Cougar [antikvár]

ForewordMemo to the Mountain Liono,'nee, in every corner of this continent, your passing could prickle the stillness and bring every living thing to the alert. But even then you were more felt than seen. You were an imminence, a presence, a crying in the night, pug tracks in the dust of a trail. Solitary and shy, you lived beyond, always beyond. Your comings and goings defined the boundaries of the unpeopled. If seen at all, you were only a tawny glimpse flowing toward disappearance among the trees or along the ridges and ledges of your wilderness.But hunters, with their dogs and guns, knew how to find you. Folklore made you dangerous, your occasional killing of a calf put a price on your head. Never mind that you preferred deer, that your killings of livestock were trivial by comparison with those by our own dogs. Y)u were wild, and thus an enemy; you were rare, and elusive, and elegant, and thus a trophy to be prized. Under many names, as panther, catamount, puma, cougar, mountain lion, you were hunted to death through all the East and Midwest. The last catamount in Vermont was shot more than a hundred years ago. You persist in the Everglades only because a National Park official quietly released a pair of you to restore the life-balance of that fecund swamp.In the mountain and plateau West a remnant population of you persists, in the pockets of wild country off the edges of settlement and too rough for off-road vehi-