Cougar

“ In regions accessible to man, or where man is encountered even rarely, the cougar is exceedingly shy, seldom or never venturing from cover during the day. He spends the hours of daylight high on the most rugged cliffs, sleeping and basking in the sunshine, and watching with wonderfully keen sight the valleys below. His hearing equals his sight, and if danger threatens, he always hears it in time to skulk away unseen. At night he steals down the mountain side toward deer or elk he has located during the day. ”

“ Through the weeds and jungle which grew up to a short distance of the bare spot where the combat between the peccary and the moccason had taken place, came stealing softly a beast with a long thin red body, and a head like a cat. It was the fierce and tree-climbing cougar. ”

“ One day when one of them with two of her little boys was on the trail in the midst of the woods, a large cougar suddenly appeared in it not forty yards away and stood looking at her. Now, the cougar is an uncanny beast, and in these Northern woods, a most formidable one. A man can live in the woods for years and never see one, and yet some day the supple yellow panther will stand in front of him on some woodland path as though he had come there by magic. ”

“ Its prey—elk, deer, antelope, or buffalo—soon appears beneath, unconscious of the dangerous enemy that cowers over them. When fairly within reach, the cougar springs, and pouncing down upon the shoulders of the victim, buries its claws in the flesh. The terrified animal starts forward, leaps from side to side, dashes into the papaw thickets, or breasts the dense cane-brake, in hopes of brushing off its relentless rider. ”

“ Hence the cougar, although found in all of the United States, is a rare animal everywhere, and seen only at long intervals in the mountain-valleys, or in other difficult places of the forest. The appearance of a cougar is sufficient to throw any neighbourhood into an excitement similar to that which would be produced by the chase of a mad dog.
It is a splendid tree-climber. It can mount a tree with the agility of a cat; and although so large an animal, it climbs by means of its claws—not by hugging, after the manner of the bears and opossums. ”

“ Between ourselves, I do not think hunting the cougar is very much sport. It is an instructive experience, and one, I think, every hunter of big game should have; but, at the same time, in my opinion it does not afford the sport of still-hunting deer, antelope, elk, moose or bears. In the first place, there is really no time you can still-hunt the cougar except in winter, when there is a light snow on the ground, and at all times it is most difficult, because you are dealing with an animal that embodies the very quintessence of wariness, and is ever on the lookout for prey and enemies. ”

“ Both rolled over the ground—the peccary all the while gnashing its jaws, and continuing to send forth its strange sharp cries, until the woods echoed again. Even the young ones ran around, mixing in the combat—now flung sprawling upon the earth, now springing up again, snapping their little jaws, and imitating the cry of their mother. The cougar alone fought in silence. ”

“ At any rate, he showed his cowardly side that trip.
The cougar is a curious beast, capricious as a woman. One day he follows his prey stealthily until the proper opportunity for springing upon it comes; again he will race after a deer in the open; at one time he will flee at a shout, at another he will fight desperately. They are powerful animals, particularly in the fore quarters. I have seen one lope down a mountain side, through about six inches of snow, carrying a fawn by the nape of the neck in its jaws, and swinging the body clear. ”

“ When I commenced my return, he, no doubt, leaped off into the covering brush, and, although sharply looked for by me, the dense fog and the thick brush hid him from my view.
The cougar is strictly a carniverous animal. His principal food is the deer; and it is said that he requires two a month for his subsistence. That he is a good feeder is evident from the fact that he is always sleek and in excellent condition. He has a great love for the meat of the colt, and is consequently a terror to breeders in that line. He is not a hater of veal or pork, but does not prefer the latter. ”

“ It is quite natural in such profound solitudes to look for some of its most distinguished inhabitants; but our desire to meet a cougar, or a brown bear, is not gratified. Only the gray hare, and the grouse and quail, cross our road. These seem not the least to mind us; evidently unacquainted with the sanguinary disposition of man, and so audaciously familiar as to provoke an uprising of the lordly thirst for killing. The weather is fine, the mountain air and balsamic odors tonic and delightful. Altogether we are in the best of spirits for two-thirds the distance to the night station. ”

“ The felines do not often chase their game in open pursuit; but in his madness he had forgotten his hunting cunning. He saw the motionless flock and came at a charge.
Spot hurried around the flank of the flock and, watching the cougar's advance, Hugh was wholly blind to the fact that every one of those three thousand sheep lifted their lowered heads. The cougar came almost straight toward him, as fast as an African lion in the charge. ”

“ I advanced in the direction in which I had heard the voice of our four-footed companion, and suddenly came upon him baying furiously at a young cougar, which Sumichrast ran towards, but the animal fled into the wood.
"Where did you turn out this fellow, Gringalet?" asked l'Encuerado, quite seriously. "Don't trust too much to his friendship, for it might be the worse for you; lions seldom fondle any thing without hurting it."
"Was it a lion?" asked Lucien.
"Yes," I answered; "but an American lion, or cougar, known by savants as the Felis puma." ”

“ They are not often seen unless you invade their solitary domain. I am not prepared to say what is their principal food, but suppose it to be the same as their kinsman the black bear.
The cougar is a native of this State and can be found where dense thickets and dark forests exist. He is a sly, skulking and treacherous animal, mostly nocturnal in his destructive visitations. I have often gone on a brief hunting-trip into the foothills of the mountains when they were slightly covered with snow, and a dense fog would settle down, obscuring all landmarks ”

“ The cougar shares with all living things a resistless propensity to grow old, and already his years were many. He had had his day. The deer that had died in his talons, even the elk that he had laid low with one lightning, terrible bite to the throat would make a number not pleasing to contemplate by lovers of the wild game. It is to be remembered that an ordinary cougar will kill two deer a week, year on year, until the buzzards come to feed upon him. Broken Fang was no ordinary cougar: for more years than the swan could remember he had ranged through Smoky Land, killing as he went. ”

“ She knew that a cougar, hunting, does not so easily abandon his quarry. Though cautious, hesitating, he trails his game for hours, constantly preparing for, while he is diverted from an attack. She also knew that, like the human coward, once assailed and cornered, he becomes a fury.
In the open they found Ginger standing with hoofs planted like a figure in stone; but the black, in his terror, had circled and recircled the alder to which he was tied, winding his lariat, and, reduced to an arm's-length of rope, he made short and frenzied plunges to break free. ”

“ We could hear the deer walking down the trails and splashing in the pools, but to aim was impossible. Just what time in the night it was, none of the frightened boys could ever say, but suddenly the cry of a hunting cougar sounded so clear and loud that it seemed right in the party. No one who hears that cry in the woods ever forgets it. Even old hunters do not like the devil- ish wildcat scream that has in it a note as of a woman or child in extremity. ”

“ Humans would come with a pack of dogs, and they would scramble and rattle the wilderness and make a grand old hullabaloo—and if there was anything the cougar despised, it was tumult, agitation, confusion and noise. He hated above all things the scandalous dogs, brothers of the wolf-packs—and wolves!
The cougar sniffed, lowered his head and looked about uneasily. He didn't really have to be afraid of dogs, nor yet even of wolves, but they were exceedingly annoying. They came bounding, yelping, yapping at his heels, and they would nip him, which was insulting—but Felis Concolor was hungry. ”

“ It is absolutely safe to walk up to within ten yards of a cougar at bay, whether wounded or unwounded, and to shoot it at leisure.
Cougars are solitary beasts. When full-grown the females outnumber the males about three to one; and the sexes stay together for only a few days at mating-time. The female rears her kittens alone, usually in some cave; the male would be apt to kill them if he could get at them. The young are playful. Uncle Jim once brought back to his cabin a young cougar, two or three months old. ”

“ My companion, an old plainsman, said that this was the cry of the cougar prowling for its prey. Certainly no man could well listen to a stranger and wilder sound.
Ordinarily the rifleman is in no danger from a hunted cougar; the beast's one idea seems to be flight, and even if its assailant is very close, it rarely charges if there is any chance for escape. Yet there are occasions when it will show fight. In the spring of 1890, a man with whom I had more than once worked on the round-up—though I never knew his name—was badly mauled by a cougar near my ranch. ”

“ At night when the whistlers were deep in their burrows she lay down close beside her son.
An afternoon came when she had need for her vigilance. From a high perch on a red rim a lank cougar sighted the mare and her colt. He was lying on a narrow shelf where the warm sun beat down on his sleek hide as he drowsed. Through slitted eyes he watched Lady Ebony and Midnight feeding below his lofty perch. There was no flesh he prized more highly than young colt. He twitched the black tip of his tail and unsheathed his sharp claws, but he did not move. ”

“ But it is hard to say why the cougar, which is just about the size of the great spotted cats, and which preys on practically the same animals, should not be dangerous to man, while they are singularly formidable fighters when at bay. The largest cougar I ever killed was eight feet long and weighed over two hundred pounds. Very few African leopards or Indian panthers would surpass these measurements, and this particular animal had been preying not only on deer, but on horses and cattle ”

“ Down we went to them, scrambling and sliding; down a break in the cliffs, round the head of the gorge just before it broke off into a side-canyon, through the thorny scrub which tore our hands and faces, along the slope where, if a man started rolling, he never would stop until life had left his body. Before we reached him the cougar leaped from the tree and tore off, with his big tail stretched straight as a bar behind him; but a cougar is a short-winded beast, and a [22] couple of hundred yards on, the hounds put him up another tree. ”

“ The cougar is called a cowardly animal: some naturalists even assert that it will not venture to attack man. This is, to say the least, a singular declaration, after the numerous well-attested instances in which men have been attacked, and even killed by cougars. There are many such in the history of early settlement in America. To say that cougars are cowardly now when found in the United States—to say they are shy of man, and will not attack him, may be true enough. ”

“ A deer-chase was also got up for their special entertainment—during which a cougar was “treed” and killed—an event of rarer occurrence than even the death of a bear; for the cougar is now one of the scarcest quadrupeds to be met with in the forests of North America.
Another entertainment which the planter provided for his guests was a “barbecue”—a species of festival peculiar to the backwoods of America, and which, on account of its peculiarity, deserves a word or two of description. ”

“ On the day after the arrival at the ranch the party went out for its first cougar, which, as my young readers perhaps know, is an animal inhabiting certain wild parts of our West and Southwest. The beast grows to a size of from six to nine feet in length, and weighs several hundred pounds. ”

“ A cougar not only has fangs, but talons that can rend flesh more terribly than the cogs of a machine, and strength to make the air hum under his paw as he strikes it down. And so it is an extremely disappointing thing to see either of these animals flee in terror from an Airedale not half their size,—a sight that most mountain men see rather often. The fact that they act with greater courage in the famine times, and that either of them will fight to the very death when brought to bay, are not extenuating circumstances to their cowardice. ”

“ To such adventures with all their natural exaggeration John Gray had listened many a time as they were recited by old hunters regarding earlier days in the wilderness; for at this period it was thought that the cougar had retreated even from the few cane-brakes that remained unexplored near the settlements. But the deer, timidest of animals, with fatal persistence returns again and again to its old-time ranges and coverts long after the bison, the bear, and the elk have wisely abandoned theirs; and the cougar besets the deer. ”