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Thursday, Jan 8, 2009
"At that moment, with his jaws around my neck, I was reminded that the Holy Spirit is more than one billion times faster than a cougar."
Feb 12, 2002 | In the history of cougar attacks in North America, the tale of Clarence Hall -- "legendary Ol' Clarence" of British Columbia, as the papers dubbed him -- is extraordinary. Hall, who is 77 years old, grew up in Pittsburgh, Pa., worked the steel mills, worked as a bricklayer and a builder, but from a very young age his happiest employment was trapping in the woods, taking weasel, mink, fox and raccoon. This naturally started him hunting. He became very good at it, a budding marksman. War came. He was sent to hunt man in Normandy, fighting for Patton's Third Army. When he returned, he went west, to Arizona and Idaho and then Canada, and became a professional hunter of "problem" animals, the coyote and wolves and cougar that prey on livestock.
Tracking the cougar was soon his specialty: He learned their furtive, intelligent ways, and he came to like them.
In the winter of 2000, Hall was the hunted one. The local papers showed him chuckling about it afterward from his hospital bed, the reporters took photos of his riven cheeks and chewed-up neck, and within a day he was up on his feet, within a week he was out once more with his dogs and tending his farm, where he raises turkeys, pigs and chickens and has a garden and an orchard of fruit trees. When I called him last summer to ask what's it like to battle hand-to-hand with an 80-pound lion, he said, "Oh my goodness! Well, let me tell you ..." Then he told me what happened on that gray day in January.
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"Neither you nor I nor any being on earth is prepared to face a cougar attack," Hall said. "When it happened to me, I felt his jaw on my head and the blood running down, but I survived, because I was given inside instruction from the Holy Spirit -- in split-seconds the message came to me, and it saved my life.
"My son and I have a contract with the Ministry of Environment here in British Columbia, in the Bella Coola Valley, seven miles from the Pacific, snowcaps on all sides and a valley that goes on and on. Any wild animal attack -- and we get a lot of 'em, mostly wolves, black bear, grizzly hitting livestock -- we get a call and we head out at daybreak, take our hunting dogs in pursuit, black-and-tan and red-bone and bluetick hounds, 14 in all. I've hunted for 60 years, hunted every big animal you can name. Let me tell you: The cougar is the most unpredictable animal I've ever run into, very difficult to track, the kind of animal who will change his direction -- just turn right around -- for no apparent reason. A secretive and sleek and sneaking fellow, the shyest creature on the North American continent: Give him one leaf and he'll hide behind it, hide himself as no other can do.
"But beware when he gets bold. The cougar population is absolutely out of control in Bella Coola. He's showing up in people's backyards, taking dogs and cats, children and grown men too. Give you an example: On the 16th of July of 2001, the wife of a retired schoolteacher saw a cougar out her back window, so the schoolteacher and the local game warden go on a hunt for this cougar. And they find nothing, except for a squirrel, a red squirrel. They come into the backyard, returning home, and the wife looks out the window and she couldn't believe what she saw: 15 feet behind the two men is a cougar stalking them, and they didn't know it, didn't hear a thing, and she bangs on the window, and my goodness, there's the cougar, 15 feet away! A medium-size male who was in good shape, perfect health, wasn't starving -- and he was stalking a human being.
"A friend of mine has sheep penned behind a woven-wire 5-foot-high galvanized fence. A cougar took a full-grown sheep up over that 5-foot fence, and from there dragged it some 200 yards to the base of a huge red cedar tree, an old-growth 7 foot in diameter. The tree was rotted out on one side, and there the cougar had made what we call his 'lay-up' -- not a lair, but the place where he recuperates after the kill. A cougar spends an awful lot of energy taking down a kill -- they get exhausted in the attack, because it's warfare. They cut the back of the neck with their claws and bite the back of the head, and in doing so they bleed the animal to death.
"Now I went out to look at that lay-up, there were tracks of a mother and her kitten, they had devoured my friend's sheep, and there was nothing left but a few bones, the skull was cracked, the brain was eaten. But the funniest thing was the wool they'd left behind. Cougar have an abrasive tongue, and they use it to break off the hair from a kill, by licking. They almost deliberately, neatly, stack up the hair by the carcass before they eat it. They're neat creatures. They have what we call 'scrapes,' like a housecat who covers his pee or his crap. Well, the cougar goes overboard, he reaches out with those big long arms, 2-foot-long, and he scrapes up a pile over his crap sometimes 8 inches thick with leaves and earth. It's his nature.
"A few years ago, a cougar attacked a lady in the woods, ate her while she was still alive and totally conscious, covered her in leaves and grasses -- hiding his kill -- but a good friend of mine found her, the cat challenged him, circling, and he shot the cat dead. My friend spoke to the woman, and she said, 'Now I'm dying,' and it was the last thing she said.
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