That Time a Mountain Lion Tried to Kill Me: A Selection from Mike Spencer Bown’s The World’s Most Travelled Man (2018)

“Just once, a mountain lion tried to kill me. I’d been practising my lamp-less night-hiking skills, climbing high in the hope these dark ridges might funnel me to Mount Gimli in the Kootenays. In the middle of the night, up in steep alpine zone where the terrain was a mix of sheer precipices and meadows dotted with stunted trees, a large animal startled as I crossed a gully in the rock. My ears detected it quietly swerve in behind to follow me, uncharacteristic behaviour for wapiti or deer. Stopping in my tracks was a test; it took one step, then two, and it also froze. No more wondering if it were bear or mountain lion—only a mountain lion will stalk humans that way.

That same animal had worried me the week before. I’d dropped a sweaty little daypack and stepped into a streambed to guzzle water; the air was 37 degrees Celsius, and the pine forests were burning, with one fire atop this mountain, another across the valley. The mountain lion had darted in and taken a swipe at the bag. Then it was gone. The result was that the thick foam shoulder strap, with two rows of double stitching and a heavy nylon outer fabric, was shredded as if it had been cut half through by a razor. I could bend the strap open like a puppet’s mouth. And this was the work of the central claw alone; the others dug in to either side.

Weapon-less, I adjusted my walking in this black of night, affecting a confident stride down the mountain. The instant this animal sensed my blindness it would pounce on my back and go for the kill. So at the whisper of a paw’s swish through bunchgrass, I’d crane my neck to glare behind me into darkness, feigning vision, and I’d growl. How to avoid walking straight off one of the many cliffs? Let’s just say I’ve never ‘minded my step’ more than I did in the hour that big cat followed me down the mountain. Even the flat meadows up here were like ski slopes. I descended several kilometres with the animal shadowing me, only to overshoot my camp a little way to the left. It was still stalking me, and closely, perhaps 10 metres back. But here I was lucky to recognize a peculiar J-shaped branch against a sliver of moon, and I veered to where I’d set up camp: a sheet of plastic and my precious stockpile of a couple of weeks’ emergency rations of rice and canned goods.

Then and there, in the glow just before dawn, it decided to have a go at me—striding directly in, not making any snarling noise that they are known for, but ears back and ghostly silent. I was the one snarling. Having grabbed a staff of hawthorn wood—used to hold up my plastic tarp—I swung to club the top of its skull, careful not to overcommit. Striving to get inside my swings, it would dodge and dart back, then circle and come at me again from another angle. I drove it off but passed a sleepless night. In the morning my first task was to write a note: ‘If you don’t find me here, get away fast, as I’ve been killed by a mountain lion: likely still prowling the area.’ Nails fixed the paper to the bright orange puzzle-piece bark on the side of a huge ponderosa pine. This rather alarming note could be torn down a couple of days later as the mountain lion only came back briefly the afternoon of the following day. Then it was gone for good. . . .

Humans generally are much stronger than we give ourselves credit for. If we really had to, most of us can pull off the most astounding feats, living for weeks without food, scrambling through 100 kilometres of scab-land and gulch: humans are big, tough animals, and they die hard. If you are challenging yourself and having adventures in this life you’re living, a fair stretch of it is going to be spent suffering, and some people see that as carte blanche to become insufferable. I can only hope it’s not my misfortune to find myself next to them. For me, the epitome of tough is not only mind over matter; it’s being able to joke and have a laugh about situations that aren’t going to kill you, and even many that might.”—Mike Spencer Bown, The World’s Most Travelled Man: A Twenty-Three-Year Odyssey to and through Every Country on the Planet (2018)