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Prologue THE CROSSING The big cat stole silent down rocky mountain slopes broken by bunchgrass, slipping unseen into the creek bottom. Behind him, the grunts of sparring bull bison retreated, giving way to the morning songs of red-winged blackbirds. The color of honey, the color of caramel, the color of dry mountain meadows, invisible in the dim light, the mountain lion crept into the first grey of day through grasses still wet with dew, his amber eyes set on the dark of distant forests, sure to hold deer. He was hungry. And he needed to move. There was food behind him, deer and elk and even a few bighorn sheep and antelope. But he was young still, and knew to avoid the big old male lions that patrolled those herds. And so he moved, off the Montana mountaintop, under the fence that rings the National Bison Range, down from the rocky den where he’d been born 18 months before. His mother had kept him moving all this time, teaching him the stalk, teaching him the kill, teaching him to avoid the territorial old males along the way. He was hardwired to roam, to eat, to find a wild empty country of his own where he could stake his territory. Deer lived in the wetland thickets and river bottoms below the mountaintop, so he followed ancient feline highways along the streambeds, moving with the deer at dawn and dusk. The cat headed east, upriver, toward mountains backlit by sunrise, doing what mountain lions have done here for 10,000 years. But times have changed. Between his old home on the National Bison Range and the deer-filled forests of the Mission Mountain Wilderness, a minefield of danger has grown up – houses and dogs and guns and poisons. And now that strange new noise, a hiss with a hint of roar, rising and falling periodically, somewhere between here and the snow-capped peaks. The National Bison Range is located just north of Missoula, Montana, a grassy 19,000 acres that rise in steep relief above a broad valley carved by Pleistocene ice. It is fenced to keep the bison in, but a thriving black bear population has dug holes beneath the wire and most large carnivores move freely on and off the range. Wolves, black bears, grizzly bears, coyotes and mountain lions all share the Bison Range, along with herds of prey. The Bison Range also is sacred ground. The bunch-grass and forest-filled mountain complex lies within the boundaries of the Flathead Indian Reservation, home to the Salish, Kootenai and Pend d’Oreilles people. In fact, it was a Tribal member who herded the Range’s original bison a century ago — from the prairies east of Glacier National Park, over the Continental Divide, and down into the Mission Valley. The valley is framed by protected lands — to the west by the low-slung National Bison Range, and to the east by the soaring summits of the Mission Mountain Tribal Wilderness. Between lie the unprotected wetlands and river bottoms and glacial pothole lakes so popular with deer and mountain lions and, more recently, human habitats. As he worked farther out onto the valley floor, the young lion slowed to a crawl. To his left, a large field stretched northward toward a barn and a few feeding deer. He was hungry. But the strange sound still spooked him, and he kept moving. A lone male can go as long as two weeks between kills, if necessary, and this was not the time to take risks, here in unknown country. Mountain lions have remarkable eyes, capable of seeing clearly through the dark of dusk and dawn hunting hours, but his ears were sharp, too, and he could hear the redhead ducks, mallards and Canada geese calling from pothole lakes as the early-spring sun rose. The territorial sign of other big cats – the scent of urine and spray, the scrapes and scratch trees – kept him traveling quietly along waters’ edge. A big male might lay claim to 150 square miles, so this was no place to stop. And anyway, that new noise he’d heard earlier had now grown quite loud and more frequent, rising and falling steadily, a low drone of moving sound. Somewhere on the other side of that noise a graduate student slipped on wet grass as she scrambled down a sloped highway bank. Whisper Camel-Means – a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation – was here to study the effectiveness of wildlife passages tunneled beneath the rush of US Highway 93. The road runs ribbon-straight through the heart of the valley, a dividing line that cuts across rich habitat and separates the Bison Range from the Wilderness. Her mind was on a camera trap she had set a week before, in a state-of-the-art wildlife underpass built beneath the busy north-south roadway. For years, Tribal elders and biologists had negotiated with state and federal highway officials, designing a “wildlife friendly” reconstruction of Hwy 93. They called it The Peoples’ Way, and they gave it a motto: “the road is a visitor.” It would be made to serve the real residents – the people and the elk and the bears and the big cats. Completed in 2010, it features 41 fish and wildlife crossing structures in 56 miles of highway – overpasses and underpasses, culverts and bridges, all linking streams and ancient migration paths across the valley floor, connecting habitats from mountaintop to river bottom. Whisper’s camera traps were set to capture and record wildlife crossings beneath the pulse of log trucks and minivans. This was the sound, the rising and falling hiss of tire on tarmac, the lion had been hearing. He was near the forested eastern mountains now, could see the dark timber rising, but these flashes of light and steel raced steadily across what appeared to be a paved ridgeline. He could not see the terrain on the other side, and that made him cautious. Padding closer, he sniffed a web of metal fence, then followed the fenceline parallel with the highway toward a darkened tunnel. Low light and caves. He liked that. That’s how he hunts. A thick layer of earth muffled the roar of traffic above, and he never heard the whirr of Whisper’s remote camera. The big cat slipped through, invisible except to the camera, and on the other side he could finally smell the sharp tang of Douglas fir and moist forest soil. He had passed unseen across one of Montana’s busiest and most dangerous highways, a silent ghost hardwired to find the wild. Now he was on his own, staking and marking his hunting grounds, striding quickly toward a new high-country home among the deer herds of the Mission Mountains. But he was still close enough that he could hear the sound of the trucks behind him as Whisper slipped down the highway slope. She never worried about encountering mountain lions during the day – after all, she’d always understood that the big cats preferred darkness. But Whisper knew to take care in bear country, so she made noise as she moved through tall vegetation and dense forest. Bears typically move on if they hear you approaching, but her mind was on that camera, not on predators. At the tunnel, she edged along the wall to reach her camera. It was late morning now, and the sun was warming. Whisper toggled through the digital images and immediately noticed a time-stamped frame that had been snapped just a moment before she arrived. A chill up the spine. A quick catch of the breath. Hair suddenly on end. A big mountain lion. Skwtismyè in her native language. In broad daylight. Just now. Adrenaline. And then… a smile. This was exactly how it was supposed to work. The big cat had moved safely beneath the highway, through a crossing structure that she and the biologists and the engineers had designed and built. It worked beautifully. Other images, at other passages along The Peoples’ Way, have captured bears and bobcats, deer and elk, skunks and owls and even otters. Wild nature needs room to roam – to disperse and connect and migrate with the seasons – and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have set the global standard for wildlife connectivity across roadways. Most all of the big carnivores that traditionally defined our nation have been squeezed into the protected fringes, the national parks and wilderness areas that provide a last refuge. But not the mountain lions. They live with us, from California to the Eastern seaboard, even if we seldom see them. Or, perhaps, because we seldom see them. These big cats are evolved for stealth, to hide from top predators such as wolves and bears, and that secrecy has allowed them to live among us. I have had the privilege to spend a career tracking and conserving mountain lions and their habitats from the National Bison Range to the Mission Mountain Wilderness, and from Montana’s Crown of the Continent ecosystem to the Patagonian wilds of Argentina and Chile. Down there, we call them pumas, but they are the same cats, hungry for prey and for the freedom to roam. From Montana to Patagonia, the story of Puma concolor is a story of magical landscapes, remarkable habitats and the fantastic people who work to protect them. It is also an unlikely story, because it is a very lonely exception to the rule. Big, wild cats worldwide are in trouble, threatened and endangered and on the ropes. Fewer than 20,000 lions persist in all of Africa. As few as 15,000 jaguars remain in the wild. And the global census of tigers has dipped below 4,000. And yet. The mountain lions of North America and the pumas of South America are thriving, dispersing and expanding and re-wilding entire continents. They are beating the odds, even here at the height of the human dominated “Anthropocene Era,” and their success provides a remarkable opportunity for wild nature to regain a toehold and to shape possibilities for the persistence of natural systems. They are hope for those of us who believe our future will depend, in large part, on finding the wild.
