Originally Posted by
Tonykarter
So here it is:
They are among us, and they have absolutely no fear of us.
Memorial Weekend 2013, Saturday night, about an hour after dark. I am walking around the corner of my house with my little 2-triple A battery Walmart headlight on moving my sprinklers, headlight on because snakes are thick around here in this creek bottom, and I have almost stepped on several of them moving sprinklers at night. As I approach the sprinkler I pan the dim light it puts out up through the water droplets to gauge how far it is throwing so I'll know where my next placement is. As I do I my headlight illuminates two green reflectors behind my neighbor’s house, distance to which later measure-wheeled at 46 yards. Right here: 30°31'55.6"N 94°26'47.3"W. That’s my shop and house just to the south. My neighbors to the north are out on their latticed-enclosed back porch with another couple and their two little dogs, yipping their little hearts out, much more than normal. They are having a party, charcoal burning, meat obviously on the grill...I can hear their conversation.
In nano-seconds I'm trying to reason "Did he put reflectors on his bird feeder?...no, it's to the left a little bit...maybe he put them on the tree in the fairway rough…but why?...and if he did, wouldn't they not be in the same plane due to the curve of the tree trunk and both would not be returning the same amount of light like these are?”, all this through my mind in probably less than a second. Why are they there? The reflectors were about the size of the inner concave part of the bottom of a coke can, or the bottom of an Off mosquito spray can, with a space of about 5-6 inches between them.
That's when the reflectors slowly pivoted right to look at my neighbors on their porch, and then snapped back and stared me down, containing in their unblinking assuredness absolute cold contempt for me, and telegraphing a total lack of fear of me. And I mean total lack of fear. In that stare, at that moment I knew that I was not being viewed as a threat, but as part of the food chain.
When he looked away and then snapped back I knew instantly what I was looking at. I shouldn't have been surprised. I had been finding big cat scat from time to time in the back corner of my yard since 2006. We lost some big oaks in hurricane Rita that year, and the sand that I spread to fill those big holes made a good place for them to easily squat and scrape. The scat piles were huge, most about 4" high. I'd take a stick and dig through them. Contained inside were the requisite hair and bone fragments you find in any predator feces. Most scary though were the claw marks it made when scraping the sand over the scat - always just three claws for some reason, as if it considered the task icky and nasty, widely splaying its digits so as to soil as few toes as possible. The claws made gouges in the bottom trench over an inch deep and almost a quarter inch wide. Most sobering, the trenches they made scraping the sand over the scat were all about a foot and a half long, with the longest being over two feet. I've seen bobcat scat. This wasn't it. This was a big cat. And it was crapping in my back yard not twenty yards from where I lay my head each night.
And it just continued to stare at me, not moving a muscle, confident, obviously having been coming onto the golf course at will any night it wanted for a very long time, so as to more easily hunt the deer that graze on it at night, and in doing so gaining supreme assuredness and situational awareness…and a lack of fear of humans.
This is the Big Thicket. Five North American ecotones merge here, and everything grows here like on steroids. We have more bio-diversity here than anywhere in the county. Which means high bio-density, beyond that which most people can comprehend until they visit the Big Thicket. Three-tiered canopies are the norm, it with high over-story which elsewhere blocks out enough sun to limit growth under its canopy, thus opening up the forest floor. Not here. The ground-level plants do quite well here on limited sunlight due to the rich dark soil and the moisture and humidity which is high and constant. Think of the hedgerows of Normandy, but miles thick.
In front of my house...thick, humid, arboreal forest, thicket. Across the street a right of way into it for the first hundred yards or so, was to have been a cul-de-sac, then ~ 380 yards by GPS to the lone ATV
trail through it, virtually impenetrable in between. Private, undeveloped property owner’s association land, unused. Nobody ventures out in it. It is too thick. And the trees that fell in hurricanes Rita and Ike that blocked that only trail, they were never cleared. Even when I was young and headstrong it was spooky out there. As it is a long way around to get to that trail I had tried several times back in my 30's to hack a direct path to it. Never got more than 30 yards before giving up. Almost 1000 yards to the creek in the back, 470 acre lake to the left a half mile or so that the creek dumps into, it curving around hundreds of acres such that all of this is almost surrounded by water oak, cypress and palmetto bottom. Only logical entry for man or beast is across the street from my house, as lake/creek/swamp hinder easy human entry from all other sides. None of it settled or cleared, Alabama-Coushatta Indian Reservation to the right about 40 miles. This, ALL thicket.
They call it the Big Thicket because that is what it is: you can't see thirty feet into the woods across the street. And it is that way for about fifty miles, with nothing to break it but tree farms and sparse rural settlement, a few logging roads seldom traveled except in hunting season, under-utilized Hwy 146 about thirty miles to the west, two or three farm to market roads, the Trinity river bottom, and finally Hwy 59. All of it thicket, or tree farms, seldom entered. Parks and Wildlife surveys show that the carrying capacity of the Thicket, its ability to support wildlife, is almost twice that of any other area in our state. Perfect habitat for big, carnivorous cats.
The cats can't hunt effectively in that thicket, but it makes a great place to live, thrive and raise a family. By the way, unlike everywhere else in Texas, we have no feral hog problem in Wildwood. You’d think with all of these woods, and a golf course that is constantly over-fertilized that they would be rooting the heck out of the succulent greens and fairways. Nope. Has not happened once since way back in the mid-70’s. Wanna guess why? As prolific reproducers as feral hogs are, consider: Just how many apex predators are present in these woods to be able to effectively keep the hogs beaten back to the point that they seem to not be present in a biosphere that supports twice the life of anywhere else, and where they too should be proliferant?
On the golf course they have room to hunt effectively. So they have been coming into the neighborhood to feed, seen from time to time for decades, and in doing so have lost all fear of humans. Very dangerous. No telling how many times I and my neighbors have been watched unknowingly from the shadows just across the street. Their familiarity with us breeds contempt, and I could tell by this one's cold, assured stare that he had absolutely no fear of me, even when I started moving (stupid me) towards it and yelling to my neighbor, asking them if they saw the large animal behind his azalea bush. I just wonder, how many times had humans unknowingly gotten between him and the prey he stalked. More important, how much had he come to loathe us harbor ill will towards us as a result? Before I ruined it for him, and judging by the way he begrudgingly retreated upon my approach, he had been coming down the fairway rough toward three does that were feeding on the lady's tee box to the south, saw the two dogs on the porch and became interested and just stopped to observe. He was just sitting there watching my neighbors and their dogs when I showed up and intruded upon him. I think the dogs hung him up. Easier prey than deer. Damned humans. Again. One of these days…
Dogs and cats disappear in this neighborhood every week. There is always three or four “Have you seen Fee Fee” signs with pet pictures on them posted at the post office or the little store we have out here. We know what happened to them. Seldom are they found.
So like an idiot I move laterally around some potted plants we have right there. My neighbors, caught off guard do not hear what I said the first time, only knowing that I am hollering something at them, I hear Debbie say, “What did he say”, so I repeat even louder. By this time I am around the plants and moving toward the cat. He sits tight, never blinking, not moving a muscle, and just staring me down. My light is dim, so all I see are two green eyes, big and impossibly wide the distance between them. That distance
between them immediately registered on me as indication of the size of his head, and how big he must be. I only got about ten step towards him when he turns and pads off down the rough towards the green.
I rush over to my neighbors and tell them. They are shocked. I run back to the house and get my Streamlight Stinger, it always in its charger, and much more powerful than the headlight. I return to my property line and pan right, south, away from the direction he went. That’s when I see the does about 100 yards away on the ladies tee box, south and on the other side of the fairway. All the time, again, in nano-seconds, I’m trying to reason away what I saw, trying to tell myself that it was a deer, not wanting to admit to myself what I already knew. So I’m telling this to myself as I pan the Streamlight left in the direction that he went and there he is: he’s sitting by a white oak a little over a hundred yards in the rough, just staring at me. Again this time I only see big green eyes, and not his form due to the dimmer light stream at that distance. At that point I’m still trying to tell myself that I didn’t see what I saw. But I wanted to confirm to myself that I had seen a cougar, not two green eyes. I wanted to be sure. So again, stupid me, no gun, without considering what could happen (and I make my living in risk management no less) I start walking towards him. He lets me approach, he stoic and unmoving, sure of himself, staring me down. This time he begins leaving at a greater distance between us, about sixty yards. But because of the more powerful beam I saw his profile as he turned. I could even see the tan color of his coat. And let me tell you, this was one BIG son of a *****.
We have all seen green cat eyes at night. These were different. For one thing, they were big, real big. Most of all though was the color and the amount of light that they returned. The color was like no other green cat eyes I have ever seen. It was almost intoxicating in its color, a combination of aqua marine and jade, just beautiful. And the light they returned…they almost glowed they put off so much green light. It was like green foxfire. The illumination level of the eyes bespoke an enhanced ability to gather light, necessary for a hunter of the night. Those were the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen.
I’ve seen him once since. Sometimes the dog I rescued, dumped and starving, deep in the Davy Crockett National Forest, he will bark in the garage where I keep him at night. He wants to go out to pee, so I get up, or risk having to mop the garage in the morning. One night last winter I put him on the leash and we are walking out in the back yard towards the fairway about 3:20am. By now, because I am scared, I have bought a 1000 lumen Zebralight headlight, so bright and powerful that it kicks when I turn it on. I look up as I near the property line and there he is, fully illuminated in its powerful beam. He’s about half way across the fairway, about 50-60 yards away and walking at a fast walk, but not an “I’m scared” walk, but the walk of an apex predator, from my nine to my one, having seen us before we saw him and started his egress from behind my neighbor’s house, about the same place that I saw him the first time. He’s looking back over his right shoulder at me the whole time, not a bit worried that he might run into something ‘cause he is fully familiar with where he is and where he is going. Both his gait and the way he looked back over his should at me reminded me exactly of that late 60’s film clip made out in the Pacific northwest, later debunked, of the Bigfoot walking away and looking back at the moviemaker over his right shoulder. Unhurried. I take Puff out to pee before bed too. Sometimes he won’t even get off the concrete patio to go into the back yard to do his business. He is a German Shepherd/Cur mix, big, fearless and protective to the point of being dangerously vicious any other time. He seems to know when he is out there, and he won’t get off the porch.
Since the mid-70’s I and my friends have walked and hunted the forests, sloughs and river bottoms of East Texas. As it is all public land available to the many, to help avoid getting shot by drunks and neophytes we have always gone in before daylight and come out after dark. A flashlight is seldom mistaken for a deer. To get away from the high hunter densities common on the edges of these woods that are inhabited by these types we go in deeper than most. This necessitates long walks in the dark, and to achieve separation between us we split up sometime after entry. Most of the walk is usually
completed alone. If you wrap enough of those bread bag twist ties that are reflective about head high to the scrub as you go in to stealthy mark your trail, it is actually easier to find your way out after dark than it is in the daytime…a good flashlight will light them up and at night it looks like a well-marked highway through the woods. They are hard to see and virtually useless in the daytime, so we do not risk revealing our whereabouts to others.
So most of time that I have spent walking in the woods has been at night, without fear of getting lost, normally a person’s main fear of traversing the woods at night. I have had some interesting moments during these night walks, but never anything that really scared me. Yes, it is spooky, but that just adds to the adventure element, a necessary element for me that is missing from what otherwise passes as hunting on a lease with more restrictive and finite boundaries than that of public land. I mean, if you don’t get way back in there far enough to get the crap scared out of you at least a couple of times a day, just what kind of pansy-assed campfire stories are you going to have to tell your granchildren anyway? Periodically for convenience we stealth camp in there if we are too far in. Sometimes it is just too far to walk out, only to have to walk back in the next morning. So we are comfortable with being in the big woods at night.
Or at least I was until I saw this cougar. I have seen others, or parts of others. Once, a long tail in the 80’s, and another time a hind quarter and a long tail in 2007 in the Davy Crockett National Forest, both at dusk. Saw the hind quarter disappear behind the limbs of a bent over sweet gum, it horizontal and chest high, having been layed over previously by the natural death and felling of a larger, long rotted and now gone tree upon it. I watched its limbs get ever closer to the ground as he walked down the trunk towards the end of it, and then they all pop back up as he jumped off the end.
I was kinda’…ALERT…after both of those…and the walks out those nights were…let’s just say that I was REAL ATTENTIVE, and I felt REAL ALIVE the whole way out, REAL ALIVE! But I wasn’t scared. (Yeah, I was.) Great adventure. I didn’t go back into that neck of the woods for a long time, but it was an adventure…the kind that for me makes being in the woods worthwhile, and which makes possible campfire stories that grandkids will remember and tell their kids.
Almost forty years of walking the big woods and wading the river bottoms and cypress swamps at night without getting rattled. Until now.
I’ve got to tell you, even with the experience I’ve got under my belt, I am now fully rattled. This is the first year since I was fourteen that I have not bought a hunting license. That cat’s big green eyes staring at me unwaveringly has got me terminally shook up. He looked at me the way a great white looks at a cage diver with those cold uncaring shark eyes. Seeing a coiled timber rattler a foot from your boot or a cougar hind quarter at dusk has got nothing on that cat’s cold stare. And with one look he made me his cowering ***** in my own back yard. We came face to face, and he did not blink. HE NEVER BLINKED AT ANY TIME. He stared me down. I wonder, between he and I, who remains most intimidated? I’m pretty sure it is not him. His confidence that he projected to me in his lengthy, unblinking stare tells me that if we would have been out in the woods that I would have been just twitching meat.
I have to believe that he weighed the odds and I was just lucky this time, maybe due to the other human presence in close proximity. If a man gets jumped by a smaller juvenile he is going to have his hands more than full. And God help him if it is an older cat that is very hungry and due to its age unable to hunt their normal quarry effectively. He’ll be bigger, and his deminished capacity nothwithstanding, more than a match for any man without a gun already in his hand.
Chester Moore, executive editor of Texas Fish and Game Magazine grew up in this area. He was the outdoor writer for the Port Arthur News for many years. As such, Chester received many reports of cougar sightings in East Texas. He wrote an article about them. Cougar sightings are constant. They
are all over East Texas, some even inside city limits. There even have been verifiable cougar sightings in the salt grass marshes of the Intercostal Waterway, and around Sabine Pass, Texas, located on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico.
They are among most of you too, lurking unseen in the most unlikely of places…like around your house, at night. They watch you. You just haven’t seen them, and chances are you won’t.
So you see, because of this I won’t hang overnight in my back yard. I’ll go hang anywhere else, but **** sure not in my back yard
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