saw this review--new literary collection on cougars

[Emily]

http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/wr ... y/C39/L39/


New West Book Review
Writers Listen to Mountain Lions in New Anthology

By Jenny Shank, 11-26-07





Listening to Cougar
Ed. Marc Bekoff & Cara Blessley Lowe
University Press of Colorado
228 pages, $24.95

I picture Rick Bass and Barry Lopez sitting side by side at a desk in a spare cabin in the wilderness, dressed in their anthology superhero outfits: identical red plaid shirts. A light on the telephone between them starts blinking. They meet each other’s eyes. It’s the Western anthology hotline, summoning them for duty. Lopez reaches for the receiver. “Lopez here,” he says. “What’s the assignment? Ptarmigan? Alpine bryum moss?” He waits. “Cougars?” He and Bass begin to laugh. “Give us ten minutes,” Lopez says, hanging up the phone. Bass cracks his knuckles, opens a notebook, takes up his pen, and gets to work.

Almost every anthology I’ve read this year that has something to do with the West has featured an essay by Bass or Lopez or both. Listening to Cougar, a new University Press of Colorado anthology about mountain lions, is no exception. But maybe certain writers’ lives are not quite the way I like to imagine them: both Bass’s and Lopez’s essays are reprints. Bass’s excellent yarn about how his one-year-old pup confronted a 250-pound puma in Montana is an excerpt from his 1998 dog memoir Brown Dog of the Yaak, and Lopez’s reverie on the floundering wildlife in and around a drought-stricken Oregon river is taken from 1979’s River Notes: The Dance of the Herons.

Still, even if there is no anthology hotline, plenty of other talented writers answered the call for this book with fresh material, and it provides a fine meditation on the cougar, including biological, historical, spiritual, and personal perspectives. As many of the essayists note, the Puma concolor is an animal of many names: cougar, mountain lion, puma, panther, catamount. It’s an animal that has always loomed large in the minds of the people who have lived within its range, from Native Americans who revered it and included it in their cosmologies (as Steve Pavlik details in his essay “The Sacred Cat"), to modern day Front Rangers who track it or keep a wary eye out for it.

According to the biographical notes, J. Frank Dobie is “considered the first truly professional writer to hail from Texas,” and his fascinating essay “Lion Markers” was originally published in 1928. Dobie writes of a cougar hunting expedition he joined in Beaverhead, New Mexico, and passes along much of the lore he gleaned from mountain lion hunting experts, the Evans brothers, who pursued cougars with the help of “remarkable dogs.” The easiest way to spot the elusive mountain lion, the men agreed, was through finding its prey.

“If we could find a fresh kill,” Dobie writes, “we were reasonably certain of jumping the killer. He might stay away from it for a night, but the chances were ninety to ten that he would return the next night, eat, leave a fresh trail, and be lying up somewhere near when the dogs were turned loose in the vicinity at dawn.”

“A Puma’s Journey” by Linda Sweanor, a Colorado cougar ecologist, was another essay that taught me several things I didn’t know. Sweanor, who has studied cougars for over a decade, describes how young male mountain lions must disperse after they are weaned, seeking their own territory. “Newly independent male pumas have a strong urge to travel,” she writes. “Whether aggressive, territorial adult males instigate dispersal or if it is more deeply programmed in the cat’s genetics, these felid teenagers typically travel over one hundred kilometers from their birth site before establishing a territory of their own.”

Sweanor writes that two of the longest documented dispersal distances were those of a male that traveled 480 kilometers from his birthplace in Wyoming to Colorado, and another who was born in South Dakota’s Black Hills and died 960 kilometers away in Oklahoma.

While some assume that increased cougar sightings in far-flung places (such as eastern Nebraska, where my aunt spotted a mountain lion on her farm) must indicate a thriving population, some of the scientists in Listening to Cougar argue that it’s cougars’ need to disperse, and increasingly limited uninhabited stretches of land, that have caused the increase in human-cougar contacts. No one knows for certain what the North American cougar population is--as many essayists note, the cougar’s elusiveness is practically its defining quality.

Still, some of the essayists in this collection have seen them so often you’d think they were stuffing their pockets with catnip. Christina Kohlruss writes in “To Cry for Vision” about how just about every time she heads into the wilderness on a “vision quest,” a mountain lion comes to call on her.

Editor Marc Bekoff, who is a professor of biology at the University of Colorado, writes with good humor and insight about his several cougar encounters in “A Lion, A Fox, and A Funeral.” Bekoff has often played the role of town crier when he’s spotted a cougar in his Boulder neighborhood around homes where small children live. Once when he was out to warn a neighbor about a cougar, he practically walked right into the animal, and writes, “I was terrified and ran up the hillside, in my clogs, yelling all the way, ‘There’s a lion here, there’s a lion here!’” Bekoff realizes that in responding to his primal fear and hightailing it out of there, he violated some of the rules that are included in the appendix “Cougar County Safety Tips.” He writes:

“I remember going to sleep that night imagining a headline in the local paper saying something like ‘University of Colorado Carnivore Expert who Ran from a Cougar Gets Maimed—What Was He Thinking?’”

Many of the essayists are awe-inspired by their encounters with mountain lions, and turn to the realm of spiritual belief to help them comprehend the incident. BK Loren combined her knowledge of cougars gained from a winter spent tracking them for Colorado State Parks with Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious into her thought-provoking essay, “The Shifting Light of Shadows.” She writes about how after months of tracking cougars without seeing them, she spotted a mountain lion out in the open on the tennis courts in Chautauqua Park in Boulder. She compares the cougar to one of Jung’s archetypes, “the Shadow,” which “holds within it all our internal repressed fears” and riffs on one of the animal’s names, “the shadow cat.”

Loren’s is the kind of spiritual writing I like: bracing, questioning rather than certain, and specific. Less successful in this vein, to me, was Suzanne Duarte’s “My Bush Soul, The Mountain Lion,” in which she shared her many mountain lion-themed dreams, along with her interpretations of them.

Encountering a mountain lion is a rare occurrence, being attacked by one still rarer. Cougars have killed only eighteen people in the North America since 1890. Still, parents of young children who live in cougar country should avoid reading the detailed appendix “Deaths by Cougar Attack, 1890-Present” before bedtime.

I saw a mountain lion once. A few years ago was riding on the Peak to Peak Highway, and noticed a huge animal emerge from the trees on the side of the road. I could scarcely believe what I was seeing, and when I got home, I sketched the silhouette of what I’d seen to try to confirm it: an enormous, golden cat with a tail as long as its body floating out behind it, its movements smooth as smoke. Okay, I saw it only for a second, from the safety of my car. This story isn’t likely to impress Rick Bass or Barry Lopez. But everyone in cougar country is entitled to his or her mountain lion story, and that one’s mine.

As Cara Blessley Lowe writes in her introduction:

“Cougars can powerfully call forth our innermost fears because it is on this very edge that cougars reside in our psyches, straddling both fear and awe. We want to see one—even just a glimpse, just once—yet we don’t want to be confronted with a situation outside of our control. But rarely are encounters with cougars on human terms.”

By those standards, my brief, safe sighting was a wish come true, and I’ll happily content myself with reading about more up-close-and-personal lion encounters in Listening to Cougar.

Marc Beckoff will read from his other new book, “Animals Matter,” at the Boulder Book Store on December 4 at 7:30 p.m.

[Emily]

http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Books ... oid:106931

Using the Cougar
An uneven yet illuminating collection of essays honors the noble 'felis concolor'
By TIM HULL


Buy this book from Amazon.com!
Listening to Cougar, by Marc Bekoff and Cara Blessley Lowe, Editors. University Press of Colorado, $24.95.

The mountain lion survives in the West in numbers that sustain fairly liberal hunting policies in 10 states, including Arizona: That is testament to the big cat's stealth. That the cougar, felis concolor, the cat of one color, dies by the bullet more often today than it ever did in the old days of bounties and government-sponsored predator-control agents is one of the many postmodern ironies that haunt this territory in the 21st century.
In her essay "A Short, Unnatural History," one of 20 included in the illuminating new collection Listening to Cougar, Wendy Keefover-Ring, a carnivore-protection activist based in Colorado, writes that "... compared to present-day figures, few pumas were killed during the bounty period because of the lack of technology and limited access in hard-to-reach places in the unroaded and often impenetrable West."

It is only recently, within the past five years or so, that it became illegal in Arizona to kill a female lion with spotted kittens. Otherwise, you need only buy a tag and find somebody with a pack of trained dogs to take you out. One of several Arizona-based hunting outfitters will do it--for a minimum of about $3,000. Your average predator-control agent used to get a mere $50 for each lion scalp.

The Arizona Game and Fish Department seems to agree with Keefover-Ring's assessment, reporting on its Web site that "information indicates that lion harvests have gradually increased over time. Recently, the annual kill has ranged between 250 and 350 animals, of which approximately 15 percent were taken by predator-control agents."

In Colorado, the only state to keep detailed records of the predator-control era, between 1929 and 1965, agents or ranchers killed about 45 cougars a year, based on payouts for bounties; from 1997 to 2006, similar to Arizona, some 345 cougars were killed each year, Keefover-Ring reports.

So it is that the mountain lion survived the years when it had a bounty on its head, and agents of the government were employed to kill--shoot or poison--a lion on sight. But the cat may end up falling away regardless, just as it did in the East and South, where it once roamed not so long ago.

This collection of essays about the cougar gives us a hint at how this strange state of affairs came about. Most of the pieces in the book take a familiar form: A writer is in the wilderness attempting to reconnect with something lost; a mountain lion happens upon the scene--powerful, wild, scary and above all elusive; and that something lost is found through a brief interaction with the cougar, which is used as a symbol and stand-in for a connection to what is wild and primeval. It's nearly always a spiritual, even religious interaction. Many of the writers don't see the cougar as a predator, and a nearly perfect one at that; instead, they see it as an abstraction, in the same way that Old West pioneers saw the great predators not as necessary parts of the ecosystem, but as the stuff of their bad dreams, the monsters that kept the wilderness wild instead of wholly reclaimed for commerce. One might ask: What's the difference?

The best essays in this collection are those that eschew the easy spiritualism that has infected so much of the conservation movement and instead treat the great cat as only that: nothing more but certainly nothing less. It is on these terms, the lion's terms alone, that it will be saved, and it must be saved. A real working ecosystem must have predators; otherwise, we're just living in some Western World display in a dream-home-crowded theme park, one in which, as one essay here suggests, you need only find a place in the woods to meditate and, lo and behold, a friendly cougar will slink up to say hello.

As uneven as this collection is, there are at least five or six essays that contribute greatly to the growing literature on mountain lion behavior and conservation. The best-written piece, and the one that reverberates most in my mind, is by J. Frank Dobie, reprinted from a 1928 issue of Country Gentleman magazine. It chronicles a horseback hunt for a mountain lion in the wilds of New Mexico, an epic ride that, despite including a pack of trained hounds and guides that knew the territory well, took two weeks of camping out and hard riding--and resulted in the killing of just one lion.

"He was game and noble game," Dobie writes, "the noblest and most beautiful predatory animal on the American continent. As a bullet found its mark I felt, momentarily, mean and ignoble. I shall never forget him."