Making Sixth Sense Out of a Brutal Death in the Urban Wild

Like so many good mysteries, it began with a scream in the night.

A strange, keening moan awakened my wife after midnight recently at our house in the Santa Monica Mountains in Encino. I slept through it.

The crying went on, intensifying now and then into a sort of otherworldly, muffled scream.

My wife called a next-door neighbor.

Do you hear that weird screaming?

Yes, she did. It sounded like something in pain, but not a human being.

We have lots of animals up there near the Lake Encino reservoir. Our property borders a vast island of wild land that runs around the reservoir, up to Mulholland Drive, west to Woodland Hills and far south into Pacific Palisades.

Herds of deer appear in our yard almost nightly, lovable-looking, dopey-eyed pests that gobble expensive landscaping. Coyotes are as common as sparrows.

The Canada geese that migrate into the Valley every year come honking home to the reservoir each winter night, in raucous bomber-formation Vs. (They were more interesting when I thought they came from the sub-Arctic, losing their glamour when researchers tracked them to Utah in the summer. Utah lacks the cachet of, say, Yellowknife or Tuktoyaktuk.)

A white wolf roamed the neighborhood a few years ago until the duly constituted authorities trapped it, discovered that it was being kept as a pet by a guy who let it wander, and deported it to a wolf gulag in Washington state.

Possums, tarantulas, rattlers. I expect to run into Marlin Perkins with a camera crew in my driveway some morning.

What I ran into that morning was my wife, telling me to “go outside and look around. Something horrible must have happened out there last night.”

“Maybe it was that damned peacock.”

Someone about a block away recently acquired a peacock or peahen. Not a wild creature, but an obnoxious pet. It looses blood-curdling shrieks every few minutes all day long, as if someone were wringing its neck, a notion I cherish.

“It wasn’t. It was something else. And closer.”

Into the urban wilderness at dawn, armed with a cup of instant coffee.

I didn’t have to look far.

Upended in a water trap at the bottom of a cement drainage channel that runs down the steep hill behind my house was a doe. Or what was left of her. All of one haunch and part of the other had been ripped off. Blood and small chunks of flesh and fur were everywhere.

The truck from the Los Angeles Department of Animal Regulation that came for the body was already loaded with the remains of creatures who had run into the animal world’s equivalent of a drive-by shooting. Possums, squirrels, a small coyote. The doe would be the biggest creature on her last ride.

“Doesn’t look quite like a coyote kill, does it?” the wildlife hearse driver observed to Animal Regulation Officer Dennis Kroeplin. “They usually go in through the stomach, the softest parts.”

“It could be the cougar maybe,” Kroeplin mused. “We’ll have to get it out of there so I can see the neck before I can tell for sure.”

The cougar?

“A mountain lion?” I asked. “We don’t have any mountain lions in Encino.”

The dead-animal truck driver grinned. “Ohhhh yes you do,” he said.

Heck, I watch those wildlife shows on educational TV. I know that cougars--pumas, mountain lions, catamounts, panthers, all the same animal--are elusive creatures that need lots of wild land for a hunting range. Surely none live in a neighborhood where people are pestered by graffiti.

But Kroeplin nodded. “There’s been a cougar in this area, around Lake Encino and up over Mulholland since at least 1988 or 1989. Back in ’89 I found a deer carcass that was obviously a cougar kill. I keep seeing its tracks ever since then, and I’ve tracked it a few times. I’ve never seen it, but I’ve talked to people in this neighborhood who have.

“But I don’t think this is a cougar kill. Look. There’s a coyote track right there by the body.”

The pattern in the hard, dry, tan dirt was barely visible, much less identifiable to me. But Kroeplin could read it like a billboard.

He climbed to the top of the hill and paced back and forth, like a detective at a crime scene.

“It’s all right here,” he said. “She was sleeping or resting right here, sort of trampled a little bed there. There was a coyote over here, stalking her.” He pointed to the other side. “There were two more coyotes over here, probably downwind to keep from spooking her.

“Look at the wide spacing on these prints. That coyote was running. He came charging in from one side, she took off that way and ran into the other two. One of them got a good bite out of her right over there, where you can see the first blood stain. Probably a hind leg.

“They chased her down the hill, attacking her. See the bloodstains all along here? She slipped on that concrete drainage channel and that was it, they were all over her.”

It was a hell of a performance. Kroeplin had reconstructed the entire nighttime drama of killers and victim through his ability to see signs on the earth, a once-common ability that is a rare skill today. In the America of urban decay, Natty Bumppo lives.

“I wouldn’t worry about that lion,” Kroeplin said. “It’s been back there for years and you didn’t know it. You’ll probably never see it. I never have. They’re shy.”

I wasn’t worried about the lion at all. My children are adults and live on the East Coast.

I was wondering if a cougar would find peacocks a taste treat.

Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.