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Shadow Cat: Encountering the American Mountain Lion
North America's largest wildcat stalks a landscape of myth, fear, and isolation. Most people--even ardent outdoors enthusiasts--will never see one. "In eleven years of hiking, boating, guiding, and exploring," says writer Pam Houston, "I've come face to face with nearly every North American game species"--except a mountain lion. But as we encroach increasingly on their habitat, the tally of sightings goes up, along with stories of attacks on humans and even deaths. The essays that make up Shadow Cat introduce us to the animal and the controversies that surround it. Divided into three parts, the collection covers natural history, eyewitness accounts (from biologists, hunters, and admirers), and the complex, sometimes nasty politics surrounding Felis concolor, variously known as cougar, catamount, panther, puma, painter, and mountain lion. Noted conservation writer Ted Williams exalts in the animal's population comeback after decades of persecution; Rick Bass tells of his own history with a legendary lion in the Yaak Valley of Montana; and Chris Bolgiano puzzles over improbable sightings in the East. The collection's true high moments arrive, however, in skillful editing that reveals an interconnected community of cat fanciers and the complicated ethics they navigate in their avocations. In "Eat of This Flesh," celebrated environmental writer David Quammen (Song of the Dodo) sits down to a meal of stir-fried lion, chewing over some difficult ethical questions: "I will let the butcher do all of my killing. I will destroy habitat, but not animals. I will eat stir-fried shrimp, stir-fried beef, even stir-fried elk, but not stir-fried lion. Huh?" In the next piece, E. Donnall Thomas Jr.--doctor, writer, bow hunter, and the chef in the previous essay--serves up a taste of the hunt, musing, No matter how many times I stare up into an evergreen canopy and see a mountain lion, I doubt that I will ever become accustomed to the experience, and to tell the truth, I hope I never do. Tawny and graceful, the cat looks as if it belongs on another continent, if not another planet. As coauthor Elizabeth Grossman explains in her introduction, "these powerful predators have, in many ways, become emblematic of the debate over [preserving] wildness and wilderness"--a debate that more and more is binding those who would hunt a lion with those who would protect it. Such ironies seem almost appropriate. The whiskered face that emerges in Shadow Cat is of a regal yet inscrutable predator, one threatened by habitat loss, public misapprehension, and its own uncanny ability to survive. --Langdon Cook
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