Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (romantic books to read .TXT) 📗

the role of predators in healthy ecosystems to their work and as concern grew for the shrinking populations of cougars, lions were entirely protected from hunting, except as necessary to protect lives and property. The shape of this protection has not changed appreciably to the present day. It has always been possible to get a depredation permit to kill one or several lions if they threaten people or livestock. Troublesome lions are generally exterminated by the ranchers who apply for the permits, by trappers from a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture calling itself, somewhat euphemistically, Wildlife Services, or by wardens from the state's Department of Fish and Game.

In 1990 California's voters passed a law known as Proposition 117, confirming their preference that the cougar not be hunted. The new law also created a habitat conservation fund for the purchase of wildland areas that cougars inhabited. Since much, maybe most, of California is cougar habitat, this provided acquisition money for parks and reserves that in practice protect all kinds of other wildlife that happen to inhabit them.

But critics of the cougar's protected status say that under the current regime, the state Department of Fish and Game has not been allowed to manage the overall population growth of cougars by opening a hunting season. They say the cougar population is expanding out of control. They point out—and most biologists agree with this point—that the pattern of habitat utilization by cougars involves the ejection of younger animals from more desirable remote country already occupied by dominant older animals into marginal areas along the suburban edges of wildlands. This, say the lion's critics, will increasingly bring young cougars into contact with people in the suburbs, and before long they will be experimenting with stealing children from their bicycles. That's hysteria, say the cougar's supporters.

Our retribution for the death of Barbara Schoener was swift. When I returned at seven in the evening from picking up the body, I notified the Department of Fish and Game's dispatch office that I believed I had just investigated the first killing of a human being by a mountain lion in the state in the twentieth century. Fish and Game notified the U.S. Department of Agriculture trappers, and the following morning I returned to the scene with two trappers and three Fish and Game wardens to begin the hunt.

Lions are hunted either by staking out a captive farm animal as bait and hiding nearby or by running them down with specially trained dogs. In the latter process, a houndsman will drive a rural road with the lead dog standing on top of his specially built truck until the dog, crossing a scent on the wind, gives voice. Then the trapper lets the rest of the dogs out of their cages in the back of the truck and puts them on the chase. A single dog is no match for a lion, but lions are scared by a pack. A lion will climb to a high spot, a cliff or a tree, and the dogs will keep the animal there and howl at it until the hunter catches up. Then it's like killing fish in a barrel, if you have a rifle or pistol.

That's basically how it was done this time. After eight days of tracking and dog work, the Department of Agriculture's hunters picked up the lion's scent when it came back to the scene of the kill, most likely to feed again. The chase was short, and the cougar was treed and shot a half-mile away, on the other side of Maine Bar Creek.

The dead lion was an eighty-three-pound female. Barbara Schoener outweighed her by about twenty pounds. The lion's udders were full, which meant she had a cub. Over the next couple of days the trappers went back out and found a kitten, which was displayed for the news cameras and then turned over to a zoo.

A few weeks later I sat in a lecture theater at the University of California Medical School at Davis, among newspaper and television reporters, state officials, and representatives from animal rights organizations. A procession of experts in forensic fields took the stage and described how they had identified the dead cougar as the one that had killed Barbara Schoener. A forensic odontologist had matched the animal's teeth with impressions in Barbara Schoener's crushed skull. Experts in DNA typing had swabbed the folds of skin into which the animal's claws retract (as a housecat's do) and located human DNA—not just any human DNA but of the same type as Barbara Schoener's. They had killed the right lion.

It did not stop there.

During that same year, at another California state park hundreds of miles to the south, just north of the Mexican border, there had been a series of disturbing encounters and close calls between lions and hikers. One ought to be cautious about drawing conclusions, yet there are some resemblances between the places: Like Auburn, Cuyamaca Rancho State Park had for many years been working land, a cattle ranch, before it was deeded to the state park system. And like El Dorado, the brushy hills of San Diego County had seen a massive invasion by housing tracts.

At Cuyamaca in December 1994, within eight months of California's first such modern-day fatality, fifty-six-year-old Iris Kenna was dragged off a fire road and mauled to death while hiking alone near a popular campground. It would be nearly a decade before another death, that of a thirty-five-year-old mountain biker, Mark Reynolds, who was attacked and killed while riding in the hills of Orange County in January 2004. At this writing, there have been eleven incidents in which lions attacked people in California since 1890. Three involved two victims each. Eight have occurred since 1986. Four people died from their injuries, and in 1909 two more died from rabies they contracted after a lion attacked but did not kill them.

The overwhelming majority of the roughly 230,000 Californians who die each year succumb to disease. Those