THEY'RE MYSTICAL UNTIL ONE'S SHREDDING YOUR BACK

Stalker: He's a loner, he's lethal, and he's got your scent. Feline phantom, ultimate predator, the cougar has ghosted back into the American wild-and your backyard. (Hey, Marge, have you seen the poodle lately?) (Elwood Reid, May 2003, Outside)

Once, when Shaw was giving a lecture at Saguaro National Park, a woman rancher asked him, "What good are they?"

"Instead of answering with the usual cliche about how lions are necessary for the balance of nature," Shaw says, "I told her that I liked knowing they were out there." For Shaw, they represent the part of him that will always want to forgo civilization and live in a wild landscape—as he puts it, "a rather mythical vision of perfect freedom." For others, the cougar is something else—a focal point for hostility, a survivor worth protecting, a night stalker, a Native American talisman of power. "The secret to the allure," Shaw says, "is how we each incorporate the creature into our own private myth."

We have conquered the West, transformed the shrinking forests into safe places to stroll and sweat, but sometimes the woods bite back. And when they do, we respond with ancient fear and loathing. We forget that wilderness is supposed to be wild, that a hundred years ago almost nobody went into the woods without a gun or the sharp awareness that there were things out there that could kill you.

Today more people die from bad egg salad than cougar attacks, but that does nothing to diminish our fixation on the remote possibility of a silent hunter pouncing on our backs. The wilderness crank in me says this is a good thing, because even the most used-up patch of forest, river bottom, or rock field comes alive once you know there is something out there that will eat you, or at least try to, given the right circumstances. It forces you to pay attention, to unplug. Each cougar lurking out there is a stubborn reminder that, even as we pave ourselves into tight grids, they'll keep coming, against long odds—ghostly relics of a time not so long ago when the forests teemed with their predatory presence. And if we don't understand their place in our midst, all we'll have left is our fear.

Two very different things end up conflated here: the cougar in the wilderness and the one in your backyard. The former is neat; the latter seems like a bad idea. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 13, 2003 6:57 PM