Hunting humans?

In 1991, a young bicycle racer disappeared while on a training run behind his high school in the Rocky Mountain foothills near Denver.

Three years earlier, wildlife biologist Michael Sanders had attended a national conference in Prescott, Ariz., seeking advice on some small mysteries. Only in retrospect did he realize how clearly the clues he gathered at that event had portended the young athlete's disappearance.

For six months before the conference, Sanders had been working with tracker and biologist Jim Halfpenny, studying cougars on the outskirts of the environmentally progressive town of Boulder, Colo. He was hardly a cougar expert yet, but Sanders did know enough to realize that Boulder's lions were not behaving in the manner that they should. The scientific literature suggested that cougars were elusive, timid, frightened of humans and their dwellings, yet Boulder's cougars wandered through backyards in broad daylight and jumped onto roofs, seemingly unfazed by the presence of people.

He and Halfpenny feared for public safety. Should they?

The new frontier

Boulder in the late '80s offered a glimpse of what our nation is becoming: a country where people build new homes on undeveloped land, pay to preserve the open space beside it, attract deer and other animals into their yards, and — by embracing wilderness and wildlife — alter the very nature of what they presume nature to be.

These countervailing forces — humans moving out and wildlife moving in, lands being developed and neighboring lands being restored — present both an unprecedented paradox and a surprising phenomenon: the return of the American frontier, which historian Frederick Jackson Turner defined as "the meeting point between savagery and civilization," more than a century after it was officially declared closed. Here, on the convoluted boundaries between the wild and suburbia, people coexist with creatures their pioneer forebears tried their best to exterminate.

Mountain lions, Sanders learned, have become so numerous across the American West that some biologists believe the cats may be as abundant today as when Lewis and Clark paddled through the region two centuries ago. In December 1988, he arrived at the mountain lion workshop in Prescott armed with written reports of recent lion sightings and photos.

"Here are some pictures of what we've seen in Boulder," he told attendees, cornering them in hallways or over dinner or while drinking Budweiser and shooting pool at a bar on Whiskey Row, Prescott's famous saloon-lined street. "What do you think? How would you deal with it?"

Conference organizer Harley Shaw, a well-known Arizona cougar researcher with vast experience and a thoughtful, gentle manner, spoke at length with Sanders. "I didn't think mountain lions would live near people," Shaw recalls. "Most of us were a little surprised that this was happening." Still, Shaw saw no reason for concern in Sanders' reports. "I thought it was probably temporary, quirky ….none of us really felt that this was going to be a major issue."

Actually, one man at the conference did think that Sanders' observations suggested a major, frightening trend. He had come to the meeting from California, a state that had recently suffered two high-profile cougar attacks. Both had occurred in Orange County, on the edge of suburbia.

The first attack had come almost three years earlier, in March 1986. Susan and Donald Small had taken their children, 9-year-old David and 5-year-old Laura, for a hike at Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park, a 7,600-acre county-owned preserve frequented by backpackers, equestrians and picnickers in the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains. The family drove past the visitor center (where an interpretive display featured a photo of a cougar kitten with the caption "The Cougar or 'Mountain Lion' is quiet and secretive, with a healthy aversion to humans"), parked in a gravel lot, headed up the nature trail, and paused beside a shallow stream. Young Laura — blond and blue-eyed, wearing shorts and a sleeveless top — had removed her sandals and waded into the water to catch tadpoles when her mother glimpsed a muscular animal leaping from the brush. It grabbed Laura by the head and vanished with her in its mouth.

As Laura's mother, Susan, recounted later: "I was just standing next to her, then the next second there was total silence. I didn't hear any growling, Laura didn't scream, I didn't hear any dragging. They were gone. And I could see that they had gone behind me, but when I turned around there was no sign at all of them. There were no marks on the ground. There was nothing. I could hear the stream, that was all I could hear…. [A]nd that was when I heard Laura…. It sounded like moaning." While her son, David, ran for help, Susan and her husband searched the cacti and underbrush, eventually locating their child, still locked in the jaws of the large cat, squirming and covered with blood. Laura was badly injured: her scalp and nose and upper lip hung loose, her right eye had been sliced open …, her skull was crushed, and a portion of the brain beneath had been effectively liquefied by the trauma.

Laura was still alive, however. A stick-wielding stranger, whose heroism would later earn him a medal and $2,500, persuaded the lion to drop the girl. Laura's parents, taking turns carrying her, rushed their daughter down the trail. A helicopter airlifted her to Mission Community Hospital and, in a 13-hour emergency operation, doctors saved Laura's life. (Her initial hospitalization lasted 38 days, followed by years of reconstructive surgery and physical therapy. She remains blind in one eye and partially paralyzed.)

The morning after Laura's attack, a government hunter killed the lion believed responsible, about half a mile from where the incident had occurred. The male cougar "appeared very emaciated and sick," according to an official incident report.

Initially, it seemed that the cougar attack — California's first since a mauling by a rabid lion in 1909 — was the sudden, unexpected and desperate act of a sick animal. But that explanation didn't hold. A postmortem exam of the cat found no signs of serious illness, and park officials soon revealed that months of unusual lion behavior had foreshadowed the Smalls' ordeal. The preceding September, a mountain lion had reportedly stalked a family of four hiking in Caspers Park; the father threw rocks to drive the animal away.

Then, seven months after Laura Small's attack and after the offending lion had been killed, a cougar struck again — also on the nature trail, also on a Sunday, also on a family hike. This time the victim was 6-year-old Justin Mellon, snatched by the cat as he ran to catch up with others after tying his shoe.

Mellon's injuries were far less severe than Laura's. He had suffered multiple cuts, but the lion had not crushed his skull. Despite a massive search, hunters with dogs failed to locate the cougar that had mauled him.

The attacks fueled a smoldering political fight. In 1971, the California legislature had imposed what was supposed to have been a temporary moratorium on mountain lion hunting, intended to give biologists time to evaluate the health of the state's cougar population. The hunting ban was supposed to last four years, but lawmakers and the courts have continued to extend it.

In 1985, before the maulings in Orange County, UC Davis wildlife biologist Lee Fitzhugh had written to Gov. George Deukmejian urging that the hunting moratorium be lifted: "In the past month at least three incidents of close contact between unsuspecting humans and mountain lions occurred in California, in residential areas. Mountain lion attacks on humans, especially children, are well documented."