The Story
A cougar comes down a snowy hillside at a run, head low, eyes locked forward, snow and rock kicking off its paws. It is a wild mountain lion in the town of Jackson, Wyoming, and it has a quarrel with some birds.
The quarrel sits at the bottom of the slope. The cat has killed what looks like a mule deer beside a gas station, and daylight apparently caught it before the carcass was buried. Birds found the meat. The lion has pulled back uphill to a tree, and three times between 1:30 and 4 in the afternoon it charges down to drive them off, straight toward the long lenses.
That charge runs against the usual script. Cougars are most active from dusk to dawn, and they hunt by ambush, stalking under cover to 30 feet or less before leaping onto the prey's back with a neck bite. The normal follow-up is quiet: drag the kill to cover, often cover it over, and come back to feed.
Over the next four days this one goes back to the quiet version. It covers the carcass with more care, stays up in the trees by day and comes down after dark to eat, lit by the gas station, a billboard and traffic lights. Around a hundred photographers stand in the cold hoping for a repeat. It never comes.
The patience is in the species. A cougar may guard a cached kill against scavengers and feed on it over six to eight days, and a large Cascade male kills a deer or elk only every 9 to 12 days, eating up to 20 pounds at a time. Deer are the preferred prey.
Frames from that first afternoon show the field marks plainly: an unspotted tan-brown coat, a white chin and throat, a pinkish nose, dark backs to the ears, and a long heavy tail ending in black. For an animal that leans on rock, brush and forest to stay hidden, it picked a very public place to lose its temper.
