hurt him. She most likely was just playing a cat-and-mouse game, following her urge to stalk and test her skills. That sort of game can turn out badly for the mouse, so I was deeply concerned for the safety of my crew.
Not that it kept us away. Each day, we entered the enclosure to look for the cat, to observe and film. She never attacked us again. Maybe she just wanted to send a message during that first encounter. Message received!
We kept our distance and she kept hers, at first. But each day we inched closer and closer. Soon she got used to our presence and we reached a level of comfort and trust.
In fact, as time went on, the cougar even displayed affection. She would sometimes press her body against my leg and purr. It wasn’t a quiet purr like a household cat makes; her purr was more like an idling motorcycle.
At other times, she would stalk and chase us in a friendly game of cat and mouse. Well, friendly to her—we were the mice. We had gotten used to these games and were no longer fearful. But, we were always on our guard and watchful of any sudden change in behavior.
Our trusting relationship developed just in time, for soon the cougar gave birth to three male kittens.
We found the den amid a sheltered rocky outcrop. The kittens were just minutes old. Their spotted fur blended in with the ground, offering some protection against other predators. The helpless kittens’ eyes were closed and their little ears lay flat against their head. The newborns would remain blind and completely dependent on their mother for 10 days.
One by one, she gently picked them up by the scruff of their neck in her jaws and laid them in a soft bed of pine needles. Then she cleaned them with her large, rough tongue. When a kitten cried out with a squeaky rahr, rahr, the mother gave a few more reassuring licks.
These were the intimate sights and sounds I most wanted to capture, like the mother nursing her kittens—a tender moment perhaps never seen with cougars in the wild. There were many such moments of peace and tranquility between parent and young. There were other moments of high-energy training between teacher and student.
For instance, one day I watched with keen interest as a kitten tugged at one of his mother’s ears while she lay on the ground. Playing along, she gently laid a massive paw on his head like she was petting him. Then he saw her tail—a long rope of fur waving lazily in the air. It was like the tail was daring the kitten to grab it. The kitten took his chance and pounced. He bit and pawed at the tail for a few seconds, until his mother decided enough was enough and brushed him aside.
Every moment of play was actually a valuable lesson. The growing kittens were learning how to stalk and take down prey by sneaking up on each other and play fighting. These bouts were like friendly wrestling matches, but with teeth.
By autumn, the kittens were learning to hunt real prey, from mice in the fields to ducks on the pond. They were becoming increasingly wild, too.
They hid from me more often, and hissed when I approached. I was glad. One day they would be released into the wilderness, and I didn’t want them to get too comfortable with people. I didn’t want them to get used to having a harmless camera pointed at them, either. Hunting cougars is legal in many western states, and the next piece of equipment that was pointed at them might be a rifle.
When I started the cougar project, there was no guarantee of success. A lot could’ve gone wrong. The mother might never have accepted me, or the crew, into her world. She may have chosen to hide her young from the watchful eye of my camera lens. Or she may have turned aggressive, making the project too dangerous to continue.
Fortunately, none of these things happened. We were able to show the cougar not only as a powerful hunter but also as a nurturing parent and a patient teacher. We even revealed the sounds of the cougars’ world—from the chirps, purrs, mews, and growls of their language to the shoulder-shivering scrapes of the sharpening of the mother’s claws against a tree trunk.
The following spring, the young cougars reached the age when they normally go their separate ways. They were ready.
The mother was too familiar with humans to survive in the wilderness, so she was taken to a large preserve to live out her days in safety. The young cougars had a less predictable but more natural future.
We flew them by helicopter to a remote area of Idaho. Thanks to instinct and lessons learned as kittens, they were now self-sufficient and able to live a truly wild life. They stepped from their crates and never looked back. In a few days, the brothers would head in different directions to establish their own territories. They were free.
My cougar adventure was over, but theirs were just beginning.
What next? That’s what I asked myself as we removed the fencing and any trace of human activity at the cougar enclosure.
I was itching to start another project. As before, I wanted to do something that would inspire people to care about wildlife. The best way I knew how to do that was to make another film about the hidden daily life of an animal. It would have to be an animal that was largely misunderstood, an animal that was rarely filmed in the wild.
But, which animal?
To help me decide, I thought a little vacation was in order. Not Disney World or a Caribbean cruise. No, I needed a sense of peace—the kind of peace I get from a place of quiet natural beauty, a place where I could clear my mind. I decided to return to the Wyoming ranch in the Absarokas.
More than 30 years after I had spent the summer as a wrangler, I returned as a guest. For company, I had a stack of books about animals. I was going to pore over them for a few weeks in between hiking and fishing. Somewhere in the research and the inspiration of the mountains, I figured I’d find the subject of my next film.
I didn’t know the answer would hit me like a lightning bolt.
On the second day of the trip, I received a phone message that my cougar film, called Cougar: Ghost of the Rockies, had been chosen as the first episode of a nature TV series. I was overjoyed. I felt like a 16-year-old again, full of boundless energy.
I had the irresistible urge to make a climb that had been one of my favorites as a teen. I remembered that the view at the top was spectacular. I stepped my way through a stand of white pines to the base of a hill. I scrambled up the rocky slope, hunched over to keep my balance. At the top, I stood up straight to take in the view. Suddenly, I froze like a statue.
On the alpine meadow below me stood a gray wolf.
In a flash, my mind raced back to that day 30 years earlier when I had seen my first wolf. Now, in the same area, I was looking at my second. Could this be a descendant? I wondered about the possibility as I raised my binoculars to get a closer look. That’s when he saw me. Unlike the wolf that stared me down years before, this one was skittish and ran away at the sight of me.
In that brief moment, I knew that I had found the subject of my next film. I still didn’t know much about wolves, but I was about to begin a journey that would make me an expert in ways I never thought possible.
The first step in that journey was to separate fact from fiction. And when it comes to wolves, I learned that there was very little fact and a whole bunch of fiction.
Like most people, much of what I knew—or thought I knew—about wolves was based on the sayings, songs, movies, and fairy tales I had learned since childhood. A “wolf in sheep’s clothing” is someone whose pleasant personality hides sinister motives. In the fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood,” a wolf devours a grandmother and tries to trick her granddaughter into a similar fate.
Horror movies about werewolves—bloodthirsty half-man, half-wolf creatures—have been popular for generations. And who is trying to blow down the houses of the Three Little Pigs and eat the occupants? The Big Bad Wolf, of course!
Such stories and sayings show the wolf as a tricky, ferocious, evil