Okay. I will admit it. My wife and I are into cats. Big ones or little ones, it doesn’t matter. At one time, we have four in our house, and one in my office. I often had a cat on my lap as I took calls from customers. We still have a small colony of ferals that we feed on the back porch. We never quite reached the level of “crazy cat people” yet. But that is a line that we are well aware of, and we try our best not to step over to the other side. Unfortunately, my wife experienced a late onset of allergies and this meant that our pet experience had to end. All of the in house cats were rescues, and we kept our our promise to them. We just didn’t replace any of the beloved pets that eventually crossed over. A couple of years ago, we became a cat free household.
We like dogs too, though we have never owned any together. But we always had great fun with our neighbor’s dog in Monteverde. She was a bouncy golden short hair lab. She comes to visit, and hang out in our kitchen. When Melissa was cooking, “Lady” would beg for a taste. Or she would keep me company while I handle minor repairs outside. She had always been part of our Monteverde experience. Just a big old sweet dog.
During one trip, we didn’t see Lady at all. We heard her barking a couple of times, but she never stopped by. One night, we were coming in from dinner with friends. I switched on some small lights along the walkway from the driveway. We noticed Lady lying in the shadows near the forest. Melissa started to talk softly to her, and walked over to give her a little scratch. She got about fifteen feet away when Lady raised her head and looked at her. Then she got up, and walked into the woods.
Melissa called to her, and then came back to where I was standing. She was puzzled as to why Lady was being so standoffish. After all, she was very friendly and usually glad to see us. But we also noticed something. Lady didn’t “bounce” away like a Lab. She slunk away. Like a big cat. A really big cat. I felt a chill, and we hurried inside.
A friend stopped by for coffee the next morning. He is was our sometime carpenter and a guide in one of the local reserves. And a frequent visitor when we were in Monteverde. (He loved Melissa’s Louisiana gumbo too. But that is another story) We told him about what we saw, and together we walked over to the area of the yard where “Lady” had been. Puma tracks were everywhere. My friend was able to ascertain the slight signs of the big cat descending down to the road, and we found more prints high in the soft earthen berm along the road. This is where it went back into the forest after his visit. Our friend had no doubt at all. Yep. My bride had tried to pet a mountain lion!
This is a very rare sighting in Monteverde. The woods are dense enough to support some other big cats. One night, we heard the sound of a large “something” that sounded like a child screaming in pain. Friends said that this was probably a large cat. We didn’t see it. To be honest, we didn’t want to look for it. It was a quite spooky! I was glad to be secure inside. We have also encountered a Jaguarundi on some local bridges. This is a much smaller, kinda ugly cat that has an almost weasel like look.
But we had never seen something this big. A large predator like this needs a lot of territory. Over the last few years, the local conservation groups have been buying up land to protect existing “biological corridors” and create new ones. They do this so that animals can move around, and keep the gene pools diverse. If they are confined to a small area, in-breeding will eventually doom an isolated population. Our guide friend speculated that our visitor might have been a young male passing through, looking for love. There had been a strong cat urine odor outside the evening before. I had just assumed it was a local tom marking his territory. Now, I am not so sure.
We visited our neighbors. We wanted to let them know what we had seen, and to make sure they kept Lady in for a day or two. They were understandably a little skeptical. Their daughter said that she wished she could have seen it. There are several wild cat species living in the woods here. But she had lived in Monteverde her whole life, and never laid eyes on a mountain lion. We were very glad that our friend stopped by, and was able to verify our sighting. We were not just uninformed gringos mistaking something else for a big cat. This was the real deal.
And now Melissa has a great story to tell. The night she tried to pet the lion!
I think she is taking this whole cat thing to the extreme.
