Charlie

Day 125: Meet Charlie, preserved via the medium of taxidermy in the museum at Longmire (Mount Rainier National Park) for those visitors who hopefully will never encounter one of his kin in the wild. In his day, Charlie probably weighed around 150 pounds and would have measured about 30" in height at the shoulders. His body would have measured about seven feet from nose to the tip of his tail, the tail comprising a third of the length. He could run at speeds in excess of 40 miles per hour, but his strongest hunting ability was stealth. A cougar is a stalker, quietly creeping up on its prey before leaping upon it and killing it with one quick bite to the neck. You'd never know what hit you if Charlie wanted you for dinner.

In my years of backpacking and hiking, I have never seen a cougar. I have come upon fresh kills (a situation which made me very nervous!) and I have seen cougar tracks in my yard. In the last two months, our rangers have reported seeing a cougar twice in the pasture across the road. We are cougar-wary here, and watchful whenever we go out.

Poor old Charlie does his duty these days as museum mascot and sentinel. He's getting a little moth-eaten and sun-faded, but he still puts the chill up my spine when I think sharing the trail with one of his relatives