But unlike wolves and grizzlies, cougars hid well in the rugged West, and their preference for hunting over scavenging protected them from poison and traps. European colonists obliterated the cats in most of the East and Midwest. That invisibility has helped cougars persist, argues Jim Williams, regional supervisor for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, in his book Path of the Puma. I could join a collaring excursion, she said, but the cats are so elusive that, even with houndsmen and their tracking dogs, a team might collectively snowmobile 400 miles a day over a weekend and still catch nothing. at the University of Washington, she’s studying how cougars are affected by wolves’ return to the state. Collaborating with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife for her Ph.D. SATTERFIELD IS DIRECT and plainspoken, and was blunt about my odds of seeing anything more. To recover my bearings, I called Satterfield and asked if I could follow her following cats. I walked them now with a sense of vertigo, disoriented by these fleeting brushes with a creature of foreign compass, who navigated the serrated mountains and the tumbling tributaries of the Methow River, the small towns of Winthrop and Mazama and their Nordic skiing trails, according to experience and rules wholly its own. They fitted her with a GPS collar, then released her to transmit secrets about her life. Satterfield and her crew captured one of them - not the half-grown cat I met, but an adult female. She set up motion-sensing cameras that revealed two juveniles and two full-grown cougars wandering among our forest-scattered homes. The couple phoned Lauren Satterfield, a cougar researcher who works in the valley. In the moonlight beyond their window, they saw an adult cougar sing-songing to a young one, a sound, the man said, “like nothing I’ve heard before or since.” A husband and wife woke one night to noises like wind in a tunnel. I soon heard from others in our neighborhood who encountered the cat - on the trail, peering through a glass door. It paused, uncertain, then vanished into the trees. When I started to walk away, it padded after me. I yelled and hoisted Taiga over my shoulder. Now, I numbly ran through that old camp advice: Don’t run make noise. Later, backpacking and building trails in the state’s high Rockies, my friends and I told dark stories of cougars, making them the ghosts that haunted our adventures. When I was a teenager, two little boys died in attacks. In 1991, the year I turned 10, a cougar killed a young man for the first time in the state’s recorded history.
Summer camp came with instructions on what to do if you saw one.
I grew up in cougar habitat on Colorado’s Front Range. Time suspended for a moment I watched from outside myself. It was still woolly with kittenhood, but big enough to send a chill down my spine. Seeing itself seen, the cougar dropped to a crouch a few paces from me. Through the trees, a brown shape closed in. We turned up a ravine, climbing toward an outcrop above our home where we could watch clouds river down the narrow Methow Valley, on the east slope of Washington’s North Cascades. Meltwater pattered the snow around the ponderosas. Last winter, I went walking on a gray afternoon between storms.
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