound yearling calves, haunt capable Becky Prunty all her young life, and keep Serena Smith nervous of the bush for years, is that Dennis’s kids are almost certainly safe. The odds that one of those kids will ever confront a cougar are slim, but if they do, and if they grip that stick, stand their ground and yell - or even bark - the deftly efficient killer before them is likely to - Poof! - disappear, like a scaredy cat. Or a ghost.

It may follow them home later, but if they never go back and check their tracks, they won’t have to know that.

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