January 16, 1991

he Colorado sun burned through a mantle of winter gloom, dappling the rocks, the trees, the snow with a warm glow, giving an air of spring to the January hillside. Ponderosa pines, their needles carpeting the ground, shimmered in the silvery light beside a town that owed its existence to gold. The forest lay open, trees interspersed with grasses and shrubs that could tolerate the heat and low moisture of the south-facing slope, vegetation that provided excellent cover for a creature in hiding.

The sounds of civilization—trucks on the interstate, dogs in backyards, students at the high school—carried up the hill, where half a dozen men had gathered. Wearing boots, gaiters, and wool hats, the men assembled in a line along a ridge and trudged eastward in unison. Heads pivoted and necks craned as the search party scanned the terrain for clues: a piece of clothing, a candy wrapper, a footprint, anything that might help explain how a healthy, young athlete had vanished in the middle of an average Monday on the edge of a small Rocky Mountain city. The men looked behind trees, under bushes, beside rocks and fallen logs, but they found nothing.

Two days had passed since the disappearance. So many sheriff’s deputies, search dogs, and townsfolk had scoured the hillside that no one expected this piece of earth to yield anything dramatic, yet Steve Shelafo intended to be thorough. The twenty-eight-year-old emergency medical technician, who wore a small mustache and an air of gravity of purpose, had been assigned to lead the final search of this area. With the first pass complete, Steve shifted his men south onto an adjacent swath of hillside and started the line moving back upslope. The team climbed a sunny ridge beneath high-tension power lines and gained a view that stretched from the old cemetery to downtown. The men lowered their gaze and inspected around their feet. Pine cones lay in melting snow. Prickly pear cacti poked through soil of decomposing granite. Deer droppings littered the ground like piles of Milk Duds.

It was then that one of the searchers pointed beneath a juniper. “We found him,” the young man said. Steve Shelafo approached through crunching snow, and as he neared, his eyes widened in disbelief. “None of us were prepared [for what we found],” he said later. “Not in the remotest sense.”

During his years in wilderness rescue, Steve had seen plenty of corpses—dismembered in plane crashes, bloated from drowning, crumpled after falling from cliffs. But this sight was more than gruesome; it was both haunting and indescribably weird. The body, clothed in athletic gear, wasn’t sloppily mangled; it was carefully carved, hollowed out like a pumpkin. Someone had cut a circle from the front of the sweatshirt and the turquoise T-shirt beneath, sliced through the skin and bones, exposed the chest cavity, and plucked out the organs. After conducting this ghoulish backwoods surgery, the killer had removed his victim’s face and then sprinkled moss and twigs on the lower torso as if to signify something profound, as if performing a macabre ritual. Is the murderer still on the mountain? Steve wondered. Then, urgently and cryptically, one of the other searchers said, “Hey. Right behind you.” Steve turned, fearing a madman with a shotgun. Instead he saw a wild animal.

The creature was large, its body muscular, its visage unmistakably feline. It sat sphinxlike in a copse of trees just five yards away and watched the men intently. The head seemed small for such a massive beast, but its face was mesmerizing: rounded ears that stood erect, whiskers fanning outward, sloping forehead, cherubic cheeks, and determined eyes. Linnaeus had dubbed the species Felis concolor, “cat of one color,” a description not quite accurate, for the animal’s back was the hue of sand, its belly eggnog, with patches of white around its mouth and black on the sides of its muzzle and the tip of its tail. In common parlance, the creature was known as cougar, puma, panther, or mountain lion. (“Mountain lion” was also something of a misnomer. Although often found in rugged, rocky terrain, cougars were once the most widely distributed land mammal in the Americas, occupying not merely mountains but swamps, grasslands, deserts, and forests from sea level to fourteen thousand feet, California to Maine, British Columbia to Patagonia.)

The mountain lion is by far the largest wild cat in the United States, excepting the occasional jaguar that slinks across the border from Mexico. A full-grown female weighs as much as a German shepherd. An adult male may be more massive than a Great Dane and even heftier than Theodore Roosevelt, who, on a Colorado hunting trip while vice president-elect in the winter of 1901, killed a cougar that tipped the scales at 227 pounds.

The lion that faced Steve Shelafo was not exceptionally large. A young adult male, weighing one hundred pounds, it was normal in most every respect but one. As authorities soon discovered, after a frantic chase violently ended by a bullet in the cougar’s chest, the cat’s stomach contained fragments of a human heart.

The grisly scene that Steve Shelafo and his group from Alpine Rescue Team encountered was not the result of a homicide; it was something more bizarre. They had located the remains of the first adult known to be killed and consumed by a mountain lion in more than a century. In the following days, newspaper headlines told the disturbing story: “Lion suspected in jogger death,” “Human remains found in cougar,” “Fatal attack believed unprecedented in North America.” USA Today labeled its report simply “Cougar Mystery.”

The death was especially troubling because, according to experts, it should not have occurred. Until that time, mountain lions were considered timid creatures of the night that avoided humans and human habitation. Although nineteenth-century American lore told of bloodthirsty cougars ambushing unsuspecting victims, scientists discounted such tales as the product of active imaginations and dime-store novels. Authenticated accounts of cougar attacks on people were so rare that Theodore Roosevelt, a great student of the outdoors, once wrote, “There is no more need of being frightened when sleeping in, or wandering after nightfall through, a forest infested by cougars than if they were so many tom-cats.” And yet in Colorado, in 1991, at midday, a mountain lion slew a young man in sight of an interstate highway and a high school. Forensic tests would prove that the lion had been the killer.

But no autopsy or bite-mark analysis or examination of the bloody attack site could solve the deeper mystery. What prompted a cougar to make such an exceptional and discomfiting choice of prey? The answer was to be found not in the cat’s bullet-pierced body, or in the remains of its human victim, but in the landscape.

This book tells the story of a death that was not supposed to happen and the forces that made it inevitable. It is a tale of politics and history, and ecology gone awry, all come to life in feline form. It is the chronicle of a town that loved its own version of nature with such passion that its embrace ultimately altered the natural world. The comparison may seem far-fetched, but much as the Aztecs hauled prisoners up high pyramids and cut out their beating hearts as an offering to the sun, the human mauled five centuries later on a frozen hill in 1991 was, in effect, a sacrifice, killed by a community embracing a myth: the idea that wilderness, true wilderness, could exist in modern America.