This little guy was in our pool equipment area.
Posted on 01/12/2016 5:05:08 AM PST by SJackson
'I was thinking to myself, "How are we going to get out of this situation? This is pretty dire"'
The cougar leapt from the bushes behind them.
"It froze and started hissing at us," said Donald Lauder.
He and his friend, Samantha Lean, both from Australia, were out for a bike ride in Alberta's Jasper National Park earlier this week. They left their bikes at the highway and walked through the brush down toward the river.
About 200 metres down the path, they heard rustling in the brush.
Nervous, she picked up a big stick. He picked up rocks.
The cougar jumped out behind them onto the path.
"We were both looking at it," Lauder said. "It stopped about a metre or metre and a half away."
"My first instinct was it must have been a coyote or something," said Lean. "It was hissing and it was huge."
She reacted first.
'I just belted it, as hard as I could'
"Luckily, Sam started hitting it with the stick pretty much straight away," Lauder said.
"I just belted it," she said, "as hard as I could."
He started chucking rocks. Maybe eight in total. He thinks he hit it six times.
It didn't budge. Thirty seconds passed. Forty.
"I guess it was waiting for us to run or something," he said.
"It was just staring at me," she said, "and hissing at me. I was thinking to myself, how are we going get out of this situation? This is pretty dire."
Then luck, perhaps, intervened. He threw another rock that skimmed the cougar's head and crashed in the bushes. Distracted, the animal turned and chased the rock.
They backed away, walked up the path and got to the highway, got on their bikes and rode away.
Lauder said he later spoke to a park ranger, who told him just how rare it is to see a cougar in the wild. It's believed the animal they saw was a juvenile male that had not come across humans before.
Cougars are elusive, so attacks on people are extremely rare — with only 27 attacks and seven deaths reported across Canada in 100 years. Alberta's only documented cougar death was Frances Frost in Banff National Park in 2001.
"It was so majestic, beautiful animal, but at the time it was pretty scary," said Lean. "We definitely had a bit of a Canadian experience."
I’ve read a couple of his books. They’re all interesting - and sometimes blood chilling.
The most terrifying sound they make comes from females in heat.
It's a sort of scream that sounds like a teenage human girl screaming defensively. When you hear it in the middle of the night from a dark, wooded canyon, it really does make the hair on your neck stand up!
Ah...Canada....sat by a lake reading in remote BC as the hub fished in float tube...he eventually came in and asked me “did you see the bear?” aaAASGGGGHHHH
Are there any people so naturally badass as the Aussies?
It takes more than that to beat off a cougar.
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You didn’t really “go there” did you?
Yes, well, I knew a guy who tried that once. His name was Claude.
RARE My %#S...
I used to board my horses at a ranch in the west end of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles County in Brown’s Canyon. In the summer, after riding, we often sat around & talked in a group. There was a ridge above the arena & corrals. At sunset, it was backlit by the light. We often saw a cougar sitting on that ridge, looking at all the ‘fresh meat’ below & slowly switching it’s tail. We saw bobcats often when out on the trail.
This little guy was in our pool equipment area.
Two others I would recommend are Robert Ruark and Jim Corbett.
Corbett was a British gov't functionary in India during the Raj, and his duties included hunting man-eating tigers and leopards. Hair-raising, terrifying, oh-hell-no all fall short of describing his hunts. Easily the best of the best in adventure hunting.
Ruark is more of a commercial writer whose success allowed him to spend a lot of time in Kenya, and good writing ensued. His novel "Something of Value" is about Mau-Mau in Kenya in the 50's. It certainly shows the start of the descent of Africa from colonial civility to todays barbarism. If you are an older guy, who spent his childhood in the fields and woods, his "Old Man and the Boy" books are something you will reread often. Mostly a collection of his Field and Stream columns, I often think he was looking over my shoulder as I learned the outdoor crafts.
You can't go wrong with any of them, all are guys you'd love to hoist a brew or three with.
According to Del Gue, Hatchet Jack was shacked up with one for 3 years... ;-)
“Distracted, the animal turned and chased the rock.”
Aw, it just wanted to play!
I bought that book from Capstick himself. Very entertaining.
The female Rockpile was with me and got a bit turned on by this guy I could tell. :<{
Thanks for the recommendations.
Yes I mean Peter Hathaway Capstick. Just looked at the note I made in Kindle which I relied on and it shows the book by: Capstick Peter Hathaway. I thought: ok Capstick might be the publisher. That is what modern technology will do for you.
Yeah, you can't win for losing!
Tonight it is going down to about 2 deg., at about 10 to 10:30 I will go see if the coyotes are screaming. First time I heard them I thought it was a girl being knifed to death in my backyard, now I take the dog out so I can watch his hackles go strait up.
What a little cutie pie. You wish you could give it a cuddle.
While Ruark and Capstick are more or less contemporary, Corbett, Selous and the other giants lived in another era entirely, a time when simply traveling in Africa was a great adventure, but throw in the epic hunts and they become what nearly every boy dreamed of becoming when I first read them.
Enjoy your read, I'm sure it will lead to more.
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