|
Big Cats, Big Emotions
Review of Stalked by a Mountain Lion: Fear, Fact, and the Uncertain Future of Cougars in America, by Jo Deurbrouck.
(Guilford CT: Globe Pequot Press, 2007).
One sure way to spark a lively discussion in the nature-writing classes I teach is to bring up the subject of mountain lions in Pennsylvania. At least one student is bound to bring up the Game Commission conspiracy theory: that the commission has secretly introduced mountain lions to extend their control over more land. Some students claim to have seen a mountain lion themselves, and everyone in the class knows someone or a few people who have seen one in Pennsylvania. My response is that I’ll believe mountain lions are in Pennsylvania when Kerry Geykis believes they are.
Kerry, a forester and former Tioga County Planner who does presentations on mountain lions, is as anxious as anyone to find them living here, but he is equally anxious to be certain he is not fooling himself. He is convinced that someday it is going to happen because the northern tier of Pennsylvania and the southern tier of New York both have the landscape and the deer to support them, but he is still waiting.
Kerry recommended Jo Deurbrouck’s Stalked by a Mountain Lion, and having read it, I have a much clearer idea of what it means to live with mountain lions or with cougars, pumas, panthers, or painters—all the same animal. Rather than describe cougar behavior, Deurbrouck tells the stories of attacks on people in vivid detail so that it is easy to sense the danger and feel the fear. Each story is slightly different, and together they dramatize the range of mountain-lion behavior so that rather than laying out generalized principles, she shows us the complexity of both the cougars and the environment they create.
The experience of Lucy Oberlin and Diane Shields is a good example. Running together in a California state park, they faced a mountain lion in the middle of the trail. Waving their arms and yelling did not scare the animal off the way the guides claimed, so for fifteen minutes they held off the animal with pepper spray, rocks, and a stick as it would approach them and then back off. Finally they edged from tree to tree and were able to make it back to the parking lot. Though the park rangers they told about the incident did not take it too seriously—just a curious cat—their story combined with some others led to the killing of four aggressive lions in the park. Lucy found herself the object of hostility from friends and even complete strangers for her part in the death of innocent animals. Her response that they could have killed someone did not seem to matter. Cougars evoke conflicting emotional responses.
Deurbrouck’s stories show how cougars blend into the landscape, and given their numbers in California, for example, how infrequently they attack humans. Often people can frighten or even fight them off, and some people can survive actual attacks. But only some. And Deurbrouck puts the problem eloquently when she describes interviewing a teenager who, years before, had lost her mother to a cougar attack, “Imagine looking into those sad eyes, knowing you believe cougars have a right to exist, knowing that belief has a blood price, and knowing you didn’t pay it and this child . . . did. What do you say to her?”
This book makes the point that the people who fear a bloodbath if cougars return and the people who think it would be wonderful are both wrong, and that living with mountain lions will not be a spectator sport. Tioga County and the Twin Tiers region will be a different place when they come.
Tom Murphy teaches nature writing at Mansfield University. You can contact him at readingnature@mountainhomemag.com.
|
