Life and Death by Mountain Lion

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

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