I worked for the U.S. Forest Service years ago, for a summer. We were surveying salmon habitat in the upper Selway River drainage. Eight days in the backcountry, six out.
My ex-wife, who was then pregnant with my now almost-adult twin daughters, used to pick me up at the end of each eight-day hitch with a pizza and a cold six pack. That was good pizza and beer.
One of the members of our team was a transplanted easterner living in Missoula. He was entertaining, with a Boston accent and a man-out-of-place sense of humor that kept us in stitches at camp each night.
I grew to like the guy despite his fondness for the Celtics.
Boston’s oddest quirk was a deep-seated fear of mountain lions. The dude was terrified that he was going to go into an eight-day hitch and not come out alive, his tastiest bits processed into lion poop.
He carried a can of bear spray — useful for bears, almost worthless for lions — the entire summer. Every time we broke camp and had to pack our gear to a new site, he lashed his sleeping bag to the top of his pack so as to protect his neck in case a lion tried to get him from behind.
Lion attacks on humans are pretty rare, but not unheard of. I’m aware of a handful of documented cases where lions have killed adult humans, so there is reason for concern. But the thing about mountain lions is that they are ambush predators.
If your number has come up one will jump on your back and put the bite on your spinal cord and you’ll be standing at the pearly gates before you know what happened. There’s not much you can do to prevent becoming a steaming pile of cat scat other than staying away from lion habitat altogether.
That’s why lions, which vastly outnumber wolves in much of the Northern Rockies, have almost no impact on the behavior of big game animals as compared to their pack-running competitors. Elk know when wolves are hunting them and take defensive measures. But there’s little point in taking defensive measures against an ambush predator you’ll never see coming.
We didn’t see a lion that summer, but they almost certainly saw us. I recall an incident decades ago when a child was attacked by a lion in the foothills south of Irvine, Calif. A day or two later a newspaper photographer coaxed family members back to where the attack occurred to get some shots for a follow-up story. It wasn’t until the photographer got back to the lab and processed the film that he saw the head of a mountain lion peaking out from the chaparral, eyeing the folks he was photographing.
I’ve only seen lions in the wild once. When the twins were just starting school we lived in Flagstaff, Ariz. in a subdivision on a wooded mesa. Though the mesa was in the center of town it was connected to the nearby Coconino National Forest by a sliver of undeveloped ponderosa pine. The mesa held a lot of deer, so it’s not surprising that lions were there as well. One afternoon
I was walking along the mesa rim with the twins when I saw up ahead what I first thought was a dog, and then a buff colored house cat. Finally I noticed the long, twitching tail, seemingly twice as long as the cat itself, and I realized I was looking at a mountain lion. As the big cat moved off a kitten trailed close behind.
We were about 200 yards from our house, in a stand of gambel oak where the twins often played noisy games of tag, while I absent mindedly walked ahead.
I’m told that the erratic play of small children can induce predatory behavior in lions. Our mesa walks were never as carefree after that.
In this country lions are everywhere. I’ve come to accept that they’re keeping tabs on me every time I head out into the woods. I also hope they’ll continue to hold me in the same low regard.
Maybe I’m no pizza in a lion’s eyes. That’s just fine with me.
Rob Breeding writes, teaches and watches his kids play soccer when he’s not fishing or hunting.