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ISBN: 0970140126

             The story takes place in the Northwest and blends true stories with facts and fiction.  Buck Logan, the primary character for the series, lives in a newly developing community thirty miles east of Seattle.  The community is pushing into the woods, in the heart of cougar country.  As the area grows they begin to have problems with cougars in backyards.  This area is the classic example of people moving into cougar country and then having problems with them.

After an incident while fishing, alone, in a remote area on the Ho River in the northwest Olympic peninsula in 1995, the author began studying cougar behavior and human related incidents.  Almost everyone believes that the incidents are being caused by humans moving into cougar country. That's what we've been told for the last ten years. Eight years of researching cougars, cougar and human related incidents and cougar behavior reveals that nearly all of the attacks have been in unpopulated areas, like jogging or hiking trails that people have used for years. Most of these areas have been used by people for over fifty years. 

The author spent two summers traveling around the northwest talking to people who have had first hand experiences with these animals. Three towns have had them laying in the middle of the street, at a school bus stop, in the middle of town next to the school.  Talking with people in remote, small towns that have experienced negative growth in the past ten years where logging jobs have disappeared he was told more than once by people 'I have lived here for over twenty years and never heard of a cougar in town until a couple years ago.' The author believes that people may not actually be the cause of the cougar and human interactions in most areas. Game wardens and forest rangers are telling me that there is a very high cougar population.  It appears to this author that cougar populations have reached peaks in the early 1930’s, the late 1960’s and again today.  The cougar population increase, in this phase, is directly related to ungulate availability. A decrease in the number of people hunting since the early 1990’s has caused the deer population to increase dramatically since then, stimulating cougar population increases. An exception is probably California. A recent trip there indicates the problem is most likely because of the explosive growth of people in southern California.  This is also likely to be the case in the Boulder, CO area.

AUTHOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY:

J. R. Stoddard has spent the last twelve years studying cougar incidents and behavioral changes. During the summer of 2001, 2002 and 2003 he spent two months each year traveling around the northwest talking to people who have had first hand experiences with these animals.

He is a retired Naval Flight Officer with over 4,000 hours of flight time and has flown S-3A, EC-130 and EC-135 aircraft all over the world, from aircraft carriers and land based stations.  He spent the summers of his youth camping and fishing in the rugged backcountry of the High Sierras, Idaho, Oregon and Utah.  An avid outdoorsman he has spent much of his recreational time in the woods enjoying fishing, camping, backpacking and photographing wildlife.  He has taken his family on many backpacking and hiking trips along the Appalachian Trail and the spectacularly beautiful trails in Washington State.