COUGAR

TERESE SVOBODA

It’s four o’clock on a winter afternoon, nearly dusk. I’m halfway between Omaha and Lincoln en route to the airport. Here, for ten miles, taco joints and carpet stores give way to a stretch of farmland and woods. This all used to be farmland—no, this all used to be wilderness, the type of landscape you see now only in the small sections of cropland where the irrigation circles don’t reach. But no snow anywhere. Unusual for this time of year. Except for the occasional terrible flood or tornado, the Midwest has few markers of climate change. Its farmers are always on the lookout for the slightest shifts—their livelihood depends on it—but their responses aren’t always what you’d expect. For the last several years, my father, a Nebraska farmer for six decades, has shrugged off the lack of snow by telling me how higher carbon dioxide levels have increased his crop yield.

Recalling his enthusiasm, I’m roaring along in a rental car at around eighty-five miles per hour, ten over the speed limit, when something four-legged leaps across the two opposite lanes. I barely have time to slow down when I see it’s a tan blip with an obelisk head and a tail nearly as long as its body. It tears across the median and past the front of my car, almost grazing my front bumper.

I park, shaken by the near collision. It’s rare to see an animal at all near a highway these days, let alone a big one. Even roadkill and insects have become scarce. I peer past the windshield into the gray winter landscape, at the leaden clouds, the dead weeds, the leafless trees. I see nothing.

I pull out my phone to google what it might have been. A bobcat is too short to run parallel to the bumper, and they have “bobbed” tails, not the long apostrophe that streaked across my field of vision. I search for “cougar nearby.” A month ago, a local kindergarten contacted the authorities to remove a female cougar that spent all morning sitting outside its front doors, seemingly waiting for children to appear. The local zoo was called in, and wildlife management loaded canisters of knock-out drugs into big bazooka-looking syringes, but the police were the ones who ultimately handled it. A photo of the kill shows two officers struggling to hoist the animal’s 120 pounds.

Obviously, the cat should not have been hanging around the kindergarten, but it was probably just following its instincts—to be successful, a predator must be patient and ponder every move. My cougar didn’t just jump into traffic. Unlike deer, which possess a startle reflex and will jump randomly to confuse predators, this cougar waited for a gap in traffic, took a chance, and barely cleared my car. I return my rental, thankfully intact, and fly home to New York City.

Big cats haunted me growing up in Nebraska, and they appear in more than one of my novels. When I was a child, local legend had it that they lurked in the limestone hills my siblings and I tobogganed down in the winter. Each time we turned our backs to mount our sleds, we expected to be pounced on—which made the kickoff even more exciting. Would a big cat leap on us on our way down the hill? We were always going too fast to check. We did see big animal prints while snowshoeing around the lakes in midwinter, though surely those were made by some plodding St. Bernard. Surely. As teenagers sitting around campfires redolent of sagebrush, we made up scary stories about big cats, the cinders glowing like the eyes of the cougars we imagined watching us from behind the spikes of yucca. Sometimes we would scream, not knowing that cougars scream too, rather than roar like lions. In the spring, after a local farmer spread tales about half-eaten calves, my father would laugh and say it was only a little bobcat. No need to worry.

But bobcat or cougar, if it had eaten one of his calves, my father would have killed it. He threatened to shoot whooping cranes if they so much as flew over his acreage, because, if their nests were found near Kingsley Dam, water authorities would halt the flow needed for local irrigation. He shot at prairie dogs because cattle broke their legs tripping on the burrowing rodents’ holes, and he poisoned coyotes for bothering a colt. The pesticides he sprayed diminished huge flocks of birds, and most of the beloved pheasants that he liked to hunt in the fall. But he was not a raving homicidal farmer—all the other producers did the same. He was a soft-hearted bastard who brought home baby bunnies that he’d rescued from the combine; he sat up in bed and shouted in his sleep: “I’m going to kill you” over my cowering mother, then finished with “you broad-leafed plants.” He must have inherited an unconscious drive from his pioneer forebears to conquer nature—or be conquered.

Due to unrestricted hunting by settlers (and consequent lack of prey), cougars had totally vanished from the Midwest by 1890. They were sighted again only a hundred years later. Once one of the most populous predators on Earth, with the greatest range of any terrestrial animal in the Western Hemisphere, the cougar spent the century holed up in a small area of southern Florida (as the panther) and in the western United States (as the “mountain lion” or “puma”). Between four and six thousand cougars still live in California, with one ensconced in the Hollywood Hills, having made its way from the Santa Monica Mountains through a corridor of tasty toy poodles and swimming pools and empty garages, and now six to fifteen breeding cougars have settled near my hometown in Nebraska. Another fifty-nine live three hours north. The cats are shy and elusive, but their return has not gone unnoticed.

“America’s Cat on the Comeback” announced American Scientist in 2018.¹ Cougars are expanding their range, and even though humans tend not to like this, it’s largely our fault it’s happening. In the wetlands, the cats have been forced to move because of overdevelopment, and in the Midwest, they’ve lost their territory because of agriculture’s tremendous growth. In 2018, when record-setting levels of ethanol production drove up the price of corn, farmers wanted to plant even the interstate’s median strips to reap a greater profit.

To survive, cougars are seeking out green spaces wherever they can find them. In 2011 a male cougar was killed by a car in Connecticut. He had traveled all the way from the Black Hills, a trek of more than 1,800 miles. But at least the cougars aren’t starving. Populations of prey species like deer and raccoons have reached a historic high. (Even in the middle of New York City, I have photographed raccoons on my back deck.)

Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, meanwhile, promotes the maintenance of “resilient, healthy, and socially acceptable populations” of cougar, with emphasis on “socially acceptable.”² Few animals today are considered as such: cats, dogs, parakeets. The rest, if they’re lucky, are not dead but miserable, behind bars. Cougars are the least aggressive of the world’s large cats, but it’s a tough sell to convince people that allowing cougars to run wild could be good for the environment. Truth is, they actually save lives. They hunt the deer that would otherwise step in front of your speeding car (the average mother cougar eats one deer every four days.) Cougars also diminish populations of prey animals, which in turn helps to rebalance ecosystems within their range. We’ve seen this happen before with other animal species. Wolves reintroduced to Yellowstone helped reduce the elk, which resulted in the return of foliage.

Yes, cougars may occasionally eat horses and cattle and toy poodles. And their size is terrifyingly formidable: they are bigger than wolves, with paws the size of a spread adult hand. But when it comes to humans, they keep their distance. It’s statistically far more likely that you’d die from being attacked by a dog than a cougar.³ They aren’t entering our spaces because they want to threaten us—it’s because we’ve left them no other choice.

The only cougar I encountered before my near miss on the interstate was Snagglepuss, the Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning cartoon cat from the sixties. An effeminate pink feline in an upturned collar who sported shirt cuffs and a string tie, he sounded a lot like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion: I haven’t any courage at all. I even scare myself, although his most famous line was Heavens to Murgatroyd! Despite his lack of courage, the lion in Oz learned what it took to be brave. Snagglepuss had ambitions, but they always led him back to where he started and sometimes even worse off. His situation resembled that of the real-life wildcats: not quite protected, not yet extinct. In response to the cougar’s comeback, thirteen states including Nebraska now advertise cougar hunts to get rid of “surplus” animals, without considering the competition of bears and coyotes, who often outhunt humans to kill cougar. In Saskatchewan, it’s even legal to take cougars in bear traps, which causes the animals intense pain. If the traps aren’t monitored on a regular basis, trapped animals die slowly; some even gnaw off their paws to escape.

Why do we need animals around anyway, aside from food or fur or cuddly comfort or anthropomorphized sex and death on TV nature series? After all, they spread viruses, they cause accidents, they bite. Even the activities we think they’re vital for have workarounds: Man can always build robots to pollinate fruit and nut crops; Japan long ago produced a lovable mechanical dog to comfort its owners; and scientists have shown that the elderly appreciate the ever-attentive Alexa, whom I would classify as a pseudo-pet, given the affection she engenders. But what happened when China with its “Four Pests” campaign decided to eliminate rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows? Severe famine. Animals, it turns out, are critically necessary to human life and civilization as we know it.

But even beyond the value of biodiversity, they warn us of environmental dangers. In 373 B.C.E., massive groups of rats, snakes, weasels, and other animals fled the Greek city of Helike days before an earthquake. In 2001, more than a dozen tagged blacktip sharks swam into deeper waters just before Tropical Storm Gabrielle decimated Florida’s Terra Ceia Bay. In 2009, toads near L’Aquila, Italy, perhaps able to detect changes in the planet’s atmospheric electrical fields, deserted their mating sites prior to an earthquake. The cougar is warning us. In the Midwest, its return announces that environmental pressures—resulting from climate change and habitat destruction—are so great that even large animals are on the move.

My two boys—men now—declare on Thanksgiving that we humans have at most only fifteen years left on this planet. I am so taken aback that I don’t parry, and all of us go to bed in a panic. The sons are hardly doomsdayers: they have comfortable jobs in New York tech, and prepping connotes camping to them, which they abhor. But they’ve read the recent reports about the astonishing rate of global warming, the halving of the population of Earth’s species, and this is their logical conclusion. The next morning, I sign everyone up for urban survival training, and we sit in frigid Central Park listening to the instructor review the contents of an emergency go bag, explain the importance of invisibility during escape, and teach us things like how to make fire and which edible plants grow in New York City. We have so many questions, the class goes on for five hours instead of the three we’d signed up for. I urge my sons to make friends with ten-year-olds, who will be stronger than they are in fifteen years. Afterward, we discuss where to flee—we’re moving to Canada—and where we can plant trees next month. Where to put the bee house? Vote, I say, shower less. Learn how to make antibiotics so when the military rounds everyone up, you’ll be more valuable. I tell them to do one thing about climate change every day, make a donation to an environmental group, water plants with cold shower water to reduce our resource use, install a solar panel on their tiny decks. How can I even consider having a family? asks the younger, whose metrosexual swagger barely conceals a sweetness no child can resist.

I have no answer for such despair.

My childhood Snagglepuss had a tendency to end every sentence with “even,” as in “On account of I must be a little rusty. Stale, even,” or “Somebody hurt! In dire pain, even!” a habit that intimates that he was expressing an extreme case of a more general proposition.

My sons, even.

They envision that we’ll soon be like my highway cougar, running between corridors of disaster, searching for an environment that is not too cold or too hot or flooded or on fire or virus-prone. We’ll be just like the animals, jiggling our feet over a rumbling disconsolate planet. What juggernauts of weather or earthquake will the luckiest of us just miss by a day or a mile? We pray for a freak rain to drench the Amazon, putting out a continent of fire, or a tsunami to judder to an end against an empty shoreline. While we still have a little time, perhaps like the cougar, we can leap clear of it. Avoid the utter devastation that climate change threatens.

Notes

1.Michelle LaRue, “America’s Cat Is on the Comeback,” American Scientist 106, no. 6 (November–December 2018): 352–59, www.americanscientist.org/article/americas-cat-is-on-the-comeback.

2.Sam Wilson, “Mountain Lions in Nebraska,” Nebraska Game Parks, May 8, 2020, outdoornebraska.gov/mountainlions.

3.LaRue, “America’s Cat.”