Big cats on the prowl: mountain lions, once pushed to the edge of the U.S. frontier, have been growing in numbers and are moving eastward. Watch your pets.

• Author: Harden, Blaine
• Position: Science times

When Greg McCoy found Oreo, his daughter's house cat, in the jaws of a mountain lion last year, he grabbed the big cat by the tail with both hands, dragged it onto his front lawn, and jumped on top of it.

With his left arm, he tried to hold the writhing lion in a headlock. With his right hand, he attempted to yank Oreo from the lion's mouth.

As McCoy, who is 37 and 215 pounds, tugged on the bloodied house cat, the lion--an adult female weighing perhaps 100 pounds--struggled out of his headlock. Before it ran off to eat Oreo, it swatted McCoy across the face with a rear paw.

"It felt like a fist with four nails in it and it brought me to my senses and I decided I better let go," says McCoy, who lives in the mountains on the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado. "I had read about how to deal with a mountain lion, but none of that entered my head when I saw one with my daughter's cat. I was plain mad stupid."

He was also lucky. The lion left four scratches on his right cheek, which have since healed without scars. Wildlife experts say that swat could easily have torn off much of his face.

MAKING A COMEBACK

These are vexing times for Western suburbanites and the big cats that increasingly skulk among them.

The mountain lion, an ambush predator that was long trapped and poisoned as a varmint, has been resurgent since the 1960s when many western states categorized it as big game, with limited hunting seasons. No one knows how many there are, but a recent estimate by wildlife ecologists put the number at over 31,000 in 12 western states.

There may now be more mountain lions in the West than there were before European settlement, says Maurice Hornocker, a senior scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society.

"For more than 100 years we kept them away from human development by killing them whenever they showed up," he says. "That isn't the case anymore, and so they are taking advantage of it."

The human population in states with mountain lions is also surging with newcomers attracted by the rugged outdoors. This mix has coincided with an increase of attacks on people, which now average about four a year, up from one a year before 1970. Since 1890, mountain lions have killed 17 people, 11 of them children, in the United States and Canada. More than half of these deaths occurred in the past 12 years.

Now evidence is growing that mountain lions, the world's fourth-largest cat, are moving east, pushed by their own breeding success and pulled by an abundance...