Headed home on a wooded trail lit only by the moon, Ryland Brong said he could feel the eyes of a cougar on him, contemplating its next move.
The Carihi high school Grade 10 student had just dropped off his girlfriend at a nearby bus stop around 10:30 p.m. when he realized he was not alone.
“I take the trails all the time,” said Brong, 14, who is still shaken from the incident. “Well, I used to.”
After Brong veered off the ERT road onto a well-used trail that diverts to Peterson and Hopkin roads, he was about halfway up when he looked to his left and saw a cedar tree and a "giant" cougar who appeared to be climbing it.
“It turned and looked at me and changed its mind,” said Brong, who is six feet tall. He described the cat as coming up to his mid-section in height. “It hissed at me and then started following me, weaving in and out of the bush. It was a huge cat, not thin at all, and I could hear it, like, chattering, the sound they make just before they pounce.”
Brong said his instinct was to run, but he recalled a school project on cougars and remembered that was not the thing to do. He did speed up his pace, shaking, breathing heavily and planning ahead.
“I figured if he jumped, I would roll off to the side of the trail where there were a lot of big sticks. I would fall onto my back and grab one of them to fight him off.”
Brong said at one point the cougar was as close as five metres and he could see his eyes.
“My feet felt like they weighed a hundred pounds each as I tried to walk and not run,” he said. “We just kept looking each other in the eyes and time seemed to stand still.
“I got out onto Hopkin and he just sat there at the edge of the trail, hissing and staring at me, about nine metres away. A passerby saw I was really terrified and let me use a cellphone so I called 911. The operator stayed on the phone with me while they sent a conservation officer out right then, at 11 o’clock at night. The officer told me if the cougar had been hungry it probably would have attacked. I don’t know what he ate but it was a good thing I was walking faster.”
Brong’s mother Theresa said she lived in the same area when she was young and used the trails all the time as shortcut home.
“I used to take the same trail when I was a teenager but I always worried about bears, not cougars. I hate to imagine how close this cat was and feel really lucky it turned out the way it did.”
Cougars are able to leap 30 feet from a standstill and jump 15 feet straight up a cliff wall. Adult males can weigh 140 to 180 pounds and are seven to eight feet long from nose to tail.
Conservation officers searched for the cougar with their hounds but didn’t find it. Because this particular cougar showed aggressive behaviour, advisory signs were posted in the area.
“The conservation officer service has not received any further reports or sightings of this cougar since the incident,” said conservation officer Gordon Gudbranson.
“We are urging the public that if they do see a cougar in the ERT Road/Petersen Road area to please report it to RAPP 1-877-952-7277 immediately. Because of this cougars behaviour being aggressive/threatening towards a human, the conservation officer service is trying to locate the cougar and remove it.”
Cougar attacks on people are rare because the cats are very wary of people. In North America, roughly 25 fatalities and 95 non-fatal attacks have been reported during the past 100 years. However, more cougar attacks have been reported in the western United States and Canada during the past 20 years than in the previous 80.
Basic safety tips if you encounter a cougar: maintain eye contact and keep facing the cougar, back away slowly, pick up small children and make yourself as big as possible to discourage the cougar. Never turn your back to a cougar and run. If a cougar still approaches you, pick up a stick, rock other item and be aggressive back to it to discourage it. If a cougar attacks, fight back.
If you see a cougar that is acting aggressively, call 911.
