Cyclists recount big cat close encounters

Had his wife not seen the bears, Brian Klaas wouldn't have heard the cougar. And had he not heard it and turned, he's convinced he would have felt its claws a moment later.

But this is not a Chicken Little yarn. (The sky is falling! We're surrounded by killer cougars!) It is simply a cautionary tale for mountain bikers riding where mountain lions roam - and Klaas, a vacationing 45-year-old southern California cabinetry contractor, could well teach it.

Klaas did everything right upon encountering a curiously aggressive cougar Aug. 6 on a popular Leavenworth cycling trail - including what he did just minutes earlier.

Two days before along the same trail in Freund Canyon - heavily used by mountain bikers and the site of both an annual biking festival and a mountain-bike race series - Klaas' wife had seen two black bears. (Klaas himself had been biking a different trail that day.)

So, before pedaling onto the trail, Klaas removed his earbuds - which is why he was able to hear the cougar closing in on him.

He heard the sounds behind him and presumed it to be a dog. He turned his head, saw the cougar and immediately began performing a virtual clinic on how a mountain biker should deal with a cougar in the wild.

Do not run away - or, in this case, ride. That cat is much faster than you are, on foot or wheels.

Raise arms, a jacket or objects to make yourself appear larger (thereby a more formidable foe).

Maintain eye contact with the cat. Make menacing noises.

Prepare to defend yourself and, if it comes to that, fight back.

"I felt like I knew exactly what to do," Klaas said in a telephone interview after the incident. "I had prior experience (with cougars) and I've rehearsed this in my mind a thousand times."

He stopped his bike immediately and stepped off on the protected side, keeping the bike between himself and the cat. He kept his eyes on the cat and took a slow step or two back, using the bike as a shield.

"It came at me," Klaas said. "I was still taking steps backwards; I kept what little momentum I had going, because I didn't want it to close in.

Until I raised my bike up in front of my face, I remained quiet, and then I yelled. But by that time it had closed to within 5 or 6 feet, and it was down low and looked like it was ready to jump or pounce.

"Then I really, really yelled and it did turn away, and when it was going away, I lifted my bike over my head and shuffled my feet to make it think I was chasing him."

And the cat ran off into the forest.

Klaas had had two previous cougar experiences, one involving a curious cat that hung around his campsite for 20 minutes, watching him, while he was solo camping on a fly-fishing trip in Montana's Lolo National Forest.

"I think (the Montana cougar) was just trying to tell me I was in his territory," Klaas recalled. "It was just being persistent and letting me know I was in its place."

So Klaas didn't seem at all like a Chicken Little when he described feeling like he had had a very close call on Freund Canyon. When he turned upon hearing the footsteps behind him, he said, the cat slowed down and was still going just about as fast as the bicycle - making Klaas certain it had been going faster. And gaining on him.

"If I didn't hear it and turn around at that second, I'm pretty sure it would have jumped on my back," he said. "It was closing fast."

What was this cougar doing? There are a few possibilities worth consideration.

1) It was playfully curious.

"Cats are cats. You roll a ball across the floor, a cat's going to pounce on it," says Gary Koehler, a Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife wildlife biologist who spent several years overseeing Project C.A.T. (Cougars And Teaching) program in Kittitas County. "Movement attracts attention, and it's possible that fast movement illicited a pursuit."

Or that movement attracted ...

2) A predatory response.

"If you're moving quickly, it mimics prey fleeing, and that's an attractant to a predator," said Diana Guerrero, an animal behaviorist from southern California.

3) Or, perhaps because it was a young cougar, this was a case of mistaken identity. In the excitement of the pursuit, the cougar might not even yet know what it's pursuing.

"Intuitively, just the behavior of this (cougar) suggests to me that it's a young, inexperienced cat," Koehler said. "Some of these issues could be mainly curiosity. ... Dispersal-age cats, they can be as long as an adult female and they're dumb just like a teenager, and they're curious."

If it was truly predator behavior, Koehler wondered, why have there not been "more replica incidents like this" in the same area?

Actually, Freund Canyon has been the scene of a couple of recent incidents, both within a quarter-mile of Klaas' incident.

On June 25, a couple of mountain bikers saw a cougar emerge from the brush and begin to follow them, growling and swatting the air as they backed away and only leaving when one of the bikers threw sticks at it.

On July 21, a cougar came onto the trail at a pair of bicyclists and took a swipe at one, hitting the tire with its paw.

Upon leaving the trail, the couple in the latter incident ended up at Der Rad Haus, a bike shop in downtown Leavenworth where cyclists often convene to swap stories.

"They were all white-faced," recalled store employee Eric Peterson, noting that the woman "was pretty shaken up. The guy said the cougar charged at him and then stopped, and slowly backed away.

"This is giving me chills just talking about it," added Peterson, who had ridden that same trail more than 20 times this summer. "We've heard those things can jump 40 feet from just sitting there. I don't think trying to run is a wise idea."

It would be absolutely the wrong thing to do, experts say; the right reaction is what Klaas did.

But in the moments after that initial encounter, Klaas - having realized he had taken a wrong turn and was on someone's private driveway - had to backtrack past a creekside area from which the cougar must have originally seen him.

And it came at him again.

"I yelled as I got to the creek and then he bolted out - actually flying out," Klaas said. "I turned at him and yelled as loud as I could."

Again, the cougar left. But the fact that it aggressively challenged Klaas a second time, said Guerrero, the California animal behaviorist, "is very disturbing.

"It used to be with any type of predator that went after a human, there was something wrong with it," Guerrero said. "Now it's the younger animals that we're seeing (involved in similar incidents). They're driven out of their ideal territory by older, more dominant animals, and the younger ones moving out are becoming habituated to humans - and they don't really know yet this is not a good thing to be doing."

The humans do, though. The Forest Service closed the trail until the Freund Canyon cougar was "dispatched" - which it was on Saturday when a local landowner shot it as it was attacking his pig.