Anyone can kill a deer. It takes a real man
to kill a varmint.
—BEN LILLY, The Ben Lilly Legend
For most cougar hunters, the challenge of outsmarting a large predator and the thrill of the chase were far more rewarding than the payment earned. Near the end of his 1948 book Hunting American Lions, Frank C. Hibben described the cougar as a “fascinating, terrifying, and sometimes loveable cat.” He should know: in the mid-1930s he spent a couple of years chasing them through the rugged canyon country of New Mexico conducting research for the Southwestern Conservation League. Hibben wrote about his experiences in a vivid style that made the reader feel as if they were part of the hunt, sharing the excitement and chaos right alongside him.
We had scarcely reached the edge of the cliff when we saw the lion. Old Crook was in the face of the beast and both of them were on a narrow jutting ledge that reached out over the depths of the Gila Canyon with a sheer drop of a thousand feet below them. First one and then another of the other hounds reached the little rocky point where the cougar had come to bay. The pinnacles and rough-edged cliffs echoed a roar of sound which united in a crescendo of furious howls, barks and yelps that would have done credit to a volcanic eruption of major proportions.
I think Homer and I too were yelling as we scrambled down over the rocks and ledges with our chaps flying and loose rocks and fragments rolling from beneath our feet. But any sound of exhilaration which we might have made was completely lost in the roar of the dogs as they faced the snarling lion . . .
So furious was the onslaught of noise and confusion that the cat had backed to the narrow edge of the cliff so that his tail and hind quarters hung over the shadows of the empty gorge below. A wisp of blood-flecked foam dripped from those cat jaws and whipped away in the wind. The ears of the beast were laid back flat against his head and the lips of his muzzle were curled up straight to reveal every white, gleaming fang down to its yellow base.
As the dogs crowded one another close, the lion unsheathed its claws and struck with a sidewise motion so quick that the movement was blurred to the human eye. Those raking, curved claws barely missed a dog with each strike, but still they crowded closer. The hounds behind pushed the ones in front into the very jaws of destruction. The long sweeping curve of those needle-sharp claws, or the bite of those white canines, would find a mark in a matter of seconds. The dog or the lion or both could make a miss-step of only inches to plunge themselves into destruction on the rough lava rocks in the canyon below us.
. . . The dogs had pushed old Bugger almost between the front paws of the lion. The cougar struck again and again with lightening rapidity. I could see the fleck of red flesh that showed where Bugger’s shoulder had been torn by a claw. The dog caught himself with difficulty . . . and hung for a brief second on the very edge of the cliff scrambling for life.
. . . The great cat with the purchase of his hind paws barely on the edge of the rock cliff, leaped clear over the dog pack crowded in front of him. With two tremendous bounds he cleared the edge of the cliff and was running along a ledge just below us. The cat-like certainty and precision of that fleeing beast was amazing. A miscalculation of inches in any one of his great bounds would have meant certain death. The lion was running along the face of the cliff as though he had suction cups on those big round paws.
Although many cougar hunters experienced what Hibben called “a fever in the blood” when tracking a big cat, most weren’t chasing cougars for scientific purposes. As settlers increased the pressure to rid the country of large predators, the extermination of the “noxious beasts” began in earnest. A timeline on The Cougar Fund’s website states that, as early as 1684, Connecticut introduced a bounty on cougars. Over time, other states and provinces followed. Bounty hunters, and later government predator control agents, employed a variety of methods to kill the big cats, such as poison, trapping and tracking. But it wasn’t easy. Cougars prefer fresh meat so poisoned bait didn’t work on them nearly as well as it did on wolves. And pit and leg-hold traps, sometimes smeared with catnip and petroleum oil, weren’t very effective either. Eventually everyone agreed: the best way to catch a cat was to chase it with hounds, tree it, then shoot it.
Initially, many bounty hunters were farmers and ranchers looking for opportunities to supplement their income. But when they realized decent money could be made, more than a few took up the occupation full time. Some viewed it as a vocation; others only responded to requests for assistance after a cougar had killed livestock. Eventually, the role of a bounty hunter evolved into a combination of community service worker and paid assassin. Although such large-scale killing would not be sanctioned today, in their era, bounty hunters were highly respected and many became folk heroes and legends in their own time.
One of the most renowned was Ben Lilly, a mystical mountain man who believed he could communicate with animals and see inside their bodies to understand them on a physical and emotional level. Born in Mississippi in 1853, Lilly became obsessed with big game hunting after singlehandedly killing a bear with a knife. His chosen career took him from to Arizona to Idaho and down to Mexico. After a trip with Lilly as a hunting guide, Theodore Roosevelt noted that although Lilly was not a large man, his “frame of steel and whipcord” was capable of walking long distances without food, water or rain gear and never seemed to tire or mind rough terrain.
Frank Hibben took a three-day hike with Lilly in 1934. The eighty-year-old bounty hunter informed Hibben that bears and panthers were the “Cains” of the animal world and needed to be destroyed. Hibben had heard that Lilly was old and sick but what he found was a highly skilled woodsman who easily made his way across the landscape and who seemed to pick up panther sign by intuition and scenting the air like a dog. One evening Lilly led Hibben to a fresh panther kill and carved off a slab of venison for their dinner.
Lilly married twice and had several children who he supported but rarely saw. Preferring to be outside, the panther hunter disappeared for years at a time and pitied people who lived in towns and were forced to breathe “rancid” air. Lilly never indulged in alcohol, tobacco or coffee but regularly ate panther meat as he believed it increased his hunting abilities. Sundays were reserved for reading the Bible—if his dogs treed a panther on the Sabbath, he expected them to keep it there until Monday morning. Lilly shot most bears and panthers with a Winchester rifle but was also known to engage in paw-to-hand combat. His favourite weapon for this situation was a custom-made version of the bowie knife. He made his own knives out of scavenged steel, tempering them in panther oil.
As Lilly’s legendary status grew so did the number of animals he was said to have killed. Estimates put the figure for cougars at somewhere between six hundred and a thousand. He sent panther, bear, Mexican grey wolf and other specimens to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and in later years informed people he was writing a book. It had two chapters: “What I Know About Bears” and “What I Know About Panthers.” Lilly died in 1936 near Silver City, New Mexico.
Although Lilly wasn’t overly fond of people, he loved and took good care of his hounds, which accompanied him everywhere. For cougar hunters, well-trained hounds provide keen noses for tracking, company when out on the trail and sometimes protection. In The Intelligence of Dogs, Stanley Coren noted that humans have used dogs for hunting since paleolithic times, and that some dogs, like Afghans, find their prey by sight while others, such as beagles, hunt by scent. The latter have wide nostrils angled toward the ground, making it easy for them to inhale the aroma of their prey’s paw prints. They also pick up scent from tall grasses or bushes the animal has rubbed against. “A good dog will track beneath leaves and even snow,” said long-time hunter George Pedneault, who started hunting cougars when he was thirteen. “I’ve seen them bury their heads in two feet of snow to get the scent.”
Not all noses are created equal, however. According to Coren, humans have 5 million scent glands in their nostrils, beagles have 225 million and bloodhounds possess an astounding 300 million. But the nose is a funny thing; after being aware of a smell for a short time, it cuts out. Hunting hounds get around that by lifting their heads every few minutes to inhale some fresh air. While some are taking a short olfactory break, others are putting their noses back to the ground to search for the scent and once they’ve found it, begin baying again. That’s why hounds work best in packs.
The type of bark, as well as its intensity and frequency, tells the hunter his dogs have found a scent and allows him to follow them. It also lets him know when the hounds are closing in on their quarry and when they’ve treed it. “A trained dog barks a certain way when they’re on a cold trail, then lets out a long drawn out bawl [bark] as the trail warms up,” explained Pedneault. “When they tree a cougar the barking becomes shorter and faster. Even from a distance you can tell what’s happening by the type of bark.” Pedneault should know. Throughout his sixty-year career, he figures he’s tracked more than three hundred cougars as a bounty hunter, on-call predator control agent for the government and guide on Vancouver Island.
“Cougars can go forever at a slow lope so if you pick up a travelling track you could be gone two or three days,” he added. “But if you bust them and make them run, they’re only good for about a thousand-foot sprint before being completely winded. They’re only good for that short little burst and then they tree. A startled or full-bellied cougar will tree even faster.”
Although a cougar could easily turn and kill a dog, many don’t. The biggest danger occurs when a cat is defending cubs, which it will do no matter how large they are, or if it’s cornered or shot and comes out of a tree injured instead of dead. That’s why hunters tie up their dogs before taking aim with their rifles. Cougars can give hounds the slip by travelling over rough ground, doubling back or leaping up cliffs or down canyons where it’s impossible for its human and canine pursuers to follow. Hunts can go on for hours or even days, resulting in exhausted dogs with hoarse-sounding barks and sore paws and noses. If a hunter is far from camp and forced to spend the night outside with few supplies, that’s when Keeno, Old Red, Bugger or Buck might do double duty as “hot water bottles of the hunt.” As Hibben wrote in Hunting American Lions, “Two or three hounds arranged around one’s person will create a very satisfactory delusion of warmth, at least in those particular places.”
Hounds often pick up a scent and follow it the wrong way. And it isn’t always easy to turn them around. James T. Owen, commonly known as “Uncle Jimmy,” threw pebbles at his dogs to get their attention. In 1906, he became the first game warden of the Grand Canyon Game Preserve, and on one hunt told Theodore Roosevelt, “They think they know best and needn’t obey me unless I have a nose-bag full of rocks.”
Before radio telemetry collars, hounds often ran beyond the hearing and yelling range of their masters and could be gone for days and, on occasion, weeks. Jay C. Bruce, California’s first state lion hunter, solved this dilemma by calling his hounds with a horn. Born in 1881, Bruce grew up near Wawona, in the western Sierra Nevada Mountains in what is now Yosemite National Park. He was enrolled at Heald’s School of Mines and Engineering in San Francisco when the big earthquake of 1906 occurred and the resulting fire destroyed the building. Bruce returned to the rural life he loved and, along with a partner, built a sawmill. But after a work accident damaged his left hand, he lost both the mill and his house. Limited by the type of work he could do and desperate to support his wife and four children, Bruce started hunting mountain lions for the bounty. By the end of three years, his reputation earned him the job of government lion hunter.
Incredibly strong and tenacious, Jay Bruce was the state of California’s first mountain lion hunter. Two accidents meant he spent twenty years chasing lions with only one good eye and one good hand. The hand injury forced him to use a handgun instead of a rifle. He had to get close to the big cats, adjust his depth perception to compensate for his bad eye and have a very steady hand when it came time to shoot. Photo courtesy Bruce family collection
In his 1953 autobiography, Cougar Killer, Bruce wrote that he went on seven thousand lion hunts, killed nearly seven hundred lions and faced a different set of circumstances each time. The work was hard and dangerous. Due to his lame hand, Bruce used a handgun instead of a rifle. Once, when his Luger jammed as a lion charged him, Bruce fell backward, kicking at the cat while his hounds bit and pulled at its hind end. A swipe of the lion’s paw ripped the sole off his boot. Luckily the dogs held the cat back long enough for Bruce to get his gun in working order and dispatch it. Another time his hounds cornered a lion but when Bruce went to shoot, nothing happened. Then he remembered his wife telling him that she’d unloaded his gun as she was worried one of the children would pick it up. While contemplating his options Bruce grabbed a dog to save it from the lion’s claws and noticed two little bags of bullets tied to its collar.
It wasn’t only the big cats that posed a danger. While chasing a lion through the bush in 1928 Bruce was jabbed in the eye by a sharp stick. He collapsed due to the severe pain but his fifteen-year-old son was the only person with him so, by force of will, he managed to finish the hunt. He spent three weeks in a hospital with both eyes tightly bandaged. “From that day on I knew I would be taking the risk of suffering a miserable, lingering death every time I went hunting alone, and this was most of the time . . . and in lonely, rugged areas,” he confessed in Cougar Killer. Nonetheless, even though he was blind in one eye and had a crippled hand, Bruce continued to hunt cougars for another nineteen years.
When he wasn’t hunting lions, Jay Bruce wrote articles for Field & Stream and Outdoor Life. He also starred in three movies. The grainy black and white film of the last one, made circa 1924 with audio commentary added by Bruce twenty-nine years later, shows him bounding up mountains, fording chest-high rivers and scrambling down rock bluffs as he chased after his dogs on the trail of a mountain lion. No doubt he was showing off a bit for the filmmaker but it’s obvious that Bruce was incredibly fit and strong. In 1953, accompanied by a live mountain lion, Bruce took this movie and his book on tour to New York, Chicago and other big cities.
Tom Phillips, Bruce’s great-nephew, told me, “According to those who knew him, Jay was a difficult person to get along with. But when he came to town he was treated like a rock star and all the old folks in the county talked about going on a hunt with him or having a picture of him with a lion.”
At one point in his career, Bruce began an experimental breeding program with some of his best dogs. He wanted them to “follow a cold trail silently, make a fast finish, tree lions and keep them treed for ten to twelve hours at a time barking constantly during all that time.” He was so successful that the Canadian government ordered hounds from him. Bruce retired in 1947, and right up to his death at age eighty-one in 1963 he spoke fondly of the devotion of the canine cohorts of his working days and the companionship they provided.
Of course, not all cougar hunters had dogs specifically bred for the purpose. In the early bounty years on Vancouver Island any dog would do and many a collie, Airedale terrier, Labrador retriever and foxhound did a splendid job. John Cecil Smith’s favourite cougar dog was a collie-spaniel cross called Dick. Only problem was, Dick belonged to Smith’s older brother, Horace.
Financial difficulties brought the Smith family from England to central Vancouver Island in 1887, a time “when British Columbia had more cougars than bees,” John told his second wife, Elinor Swain. The family’s Black Creek farm wasn’t fenced so nine-year-old Smith rounded up the milk cows each morning. He learned to watch for hoofprints in soft earth and to pay attention to trampled ferns. It wasn’t long before he could tell which cow he was following and how it had spent its time in the woods. When Smith shot his first big cat at the age of fourteen he had no idea he’d eventually become a bounty hunter and a big game guide famous worldwide.
Vancouver Island was a logger’s paradise and the lush growth found in clear-cuts resulted in an exploding deer population. Cougar numbers also increased, perhaps to as many as four thousand by the early twentieth century, according to author Dell Hall. Inevitably, some of them added livestock to their menu. Farmers often didn’t have the time, know-how or inclination to track the troublesome cats so they asked Smith to deal with any problems. He received the five-dollar bounty British Columbia paid for mature cats, which later rose to forty dollars. Word got around and it wasn’t long before Smith was on twenty-four-hour call. Soon, big game hunters were hiring him as a guide. He was just twenty when he received a letter from a noted Austrian hunter addressed to “Cougar” Smith of Vancouver Island.
Smith married twice and had five children with his first wife. At different times he supplemented his hunting and guiding income by farming, logging, working as a fisheries inspector and selling cougar kittens he’d raised to zoos and game farms. In the early 1920s the provincial government hired him as a professional cougar hunter, which meant he received a salary as well as the bounty. To collect the bounty a hunter had to show the dead animal to a government official who punched a hole in its left ear and requisitioned payment. Afterward, Smith often sold the carcasses to Chinatown merchants in the nearby coal-mining community of Cumberland, the skins to taxidermists and the skulls to museums. He kept the tails for himself and was renowned for his cat-tail soup.
As well as having a reputation for being the most aggressive cougars, those on Vancouver Island were notoriously difficult to track. “The undergrowth—mostly salal—was so thick fellows used to joke about treeing a cougar in it,” Dell Hall wrote in Island Gold. Smith’s reputation as a tracker was legendary and many were convinced he could see in the dark. According to writer and naturalist Hamilton Mack Laing, Smith would disappear into the woods for days, and despite often being wet to the skin, he would only stop to build a fire and brew some tea. Food, blankets and even Smith’s compass might be left behind but never his battered black kettle.
For many years Smith used an old Hudson’s Bay musket. Rumour had it he never measured the powder, just put a handful in, rammed some newspaper on top and then threw in some shot. “To cougar hunt in the forest of Vancouver Island,” Laing wrote, “a person must combine the travelling prowess of a bull moose, the back packing stamina of a burro and the scout craft of a leather-stocking. Cougar Smith is the best panther hunter on earth.”
In Beyond the City Limits, Smith’s daughter, Margaret Dunn, recalled that most of her dad’s dogs were a mixed lot of part-bloodhounds, part-foxhounds, an English sheepdog and some whose ancestry was anyone’s guess. Although most cougar hunters had a close relationship with their dogs, they tried not to get too attached. It could take a couple of years to train a hound and only a second to lose it to a cougar. But that didn’t stop eighteen-year-old Smith from forming a strong bond with his brother’s dog, Dick. Smith offered to buy Dick but Horace refused to sell. So, according to a story Smith often told later in life, he asked Horace to fork over the seventy dollars he owed him. Horace didn’t have the money so Smith told his brother he could have the dog back when he repaid the loan.
As well as training dogs, on at least one occasion Smith trained a cougar hunter. English-born Roderick Haig-Brown first visited Canada’s west coast in the 1920s. An avid sports fisherman, he eventually married and raised four children in Campbell River, where he became a magistrate, conservationist and award-winning author of twenty-five books. His first years in the country were spent working as a professional hunting guide and bounty hunter in the Nimpkish River area of northern Vancouver Island. Haig-Brown was twenty-two the winter he learned how to hunt cougars from fifty-eight-year-old Smith.
Cougar Hunter: A Memoir of Roderick Haig-Brown by Al Purdy contains a collection of letters that Purdy and Haig-Brown sent each other. In one, Haig-Brown described Smith as “lean and spare as a lodge pole pine.” He recalled Smith bending over in the slash with his glasses sliding down his nose to pick out a strand of cougar fur on a log. “He’d track by eye as far as possible and then let the dogs loose when he thought they were really close. It was informed intuition over and over. My impression was that the dogs didn’t lead Smith to the cougar . . . he led them. As a woodsman he was in a class by himself.”
Haig-Brown’s third book, Panther, is based on Smith and his hunting expertise. “He was pleasant to travel with and I admired him greatly,” Haig-Brown wrote in a letter to Purdy. “We operated companionably, smoked rollies and talked freely. His perfect companionship in the woods under all sorts of conditions made the learning a very pleasant task.” Many people were surprised when they met the slight and soft-spoken Smith. A Toronto journalist who interviewed him in 1937 wrote, “For a certainty, he doesn’t look the part of a varmint slayer . . . A milder mannered, gentler soul than Cougar Smith never strolled through a forest or ran a marauding cougar to his doom.”
The easygoing Smith was adamant about one thing. “I’ve heard people say cougars are cowardly creatures and I want to scotch that idea right here for it isn’t so,” he said in The Nine Lives of Cougar Smith, an unpublished manuscript written by his second wife, Elinor. “They are afraid of nothing but noise and that’s the reason they’ll tree for a pack of dogs and it’s the only reason. They aren’t afraid of a dog any more than I am. Cougars can be fearsome critters when you meet them under certain conditions. One or two had me pretty badly scared at different times.” Smith quit chasing cougars in 1953 to spend more time in his garden and died eight years later at the age of eighty-three. It’s estimated he killed more than a thousand cougars over a span of nearly sixty years.
During the bounty years cougars were hunted and killed by young and old, male and female. Most farm women weren’t shy about shooting a cougar if it entered the yard. Some would even mount a horse and take after it if it was killing livestock. Others accompanied their husbands on hunts; some killed cougars for cash. Instead of tramping all over the country tracking with dogs, more than one woman lured the predators into her yard. Perhaps, with children and gardens to look after, women didn’t have the option of taking off for long periods of time. Or maybe it just seemed like a more practical way of getting the job done.
Ada Annie Rae-Arthur, an educated woman who worked as a stenographer, became a bounty hunter by circumstance rather than choice. When her husband, Willie, took to drink and opium in a big way, a doctor advised removing him from temptation. Rae-Arthur was twenty-seven when she, Willie and their three children moved from Vancouver to the head of Hesquiat Harbour on the west coast of Vancouver Island in 1915. By 1931 they had eight more children. Sickly Willie looked after the house and kids, as well as making regular boat trips to Tofino for get-togethers with the “boys.” In the meantime Rae-Arthur created a clearing in the rain forest, built drainage ditches and began planting. Over time, her garden grew to roughly three hectares (seven acres), and in addition to a prodigious vegetable plot contained fruit and decorative trees, including some exotic species from Asia, as well as tulips, daffodils, lilies, irises, peonies, two hundred varieties of dahlias and other flowers and shrubs.
In Cougar Annie’s Garden Margaret Horsfield described a small woman with work roughened hands who did whatever was necessary to keep her family going. A room in the house was converted into a small store and post office and Rae-Arthur sold plants through the mail. She also raised chickens, goats, rabbits and geese. Hats were her one indulgence and her standard gardening outfit consisted of a long dress, a fashionable hat and gumboots. When Willie died in 1936 Rae-Arthur soon realized she couldn’t look after the children, house, garden and various business ventures by herself. So she advertised for a husband. Over the years she married three more times, the last union taking place when Rae-Arthur was seventy-two and her spouse sixty, making her a pioneer in the modern use of the term “cougar.” All the men predeceased her and rumours abounded that she murdered at least one of them.
Rae-Arthur was a crack shot and it made sense to take advantage of the cougar bounty but she was much too busy to go hunting. Instead she used her goats as bait. Horsfield recounted in detail how Rae-Arthur placed three bear traps around the property—one a scant nine metres (thirty feet) away from the house. They were covered during the day when the goats and children were out and “Beware Cougar Trap” signs were posted for unwary visitors. Come nightfall, Rae-Arthur uncovered the traps and sometimes tethered a goat nearby. She often slept in her clothes, jumping up and running outside with her rifle as soon as the goat began to bleat.
Once a cougar got into the barn and killed nine goats. Rae-Arthur set her traps and baited them with pieces of one of the slaughtered goats. On the second night she heard noises and rushed out to find the cougar caught by two toes. When the cat saw her it tried to escape, and when that failed it lunged toward her. “I sighted fast and shot,” she said later. “He staggered and fell eight feet from me.” Another time she chased a cougar into the woods with her flashlight. “He had dragged a goat quite a way into the forest, heavy as it was. I saw him, though. He was hiding down near a stump atop the goat, he saw me too, and was just ready to spring. His mouth was wide open. I don’t usually shoot in the mouth but I could see this would go down his throat. I shot quickly. He dropped on the spot and rolled back.”
A cougar once knocked Rae-Arthur down but she saved herself by screaming loudly. Cougar Annie didn’t win every encounter. One year a cougar killed all her goats, leaving the family without milk. Indeed, the size of the goat herd went up and down depending on the deer population. If there were plenty of deer for cougars to dine on she might have forty goats; a decade later there might only be three.
As with most bounty hunters, the number of animals Rae-Arthur actually killed is open to debate. A realistic figure is probably seventy. In 1955 she claimed the bounty on ten, earning four hundred dollars. And even though cataracts made it difficult to see, she shot a cougar on her seventy-third birthday. She skinned the animals herself and sold the hides for extra money. As for the meat, she fed some to the chickens and canned and ate the rest. By the time Rae-Arthur was eighty, she could hardly see and had lost most of her teeth, energy and strength. Even so, she remained at Hesquiat Harbour until 1983, dying two years later, at age ninety-six, in the Port Alberni hospital.
Cougar Annie wasn’t the only woman to gain fame as a cougar killer. Over on the British Columbia mainland, everybody thought Bergie Solberg was just a peculiar character living in the bush until a French crew showed up to film The Cougar Lady of the Sunshine Coast. Bergilot Solberg moved from Norway to Canada with her parents and younger sister, Minnie, in 1926 when she was three years old. Her dad built a four-room house in Sechelt Inlet, about sixty kilometres (thirty-seven miles) in a straight line northwest from Vancouver on the mainland coast. He worked as a hand logger and taught his daughters how to hunt and trap. When they were older they helped him log. The girls were home-schooled and although they may have possessed only a rudimentary level of reading and writing skills, they were well educated in the ways of the land.
Bergie Solberg lived most of her life in a remote bay on Sechelt Inlet in British Columbia. Well educated in the ways of the woods, she earned a living by logging, trapping and hunting cougars. She liked cowboy hats and yodelling and kept several dogs for company, all named Bush. Photo courtesy the Alsgard family, Sechelt Community Archives
Minnie married and moved to Jervis Inlet; Bergie lived with her parents until they died. In her younger years she worked in logging camps blowing whistles, setting chokers and pulling straw line. Solberg raised chickens and goats and usually had several dogs, all named Bush, to keep her company. In her spare time she liked to play the guitar, sing and yodel. Solberg used her dad’s homemade wooden boat to go to Sechelt once a month for supplies. Her going-to-town attire consisted of western-style shirts, a battered purple cowboy hat and a big buck knife on a belt. It’s said she was a hard worker and very strong. She often competed at the Sechelt community’s loggers’ sports days and in 1976 was proclaimed Lady Logger of the Day.
Solberg operated a trapline for more than fifty years, selling mink, raccoon and other animal pelts for cash. She hunted bears and cougars too. Several times she was taken to court for shooting a bear out of season, letting her trapping licence expire or using her traps illegally. She often claimed she couldn’t read, using that as an excuse for breaking the law. The conservation officer was always trying to make her see the error of her ways, however, and once tried to confiscate her rifle for shooting a cougar out of season. They wrestled over the weapon and although Solberg won she complained about a sore shoulder for weeks afterward. Like Rae-Arthur, Solberg’s goats served two purposes: milk to drink and bait to lure cougars in close. As far as Solberg was concerned, cougars were made for one purpose: to shoot and skin, so she could sell the hide. She preferred venison but ate cougar meat once in a while, and said, “It tastes okay, kind of sweet.”
In the story “Bergie Solberg: Cougar Lady of the Sunshine Coast,” Ken Collins has written about a hunting expedition he went on with Solberg when she was in her late sixties. “Just like a bear, Bergie would put her head down, hunch her shoulders, and push her way through the dense underbrush.” As she raced across the landscape, only stopping to slurp goat’s milk out of a quart canning jar, Solberg pointed out various tracks to Collins. Then she found some cougar scat. “Like a connoisseur rolling a favoured Cuban cigar with the fingers, she fondled the piece of feces, broke it in half, and put it to her nose, inhaling deeply,” Collins wrote. Then she told him that the scat was fresh, what the cougar had eaten, when it had defecated and which way it was travelling.
Even though she was getting on in years, Solberg refused to move to town, saying it would kill her. Concerned about her isolation, a friend set up a CB radio so she could communicate with the outside world. He gave her the handle “Cougar Lady.” When she didn’t respond to a call on November 11, 2002, someone went to investigate and found the eighty-year-old dead from a stroke. Although it’s estimated Solberg only killed twenty cougars, her reputation spread beyond Sechelt via the French film and a segment on CBC Television’s The Golden Years.
In some ways, bounty hunters and early government predator control agents were the last vestiges of the “man against the wilderness” era of the Old West. Many were specialists in their fields and frequently provided a valuable service to those experiencing cougar predation; they were often quirky characters, too. And they usually performed their work out of sight of others, making it easy for tall tales to reach gigantic proportions over time.
For more than two hundred years some form of cougar bounty was practised in Canada and the US. One of the earliest eastern states to introduce a payment for killing cougars was Connecticut in 1684. Out west it was the Oregon Territories in 1864. But while eastern and midwestern portions of the continent had low or no cougar populations by the mid- to late 1800s, the big cats managed to hold their ground in the west. New Mexico ended its cougar bounty in 1923, followed by British Columbia in 1957. From that point on, one or more western states and provinces stopped paying bounties on cougars each year, with the last being Arizona in 1970. By then it was obvious that the bounty was an expensive and ineffective way for governments to manage cougars.
Besides, so many of the big cats had been killed that livestock predation was not the problem it had been in the past. Records indicate that 12,461 mountain lions were destroyed during California’s bounty years, and in Island Gold Dell Hall calculated that 21,871 cougars were killed by bounty hunters in BC. Despite being heavily hunted for an extended period of time, cougars were lucky. Perhaps because they’re so rarely seen and so labour intensive to chase, they weren’t at the top of the bounty hit list. Wolves and grizzly bear populations were extirpated (became locally extinct) in some areas of the west while the cougar managed to survive. But even before the bounty was cancelled, humans were chasing cougars as a form of recreation.