A cat-astrophe

So at any rate, it was Saturday morning and there I am chomping on my Lucky Charms (C'mon, admit it, you just eat the marshmallows, don't you? Knew you did.) and I got to wondering: What's eating Iowans these days?

Turns out, mountain lions. Well, no one has been eaten just yet, but the reappearance of the big cats has Iowans shorts in a knot.

I heard about it on National Public Radio. Mountain lions have returned to the state after something like 140 years of absence.

This coincides with Iowa's switch from its staple cash crop - corn - to catnip a few years back. Biologists think all that catnip has lured the cats back.

Seriously, biologists think there're probably a couple of dozen cats in the state, and one lady already smacked one with her car.

It used to be that Iowans only had to worry about losing their fingers in corn pickers. (Don't laugh. I knew a guy who lost his fingers in a corn picker. His name was Clarky, and all his fingers and most of his thumb on one hand were gone. He smoked his cigarettes with that hand, and it always looked like he had a mitten on.)

Now Iowans are plumb worried about being eaten by lions.

One guy on the radio said he saw a lion slinking around his barn, and a woman said she wouldn't go mushroom picking alone this spring. Some politicians want laws to protect them, others want laws to shoot them.

It's puma paranoia, as the NPR announcer said.

I never realized Iowans were such wussies. I thought they were made of sterner stuff. To listen to the radio, you'd think there was a lion behind every woodshed.

Now, I hike in legitimate lion country several days a week, often times with my boy, and I have seen a lion exactly once, and it was running down the side of the Going-to-the-Sun Road and wanted nothing to do with me other than to get out of the way.

Get my drift, Iowa?

Lion encounters are few and far between. Which isn't to say that lions don't attack people and, yes, some have even been killed. Glacier Park has its fair share of sightings and two documented attacks.

In July of '90, 9-year-old Scott O'Hare, of Dayton, Wyo., was attacked by a lion near Apgar while playing on the beach. The lion chewed him up pretty good, but he survived. In August of '92, 12-year-old Nathaniel Moore was also chewed up by a lion about 3.5 miles from Lake McDonald. He, too survived.

(As a side note, a lion was killed just last week in the park after it was hit while running across the Sun Road.)

The bottom line is about 2 million people go to Glacier each year. Exactly two in 14 years have been bit by lions.

No one has been killed by a mountain lion in Glacier, and while seeing a cat in Glacier is a pretty rare occurrence, seeing their tracks, particularly in the winter, is not.

On Sunday, Boy Wonder and I were hiking near McDonald Creek and saw a set of cat tracks. They were just about perfect tracks - nice round paws making dainty imprints in the snow.

We followed them a ways, and then they veered off into a thick patch of trees. Made me wonder what the cat was after.

Maybe it saw … an Iowan.

Chris Peterson, the lionhearted, is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.