Contrackt

Tracking a cougar through the snow

The snow is still crisp and clean, a tiny telltale whisper sprinkling from the sky. I say goodbye to the couple I’ve just met on the white logging road, stories exchanged - their cougar tales and mine - and follow the tracks past the roadside embankment and light-sated underbrush, into the shadows of Douglas firs. Excitement stirs in me. It’s been a bit since I’ve been rambling on my own - and I’ve never done this.

They are unmistakably cougar tracks. My fist fits comfortably inside the pawprint I stoop to measure, clicking pictures incessantly as I find one clearer than the last. I’m tracking down-trail, so they’re not getting any fresher, but the trail keeps presenting better and better picture opportunities, so I keep taking them. I start slow, marking each track with an upright stick so I can get the pacing, carefully making sure I can retrace my trail if I lose it, but abandon this almost immediately. The trail is incredibly clear.

I’m reminded, as I track, of my cats at home. I had snagged one this morning and placed her in unmarked snow so that I could watch the exact pattern of her paws. If you’ve never noticed, a housecat puts their back feet exactly on top of the front, so that the pattern of prints is almost like a human’s, zigzagging from step to step. This cat does the same, front and back paw in almost perfect step, but where the kitten wandered, exploring the snow-sodden landscape following smells and sounds, this cat seems to walk with purpose, a measured pace carrying it through an easy path.

I’m surprised when I see light ahead and emerge onto another logging road. I don’t know where I am, but can guess. I’ve lived on my adjoining land for 8/9ths of my life and know the shape of the thousand acres behind my back yard, though I’ve never come this far. It seems strange that a child shouldn’t have gone the mile down a logging road to see what’s there, yet I was content to roam closer. Wizard rock. Sanctum. The hill of cedars. Neighbor nettle patch. The creek. Maple valley. The Chanterelle spot. The outlook. The Master Nettle Patch. The climbing tree. Most of these are gone now, trees recently neutered as to make the places of my childhood unrecognizable. Even wizard rock feels less magic without the maples.

The clearcut of my home turf has, however, driven me further afield, over the hill and into what is obviously the home turf of this cougar. As I follow, I form a picture. My imagining says female  - I’ll confirm this later with a guidebook -  making a nearly straight line - following the road for as long as it takes her, and cutting across the woods when it winds too far around. I track her back along the road until she enters the forest again. Then follow the road back to my starting point, and take the tracks the other direction - towards the actual cougar. 

What will I do if I find it? I wonder as I follow this trail, mind tracking back to the endless warnings and wisdom about cougars and their attitudes. I imagine that I will stare at it, and possibly try to get a picture before it vanishes into the forest again. Cougars are stealth hunters - preferring to sneak up on a prey, and definitely averse to attacking something head on. Like most large predators, we will avoid each other.

The tracks have changed a little on this side of the road. The prints less sure-feeling and a little more meandering. My mind comes fully into the present as the path leads into the marshlands, and I have to abandon my habit of not stepping on any tracks in order to avoid the ankle deep water. The cougar seems to have the same aversion to getting her feet wet, and her prints bound from log to log. I sometimes have to find alternate routes where she makes a leap I can’t follow - still, I feel catlike as I balance across the snow covered logs, sure-footed in her footprints.

I imagine now a shapeshifter - taking cougar form to live in these woods - shifting freely from feline to human, and as I follow the feline tracks, I would see them shift to a woman’s bare feet, a little hut before me. You could get everything you would need in these woods. There’s cedar for clothes and baskets, nettle for food and fiber, and, with a cougar’s nose, lots of food for both our forms. I imagine my own body becoming catlike, as, humanlike, my eyes instinctively move from track to track and imagining I follow.

It’s past the marshland that I find the first spot she’s peed. The snow is yellow and there’s just a couple scratches in the snow and duff - like a housecat making token effort in the litterbox. I bend and smell. It’s powerful and a little indescribable, but definitely musky and wild. On a burst of inspiration, I take out a glass vial in my pocket  - put there for spell components -  and pack yellow snow into the bottle as tight as I can. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it  - show my students I’m sure -  but regardless, a bottle of cougar pee seems like a good thing to have. Rare. Unusual. Powerful.

I stop to marvel at the beauty of the place she’s led me. Three trees, larger than the monotony of Douglas fir, lean against each other high above. The trail veers into the salmonberry thicket from here and I try to walk over on wiggling willow for a bit before I bow to the cat’s wisdom and crawl on hands and knees through the brush. I get a feeling now, for how short this animal is, or can be. I’m ducking low as I make my way under the brush on a path that is definitely wide enough for me. She can’t be taller than two feet, dipping to slip under a snow laden branch that drops its load on me as I pass. 

The woods have opened up again when I round a corner and find a leaning cedar, sheltering the ground from snow. The surrounding snow is packed, and there are tracks all around the spot. The footprints I’ve been following have been dusted in the snow falling from the sky, but the prints exiting this place are clean. I haven’t been keeping track of how fast the snow has been falling - a better tracker would - but as I continue to follow these much fresher tracks, I find myself more wary. We’re told you will never see a cougar, that they are curious and certainly see us. The unseen nature of a stealthy hunter has always frightened me.

I can understand in my head that there’s been one death by cougar in Washington in the last hundred years, and that was someone biking through the forest, an act that mimics a cougar’s prey. That my odds of getting killed by a cougar are 1/1’000’000’000. Compared to 1/500’000 of being hit by lightning, or the very real 1/103 chance of dying by car crash - yet there’s something ancient and instinctive that tells me that a large cat is more scary than all the rest. As I follow the fresh tracks, I lose sight of the next ones and my head jerks up, looking in all the surrounding trees before scanning the ground again.

I sweep a wide circle around the vanishing point and find them again not that far off. Levitation or obscuring ferns - I follow the new tracks, which do meander a little now. I wonder if the cougar knew about that spot and had made a beeline for it. The wild cat’s version of the little hut in the woods - and if now, after its nap, it’s feeling a little more exploratory. These aren’t exploring tracks though. Not like my kitten fresh to the snow. This is the way I walk around my property - checking in on things I know to be there. Glancing at the daffodils just up and now cloaked in snow. Storing away a mental list of plants and building materials for future use.

The tracks lead me past another marsh where I can just see the barest bits of a broken down building in the distance across the grass and water. It would take some time, and perhaps some rubber boots to get there, and I’m beginning to get worried about the remaining light. I’ve been at this for several hours now. I’m hoping that this trail will lead me somewhere recognizable soon, with an hour to dusk. My GPS puts me dead center in the forest between any roads. I begin to fantasize about spending the night out here. I have dry tinder in my coat, a lighter in my pocket. I don’t have anything to eat, but I could, if need be, settle down for the night and not freeze to death or become more lost blundering around in the dark. I still have a general sense of direction, but the sun is no help today.

I continue on. The trail leads me to more cougar pee, and since my previously jarred pee-snow has melted somewhat, I pack more into the bottle. I’m seriously considering abandoning the trail, and going straight in the direction of the road, when, crawling under another dense patch of brush, I emerge on a well used human trail I don't recognize. I follow the tracks up the trail twenty feet to where they vanish into the brush on the other side. Following the human trail further I discover a clearcut, and beyond that the road.

 

I decide to explore the unfamiliar bipedal path as, now, with some bearing, I know it goes towards home. I return to the cougar tracks, pausing where they head off into the brush off the trail. I could continue following them. I don’t know where they go, but they’re going in roughly the right direction as well. I don’t know how far this cougar was ahead of me. What stories following these tracks would bring me. What I would discover about the land, myself, or the world. Two forces argue in me, one wild and wanting to track the wild cat into the night, and the other tracking home and responsibility - my waiting mate who will be worried if I’m not back by dark. Dinner to make. My own cats to feed. Chickens to put to bed. I head towards home.

 

And it’s not far down this unfamiliar path that I know it. The memories of a ten year old self return and I walk with Mama and Papa, going further than we’ve ever been. The trees are taller now than they are in memory, and the scotchbroom has dwindled, but I know this place, and I know how to get home. I was closer than I thought, and I pause another moment. I have enough light to go back and do a little more . . . but no. I loft a prayer to the cougar gods, a thanks, as most of my prayers are these days, and continue  traveling another section of my childhood forest, this part not yet broken, with my mother and father, their relationship still holding, Papa still with us�"together we head home through gloaming light.

 

I do not know if a cougar watches.