The cat was a “painter”, according to the locals. City folk would’ve called it a cougar, mountain lion, or panther. It stalked the area for a few weeks during which Mama was forbidden from roaming her beloved woods alone. Late one afternoon, it snuck up behind Mama and her grandmother while they were working by the creek and screamed, causing them to rise up and tear holes in the bushes as they ran home.
Nobody tried to kill the cougar. It was just a “painter”, and stalking around the woods was what it did. Great Grandpa knew that if it’d wanted to eat his women folk, they’d have been eaten that night by the creek. He was a hunter, and he raised animals for meat, but he let the cat be. A rare thing in the area even then, it left in its own time, and none has been heard from since. Mama always felt that she’d had a brush with greatness that evening, and she felt a kinship with the tawny beasts for the rest of her life.
I thought about Mama when I came across a story about an area hunter who killed his own brush with greatness last week. Imagine, an animal considered extinct in this area for decades, and he blows it away. It turns out the cat wasn’t an inhabitant of the woods, just a visitor, like the hunter, but the uber-predator didn’t know that when he pulled the trigger.
As many times as I read and re-read the articles that ran in local papers, I couldn’t make myself think that the cougar needed to die. We aren’t on their food list, and they aren’t on ours. The hunter had a cell phone, and could’ve called authorities. The cat wasn’t stalking him. As someone familiar with the species, should he have known that loud noises and perhaps a gunshot into the air would’ve sufficed to scare the critter away? How sad that we’ve sterilized our wild areas to the point that seeing a predator causes panic rather than caution.
None of us can say what fear will make us do until we are face to face with it. I don’t tote a gun, and I don’t hunt, though I have no problem with those who take their food from the woods, so if I came face-to-face with a mountain lion, I’d have to hope that they aren’t enraged by the aroma of tinkle. I wish the hunter had taken a different tack, but human life trumps animal life, and if he truly felt that he was being threatened, that he was in eminent danger of disembowelment or worse, then he did the only thing he could’ve. Don’t ask me if it was fear for his life or the chance to bag an unusual trophy that made him pull the trigger; I wasn’t in the woods that day.
Since news of the cougar incident broke, I’ve heard just about every opinion imaginable. Some folks are happy that the woods are once more empty of anything more dangerous than a bunny rabbit. Others think the hunter should be drawn and quartered. I just think it’s a tragedy that the cat was killed.
Humans are a strange bunch. We killed off the natural predators in this area, and now we complain about the deer eating everything and running into our cars on the highway. We have no more wolves, cougars or bear to speak of, and despite the best efforts of the hunting set, we’re overrun with the results.
Some genius introduced coyotes into our neck of the woods a while back, and they’re taking over. The other day, I read an article in a Georgia hunting magazine about fears that coyotes are decimating the deer population. Heaven forbid- that’s our job!
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