I’m writing a book about mountain lions and it’s down to weeks, days, pages flying, margins scratched and scribbled, when news comes of a 46-year-old woman killed by such a cat a couple hundred miles from where I live. She’d been hiking alone on New Year’s Day, forensics consistent with a mountain lion attack, asphyxiation with no puncture wounds, very little blood, meaning the lion had her throat in its jaws and closed off her airway, one of its go-to kill tactics.
The winter has been dry, little snow on the ground where tracks would have offered evidence as to how this encounter played out, how long the two of them might have danced, the woman’s heart racing, the cat feinting from side to side, trying to decide how to approach its prey. When her body was found by two hikers, the cat was still present. They threw rocks and shouted and it fled. A physician in the pair ran up and found there was no pulse, the woman was dead, the first human fatality from a mountain lion in the state of Colorado in 27 years.
I stop my work and sit still in the pointillist light coming into the house. Outside, high desert junipers and piñon pines press against the waking sky and I think of how scared she must have been when it happened. If there’s not an ounce of air left in your lungs and you’ve fought with everything you had, I like to think there’s a peace that comes over you, a resignation that must be a relief after a lifetime of working at being alive. It’s what you hear from those who survive drownings: in the final moments they don’t mind so much, it’s kind of pleasant, almost euphoric. This is how I make peace with the news of the woman’s death.
I learn about this at dawn on January 2nd, the first message coming in as I’m sitting at my manuscript at the kitchen table, a single light on in the house, my computer opened, notes spread everywhere. I live in heavy cat country, west end of Colorado toward the Utah border, not a single stoplight in my county, more dirt roads than paved, more natural geography than human. The woman was killed on the other side of the state along the more heavily populated Front Range where chances are much higher of having an encounter. In the coming days, the victim’s name would come out, Kristen Marie Kovatch, a seasoned trail-runner, ultramarathoner, considered by those who new her to be an experienced outdoorswoman who loved animals.
There was nothing ill-advised about what she was doing at the time. The backlash to her death the next morning is already coming, public cries about never going out by yourself. As a solo walker born and bred, I promise that she was doing what she loved. Had Kovatch not been out alone, the outcome may have been the same.
For her sake and for all of mountain lions, it would be better if these cats weren’t curious about humans in any way, if we as prey were wiped from their minds, but that’s not how this works. Deaths like this will happen. This is not Disneyland. Wild places have predators. They must.
Chances of being attacked or killed by a mountain lion are exceptionally low. You are significantly more likely to be killed by a cow. In the last hundred-fifty years, Puma concolor has killed between thirty and forty people, while cows kill that many in a year or two. Non-fatal attacks by mountain lions in North America come to one per year. In other words, exceedingly infrequent. They aren’t hunting us for sport. If they decided to, the numbers would be astronomical. Mountain lions are the more wary and retiring predator, one we’re fortunate to have because the closest co-evolutionary cat on the other side of the world, the similarly sized and physically structured Asian and African leopard, kills people in the dozens to hundreds per year. Our dominant cat is of a different nature. Its closest relative genetically is the African cheetah, for which there are no documented cases of killing humans. There is a gentleness toward us in the bloodline, but still, this cat is a predator.
The summer I started my field work for this book, a 21-year-old man in California was killed by a lion in the forested foothills between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe and even his 18-year-old brother who was on the scene couldn’t save him. That was the first death in twenty years in a state of forty million people, the only state to have banned their mountain lion hunt.
The manuscript on my desk is bookended by these two fatalities, which is where the truth lies about these cats and what it means to live in the company of fierce animals. I believe at the end of the book, as I sit to write this post, that I’ve found a place to begin.
Photo by me of a mountain lion taxidermy in a window
Thank you, Craig. As a fellow solo wanderer, I was waiting for the expected knee jerk responses (emphasize jerk) which inevitably come in these cases, particularly with women, it seems. I had plenty of run-ins with big cats along the eastern Sierra, and I was fortunate in two ways. 1) they were more curious than hungry. 2) they took off as I approached. I even got to watch one stalking a herd of deer one early morning on the slopes of Mt. Tom outside of Bishop. I never forget that I am part of the chain, not necessarily the top. Looking forward to your book!!!
I, too, walk alone in mountain lion country (Altadena California). I’ve seen fresh prints, come upon the scene moments after this ghost cat hoisted and bounded off with a deer it had just killed, and drove slowly in the night, heart pounding, as a cat played hide and seek for a few minutes with my car, moving in and out of my headlights. The price of beauty is accceptable to me.
What beautiful encounters, Nancy. I agree.
As a member of Grant County Search and Rescue, I was on the mission that recovered a man killed by a mountain lion. Our subject had been bathing in his yard. As we began a grid search, I caught the glow of night eyes a hundred feet away. The predator was watching us search. The body wasn’t found until the next morning, and the lion, plus collateral damage of a second lion, was shot a few days later. There hadn’t been a mountain lion death in New Mexico since the 1970s. So, yes, rare. This is what life is like in a wild and natural world.
The cougar who killed a women in Cool, CA was a first-time mother whose den was just off the trail on which the woman was jogging. This is according to a wildlife refuge owner who saw photos of the dead cougar. She said it still had spots on its legs. The cub ended up in a sanctuary, but the husband was outraged that it would be cared for while his children were now motherless. By the way, while volunteering in the refuge, I befriended Cuffy and Samantha, two cougars raised in captivity. Cuffy was ferocious and not to be toyed with foolishly. Samanta, on the other hand, was playful and gentle. She allowed me to clean her bowl one time while the owner was dealing with an inspector. Samanta and I had a ritual of greeting that would undoubtedly get me killed in the wild. I would crouch or sit on a bucket and lean against the chainlink fencing and place my hand against the fence. She would approach, sniff my hand, then press her head against my palm. I would scratch the top of her head and ears through the fence, which she loved. They are now dead and the refuge closed and cleared away. A house is there now and I wonder if the residents are curious about the flat spots high on their property.
My personal encounter was while standing on my porch in Truckee, CA. Our house was half a block from forest service wildness. Cougars would skirt the edges of our subdivision, (Tahoe Donner) while bears brazenly browsed the garbage containers thoughout the community. As I scanned the brush around my house, I spotted two gleaming eyes staring at me from the corner of the house. I reckoned the eyes were about three inches apart and were about six to nine inches from the ground. Awe and wonder toned down a feeling of panic. We stared at each other for several seconds. It had to be a cougar just watching me. Strangely, I felt little danger, but I thought it prudent to go back inside. I look forward to reading your book about cougars. They are my spirit animal.
I just want to add to my comment above that women have experienced more of a threat on trails from human males than from cougars of any age or gender.
And may I share this link to an article on my Substack page about Cuffy and Samantha? Thank you.
https://suecauhape.substack.com/p/wild-ones-caged?utm_source=publication-search
We live in the city limits of Seattle but cougars live in the foot hills and sometimes stalk/attack runners. Although I have lived in bear country I’m glad to let the wildlife live without my disturbance.
Yeah Craig that’s good, I’ve seen tracks in my neighborhood but no encounters. My neighbor saw one with a cub, looking over its shoulder at him, he said it was the most ripped animal he ever saw, all muscle. They are beautiful deserve our respect, they almost exclusively feed on deer so I’m surprised that it would attack her.