The cougar came a week before Christmas. It ate the small, jumpy churro. All the churros are small compared to the range sheep. This one was particularly timid and clung to her braver older sister- who the cougar ate 2 days later. Same corner of the corral. The little things were gleaning hay from the feeders late into evening, exposed during hunting time. Biddie’s body lay in a snare for a week waiting for the cougar to return. It returned, but it did not take the bait, it did not take anything but our false sense of security.
I did not want to call the trapper, to have the cougar hunted down with dogs, shot, safety restored to my barn yard. But seeing Biddie laying with her guts tumbling out in the same spot her sister died days before, I had to call. We had become a quick dinner stop for a lazy – or desperate- cougar. How desperate was this cougar? The tracker traced it up and down the hills and valleys, to a neighbor’s porch a few miles up the highway at the base of Boulder mountain. Yeah, they said, they’d seen it, sitting on their porch all evening while 50 guests drank and partied inside for the holidays. Not very timid, this cougar, who sat waiting for an easy snack to come teetering out.
The trapper is polite, gentle spoken. He comes every day. He leaves every day empty handed. At night the dogs bark. We look out the window, strain our eyes into the night. The moon is bright bouncing up and down on the snow. The dog is a large white dot on the snow. The cougar circles us but we do not see.
The postmistress says the boys from town killed a cougar in a tree. There were three cougars, they killed the big one. She doesn’t say it, but I know, it was a mama and her young. Treed and scared, the mama shot dead in front of her young, taken off for trophy stuffing. The babes left to starve.
The trapper never gets our cougar. The cougar doesn’t get my husband, who walks nightly with his rifle around the perimeter, checking the baby goats are safe inside the corral. My husband cannot rest easy. We do not rest easy. Secretly, though, I am glad our cougar is not dead, no I am relieved, for now.