Hot Cougar Love

(This post from a piece I wrote in September, now offered in our low, low spring sale!)

There are two definitions of “Cougar.” One is the definition I was looking for today: “The Cougar (Puma concolor), also known as puma, mountain lion, catamount, or panther, is a mammal of the Felidae family, native to the Americas.” I was looking up that kind of cougar on the internet and on the left side of the screen I got the headlines I was looking for: “Cougar spotted in Seattle.” “Discovery Park closed for Labor Day weekend.” Those headlines on the left. And on the right, marching down the sponsored links column: Cougardate.com. Hotcougarlove.com. Married Cougars looking for love!
Here is the other definition of Cougar: “A woman over 40 who is sexually interested in younger men.” From this, I learn that I am only old enough to be a “puma,” a cougar in training – or I would be if I were on the prowl for a younger man. I am thinking about this kind of cougar because it is my birthday. Today, I am a year away from that threshold. I am 39. I am thinking about the other kind of cougar because in my birthday card from my parents, a check to take my fifteen-month-old son, Forest, to Itty Bitty Camp in Seattle’s Discovery Park, which has been closed until Monday… or until they’ve caught the cougar. They have set out traps baited with fish and elk liver (not 25-year-old men.) And I’ve decided, I’m going to spend the money on spring-blooming bulbs and wildflower seeds. Being almost a cougar myself, I know what my son looks like to that other kind.

He looks like a potato chip.

I know what it is like to be stalked by a cougar, at night. Years ago, in the dry mountains of Northern California, I heard the sound of catpaw in the dry leaves circling our ritual fire. A long pause between every step. I know what it’s like to feel the glow of green eyes raise the hairs on the back of my neck and I wonder if he felt it…that little five year-old boy. Because there was another cougar in the news this week, not in Seattle, but in the wilds of northeastern Washington. She attacked the five year old boy when he was hiking with his family. She gripped him in her jaws by the head and neck. That is how they do it. They stalk their prey from behind. Cougars have incisors sized to slip between the neck vertebrae of their particular prey, as all cats do.

My son’s incisors are coming in now, long nights a couple of times in the past few weeks, but a secret gift, to get up in the middle of the night, walk in the dark to him, to feel him fall asleep against me again, as he once did. These days, when he is ready, he turns toward his crib. But last week, his head warm under my chin, his body heavy on mine, I rocked, caring not one bit for loss of sleep. I hold him and I think about the boy in the hospital, with head and neck wounds. He is going to be okay, they say. Maybe this is making me take our cougar more seriously. They say she came down the railroad tracks, down a wooded corridor. We design for this, for wildlife migration. By “we” I mean my tribe. The people who love nature, who strive to live inside it. I bet that other mother loved wildlife, to be hiking in the backcountry. She saved her son’s life by beating the cougar off with a water bottle. I wonder if she loves wildlife still.

I heard a man on the radio talking about the new cougar, the one who came down the railroad to Seattle. He said we should leave it there, learn to live with wildlife and isn’t this my church? I believe in predation. I believe in a food chain that is taller than I. I believe in God in those green eyes.

But this park, our huge park, is in a neighborhood. So is Ravenna Park, where the black bear ambled down into the city last year. The local media called him “Leaf Bearikson.” I am cultivating the wild in my small way, with my local eating, my gardening for wildlife. And they come. I’ve been amazed. I’ve seen tanagers and lacewings, hummingbirds and dragonflies. But look here. The large predators come and say, “I am wild, too.”

“I know this,” I say. I feel my son in my arms. I imagine the house I hope we someday have, in the woods, surrounded by old trees that make green dappled light but also, underneath them, dark places. High wide limbs for dropping down, sudden as a coat you can never take off. A coat with teeth and claws who, if she thrives, will have children of her own next year. I imagine the yard I wanted him to play in. A patch of grass close for when he is tiny. A wave as he disappears into the bramble when he is older, but still small. Still a potato chip. Even at 11, 12, 16, a running boy is a flare of the nostrils, a flex of the claws. But I still love her, our Seattle cougar. And I think this: I would not hide that cage in the sword fern, I would not bait it with salmon and elk. I would build fences, I think, around our yard. I don’t want to childproof the wild. I want to childproof a small place inside it, and call it HotCougarLove! Call it “home.”