the cougar
When I was a child a boy in my town got eaten by a cougar. His name was Scott. I grew up in a very small town in the Rocky Mountains where there are real wild animals, although that was never something you thought about really, aside from so often hearing safety tips about it that possibly encountering a wild animal felt as normal to you as ‘look both ways before you cross the street’ type advice, and besides, you almost never did encounter one. My elementary school’s mascot was a cougar, blue and gold colors. My high school mascot when we moved to the adjacent small town was also a cougar, blue and gold colors. I guess when you live somewhere with an apex predator, blue skies and gold mines, you make the most of it. Every year in elementary school there was a contest where all the students submitted a drawing of a mountain lion and then one was chosen to represent the school for a year. I loved to draw and I worked very hard on my drawing each year, but I never got chosen. I can even remember the drawing I did in 2nd grade, a cougar stretched out long on a tree branch with a smiling face. The year Scott was eaten, my elementary school decided not to do the cougar drawing contest out of respect and grief and I don’t remember what we had to draw instead. I remember feeling sad for Scott, but also for the mountain lion that killed and ate Scott. They found her and shot her. She had a wounded paw and was starving, the only reason she went after a human. Cougars almost never do, y’know. I still think about her paw sometimes, it floats across my mind randomly. Her in the woods, starving, limping. She was an alive creature who had to live in the mountains and survive on her own. That was all she was trying to do, live. She was not acting out of malice or evil. Scott was in high school when he was killed. He was running behind the high school before school started, he was on the track team. Mountain lions most often go after prey in the evening or early morning hours. That’s a wild animal fact for you. It was probably a horrible way to die. But I’d take it over our other town tragedy, which happened about seven years before Scott was killed, when a 14 year old girl named Beth, also running before school in the morning, in town this time, not in the woods, was pulled into a red truck and was never seen or heard from again. I guess I’d rather be killed and eaten by a wild animal acting on instinct and survival then be pulled into a truck and raped and murdered by evil, malicious men and then eventually dumped somewhere like garbage, which is almost surely what happened to her. Yet, people are more afraid of the cougars. Some what recently in a Colorado Rocky Mountain small town like the one I grew up in, like maybe five years ago, some guy’s dog was killed and eaten by a mountain lion, so he went into the woods and killed a cougar, probably not the one that ate his dog, but tit for tat I suppose this genius was thinking, and then dragged it’s body behind his truck through town in a show of victory/vengeance, I guess, over this inculpable animal who probably didn’t eat his dog. I wonder how it would go down if I shot the guy (guys?) who ho kidnapped Beth and dragged their body (bodies?) behind my truck through town. I Google Beth sometimes to see if there is an update. There isn’t. She has been missing for almost thirty years. Some people say her body was thrown in an abandoned gold mine. Everyone knows what happened to Scott. Eventually, they named a bridge over a river after him.
