Oregon—An unexpected feline visitor creates a stir among a cabin’s owners. Pondering what to do, the couple considers calling the officials.
The growling I heard from under the cabin was something new; something deep and, well, scary, like deep animal growls are supposed to be. It was dark, New Year’s Day, and we’d just gotten back from a week-long holiday absence.
One of our dogs was sticking his snout under the cabin, an eight-by-ten-foot outbuilding I use as an office, and barking intently. I knew right away that something was under there—the dog was acting unusual. I hadn’t even gone in the house yet, which is of course all one wants to do after traveling cross-country for the day, but I had to investigate, see what was there, and at least get the dog to simmer down.
Just thirty feet from the house, the cabin’s a log timbered structure with open alcoves under the flooring, the early-winter snow already piling up around it and the nearby pines.
As I crunched through the snow I casually assumed that I’d encounter the neighbor’s cat hunkered under the structure, being unnecessarily intimidated by the dog, or maybe a raccoon, which the dogs hate for some reason and can’t resist a good barking session over.
“OK, buddy,” I said, exhausted. “That’s enough. Let’s see whatcha got under there…” I tapped the dog and he quickly trotted behind me, and I took another step, approaching the opening under the shack. That’s when the growls struck my ears and I came to a complete stop. I remember hovering there for a moment, half bent over, one hand on the side of the cabin, about to fully bend down and peer under the structure, when I was forced to pause. I’ve thought over this moment time and time again.
How does one describe this sound? “Deep and guttural,” although a cliché, seems fitting. “Sepulchral” is even appropriate, although may be too much of a negative connotation. The intensity and volume of the growl, a booming, disturbed purr, told me that I had to immediately upgrade my idea that it was just my neighbor’s cat under the cabin.
As a naturalist I’ve frequently lectured kids about animal interactions in the natural world, about how the size of a particular species is often irrelevant when it comes to intimidation. “Aggressiveness is the key to intimidation—often independent of size.” Many a small songbird chases a much larger hawk out of its territory simply through displaying aggression. Often, it’s not worth it for the hawk to expend the energy to fight back. Animals have countless forms of bodily display: bold markings, postures, ear flares, squints, hisses, honks, and growls—that’s their vocabulary when it comes to intraspecies communication. These are not necessarily predator-prey interactions; these are more likely territorial emotions conducted to simply express “Back off.”
As I hesitated outside the cabin on that frosty night, half-hunched over, ready to peer into the unknown, I was confronted by an auditory “Back off!” I don’t remember feeling fear, I really don’t recall being disturbed, only I knew that I had disturbed something else.
I needed a flashlight. I was elated as I high-stepped back to the house. The dogs were waiting a few dozen feet behind me and it wasn’t until much later that I realized how unnerved they were. The barking directed under the cabin was, I believe, much for show and ceremonial territoriality, perhaps mostly to let us humans know what was in their yard (i.e., their “territory”). But when I was trotting back toward the house, the dogs seemed pleased to be heading back toward sanctuary.
At this point I was considering which animal I might possibly be dealing with. I was thinking bear, with an outside chance of cougar and the possibility of a big, stray dog. Hmm. Just a dog would be disappointing.
I quickly crashed through the door, all three dogs bursting in with me, and momentarily made eye contact with my wife as I snatched the flashlight off the wall. She looked up from the stack of mail: “What’s going on out there?” With a wry smile and arched eyebrow I stated, “There’s something under the cabin,” and bolted back out the door. She came right behind me, descending the stairs in the frozen snow. “Whaddya think it is?”
“Don’t know. But it’s big.”
I thumped toward the cabin, perhaps too quickly, almost afraid that what I knew would be an epic natural-history sighting might have left, and was pleased to hear the growl return as I approached.
Darkness was deepening as I clicked on the light. I squatted and spun my arm toward the opening. Face-to-face with a brown animal. A big, brown cat. It bared its teeth and hissed to greet me. I didn’t feel fear. It was nestled too deeply in a tight place, unable to lunge. It was apparent that the cat was terrified and it didn’t move.
I knew it was a cougar. But still my scientific mind had taught me that I needed to prove that it wasn’t not a cougar. So I just stared, squatting, holding the flashlight before me, flipping through mammal field guides in the margins of my mind.
Uniform brown face with dark cheeks. Ear tufts? No. Tail? Can’t see. White chin? Roger that. Paws? Can only see one and it’s pretty damn big. Cat size? Well… it’s kind of small, like a medium-sized dog, a small Lab, for example. So I kept flipping back and forth between cougar and bobcat possibilities, but I knew it was a cougar. It struck me as a young cat—immature. So I wondered if a young bobcat would have ear tufts. But, if this was a bobcat, it was really big.
That white chin—that was the clincher. When it comes to big cats, I was lucky enough to have seen one years before.
On a wet spring evening I was heading uphill into the pines and foothills of the Cascades where I live. The trees were sparsely scattered with lots of manzanita, bitterbrush, and other shrubs hugging the sides of the road. Suddenly, about two hundred feet in front of me, a large mule deer doe popped into view, bouncing across the road. She was trotting rapidly in a diagonal direction away from me. Deer are common in the area and one comes to expect seeing them in winter and spring, but something felt different about this sighting.
I had frequently commented how the local deer population was very car-savvy. They’d see or hear vehicles coming and calmly step away from the pavement a few feet, then return to the roadside grasses before your taillights faded. But the deer on this particular night was bouncing recklessly in front of me. My foot was already coming down on the brake, slowing steadily. Where you see one deer, there are usually more. That’s when I saw the next one coming hard in the corner of my eye. Much closer than the first, it was bounding through the underbrush right at me. I was decelerating rapidly but I was sure that it and my van were on a collision course.
At that moment my memories are chilled into slow motion. My gaze shifted off the road to the right where the animal was just bursting into view. The van brakes groaned and the engine whined, slowing. The brown shape cleared the brush, landing less than ten feet in front of me. I was going to hit it. Its head turned, shocked by my vehicle’s appearance, and I met its disturbed, angry glare over the corner of the hood. My vision defied reality. For one instant, burned into my mind as my headlights lit up the cat, I made eye contact with the ultimate ghost of the mountains. Its eyes shone like fire, ears flattened, giant whiskers flared outward, white chin clenched, and muscles rippling down from its shoulders to its massive feet.
In full sprint, the cougar’s front paws hit the shoulder of the road when its gaze spun toward me. At that moment, I swear that its rear legs were still moving forward when the front legs recoiled and the entire animal sprang backward. The van jerked to a stop. I peered through the passenger window to where the cat had been, seeing only leaves of manzanita and darkness.
“Oh my God!” I heard myself say. Still staring, my mind couldn’t catch up with what I’d just seen. My first thought—and I’m not making this up—was “Someone’s pet African lion has escaped.” The cougar was huge. I believe that its head, from the base of the neck to the tip of its nose, was fully eighteen inches long, bigger than any dog I’d ever seen.
I looked back to the left where the deer pounded away into freedom, realizing that I’d inadvertently saved its life, and I stared back to where the mountain lion had disappeared. The smile must’ve gradually crept across my face as I realized what I’d seen and how lucky I’d been. I never expected to see a cougar. Although I’d spent a lot of time in backcountry situations where I knew the cats lived, I still never thought I’d be so fortunate as to spot one. That sighting left me feeling giddy for days.
The vivid memories of that frozen moment surged back through my mind as I stared at the frightened young cat in front of me. Its growls and snarls were an obvious weak attempt to deter me. Its body never moved and it was apparent that this cat wasn’t about to leave its shelter.
“Honey,” my wife finally asked emphatically, “what is it?”
It occurred to me that my answer would have some shock value and I considered tempering it somehow, but I just nodded and coolly stated, “There’s a cougar under here.”
Immediately, she was backpedaling, heading for the house, spouting at me, “Get outta there!”
“No. It’s OK.” I backed off, wanting to give the cat some space. “It’s young, one or two years old.” I looked over at my wife, smiling, and beckoned her. “C’mere. It’s pretty cute.”
It was. The cougar was likely in its first winter away from its mother and still had some distinct kittenish looks to it, albeit very large ones. We took turns looking at the cat from a respectable distance for a few minutes and then, once darkness was complete, we made our way into the house.
Then we had a dilemma. What to do? We felt obliged to make some phone calls to the immediate neighbors and encourage them to keep their pets indoors for the night. But what to do with the cat? Should we have it removed?
Because it was New Year’s Day and after 5:00 P.M., there wasn’t an agency—state, federal, or local—available for advice, so my wife wound up on the phone with the Oregon State Troopers, informing them of the situation. They said they’d get back to us.
I’m sure that it took several minutes for our adrenaline to diminish, and after we discussed the situation in detail and considered all of the possible consequences, we realized what we were invoking.
“The State Troopers don’t have wildlife considerations to make,” I mentioned, “other than whether or not this animal is considered ‘a threat.’”
My wife looked at me inquiringly.
I continued, “If they come out here, they’re gonna kill it.”
She immediately got back on the phone, was told that a deputy was on the way, and after asking the dispatcher what the plan would be, was informed that the cougar would likely “be destroyed.”
Now, I have no complaint with the state police, but at that moment I became quite defensive of the young cat under the shed. We know that we live in cougar country. Our property is surrounded by national forest land and the area is rich in scenery and wildlife. That’s why we live here. We knew that this cat was innocent of any wrongdoing and deserved a chance to make it on his own. We determined that we’d simply wait until morning and hopefully, by then, the underside of the cabin would be vacant.
Unfortunately, the next day, we were shocked to learn that our fuzzy friend was still entrenched in his temporary home. Now we had to confront the issue in the clarifying details of daylight. We liked the fact that the big cat had dropped by, but we didn’t want to actually live with it. He’d likely had a recent big meal, and it was probable that the cat was planning on sitting comfortably in such a sheltered, dry place for the next few days. He was certainly a threat to our own housecats, maybe our dogs—enough to make me glance over my shoulder occasionally for many weeks to come.
We were determined that we would scare him out. This was silly, but fun. We invited some friends over and we all pranced around the yard, whooping and clanging pots and pans together. In hindsight, I realize how senseless this was. The cougar was comfortable under the cabin. There was no way he was coming out to encounter that ruckus.
Eventually, we quieted down, piled up snow on one side of the cabin, which left him only one exit, and slowly prodded him through the snow with a long section of plastic pipe. We all stayed on one side of the cabin, giving the cat free and unintimidating access out to the other side.
From the house, my wife said, “He’s coming out.” We kept prodding. Then we heard, “He’s out!” and we all froze.
Looking around the side of the cabin, I saw the young mountain lion slowly padding through the hard snow into the shelter of the pines. He never looked back, just kept trotting, perhaps hoping that no one would notice his departure. I stood there, just a few feet away, keenly observing the animal. I had a camera in my hands, but I didn’t want to interrupt my view of a young cougar stealing through my yard. His coat was thick, well insulated, but still bore the spots a young cat relies on for camouflage. I’d guess that the cat was between fifty and sixty pounds. He made it to the trees, turned this way then the other, before I lost sight of his long, thick tail, and he was gone.
We’ve told this story over and over since it occurred three years ago. When I relate the details of this experience, people simply listen, jaws open, studying my words, wishing they had been there. The impact is the same no matter who the audience: people are mesmerized by mountain lions, and I feel fortunate to be the teller of such a tale.
The next day after that young cat padded away I followed his tracks. Along with a couple of friends on snowshoes, we followed them for two or three miles, losing and then regaining the trail. The tracks wandered in and out of forested areas, along the edge of a large creek, and then simply disappeared.
We stood there at the edge of the creek, looking across, even up, wondering if it could have made a jump in any particular direction. But it was clear that we were off the trail, the cougar was again alone, and we were all more fortunate for the experience.