The last verified account of a wild cougar in Catherine Reed’s part of the province was in 1884, when a cat was shot and killed near Creemore, eradicating the cougar once and for all from Southern Ontario. That is the official position from provincial wildlife officials, anyway, who attribute the vast majority of cougar sightings to urban legends surfacing every few years, along with a host of other bizarre tales that just won’t die a natural death, tales made immortal by the internet, and if not immortal, then viral. All those forwards and blog postings and twittering spreading stories of alien abductions, and crocodiles and snakes living in the sewer systems (keep your toilet lid closed and take a careful look in the bowl before you shit), and cougar sightings. Oh, sometimes they weren’t called such, sometimes reported as puma sightings, and mountain lion sightings, and panther sightings, and leopard sightings, and very big cat sightings, but regardless, the number of cat-calls to the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources had increased markedly in recent years. Even so, the official position remains that although the cougar once widely roamed Canada, and still roams the Western provinces, the only cougars that might be living in Ontario are a very few that had been raised as pets and escaped their owners. Other sightings are said to be cases of mistaken identity, callers to the Ministry hotline startled by the appearance of an unusually large cat in their part of the woods, and jumping to conclusions that it is a cougar, when really it is a lynx or bobcat - the mind does funny things in a state of fear, creates illusions, perceives things as it thinks they are, rather than what they actually are. The lynx and bobcat are bigger than the typical pampered housecat, but much smaller than the cougar, the largest of the cats indigenous to Canada, second in size in the Western Hemisphere only to the jaguar. The female adult cougar weighs about the same as Catherine herself, and the male, about 200 pounds. Wildlife officials are quick to point out that in spite of the spate of recent cougar sightings in Southern Ontario, nobody has come up with physical proof – a dead cougar. Believers counterpoint that the cougar is an elusive animal, with a knack for camouflage, and what about the cougar scat found at a bog near Port Colborne and confirmed through DNA testing at Trent University a few years back? 

Female cougars gather in groups of mother and young (kittens staying with mama for about two years), while the male is solitary, patrolling an area of up to 300 square kilometres in search of food, usually white-tailed deer. Nocturnal hunters, cougars stalk their prey within striking distance and then charge in for the kill with two or three final powerful leaps, clamping down on the animal’s neck, suffocating larger prey with an unrelenting bite across the throat, collapsing the windpipe, and smaller prey by breaking their necks with one sharp deadly bite. Once fed, the cougar, particularly the female with all those hungry kittens, blankets the remainder of the kill with brush, so that other animals that feed on the dead don’t locate what rightfully belongs to her, inside her marked territory. The theory goes that with an explosion of the deer population in Southern Ontario, the wild cougar population has returned.  

But really, how was Catherine to know that the black-spotted kitten she found on her dawn trek in the woods along the Grand River, her daily walking meditation, was a wild cougar? And having taken a bodhisattva vow based on compassion for all living beings, how could she not take it home, the kitten obviously in distress, abandoned and mewling in hunger?