Close encounter with mother cougar turns hunter into the hunted.

Byline: INSIDE THE OUTDOORS By Mike Stahlberg The Register-Guard

The biggest threat Oregon hunters face in the field has always been other hunters.

Hunters still shoot other hunters - and sometimes themselves. Thankfully, such mishaps are much less common than they once were.

A long-running hunter education program helped Oregon get down to an average of one hunting fatality and two non-fatal shootings annually over the past 10 years.

While hunting firearm accidents have been on the decline ever since the hunter education program was launched in 1954, there's now another threat to hunters that was practically non-existent 50 years ago.

A reminder of that threat was provided a week ago Tuesday when Guy Wheeler of Junction City shot and killed an adult female cougar as it charged him. At the time, Wheeler, 30, was hunting mule deer in the Walker Rim area of the Fork Rock Unit.

"I stopped for a minute to rest," Wheeler said, "Actually, I saw a little frog I hadn't seen before and sat on a log to look at it."

After a few minutes, Wheeler said he heard a sound behind him.

"When I turned around, I saw the mother cougar standing behind me about 15 to 25 feet. It surprised me. I noticed behind her were two cubs. Then when I looked back at her, she was in a crouched position.

"I'm not sure whether she jumped first - it happened so quick ... she jumped and I shot and she veered off to the left.

"I thought it was 50-50 whether I got her or the sound of the rifle scared her, but when she circled around and started coming back, I wasn't going to take a chance, so I shot her again."

This time, the mountain lion dropped, dead. Examination showed the cat had been hit in the hind leg by Wheeler's first shot and in the chest by the second.

The ODFW sells about 34,000 cougar tags annually, but the Junction City hunter was not carrying one of them.

"I shot it out of self-defense," said Wheeler, who professed to being "more scared after it happened than during ... a lot of it was just reflex, I guess."

Cougar attacks on humans are rare. There's no record of a cougar-caused fatality in Oregon, although there have been at least 10 fatalities in the U.S. and Canada since 1990, and several dozen injuries.

Among those killed by cougars: a female jogger and a male mountain biker in California and a female cross-country skier in Alberta, Canada.

Meanwhile, Wheeler is not the first Oregon hunter to shoot a cougar that got too close for comfort.

"It does happen occasionally," Tom Thornton, Game Program Manager for the ODFW in Salem says of hunters who find themselves being stalked. "In fact, we have a big mounted cat in our office, and that was how it was taken."

The ODFW doesn't separate cougar kills involved in "stalking" or "charging" hunters from other "human safety" cases, which have numbered about two dozen a year since 1998.

"So whether something like that happens once a year or five times a year, I couldn't say," Thornton said.

However, hunters often do things that are more likely to put them in harm's way than hikers, bikers or skiers.

"Every year we hear stories about hunters who had close encounters with a cougar," said Bill Castillo, the ODFW's district wildlife biologist in Springfield. "Of course, hunters do everything a person would avoid doing if he were trying to avoid cougars."

Things like wearing "camo," using animal scents and making animal calls (sometimes "distress calls," which are like a dinner bell to a mountain lion). Hunters stay out during prime dining hours - very early and very late in the day.

Sometimes their own fresh kills can attract a big cat's interest. (In 2003, a Washington hunter was jumped by a cougar while he was cleaning an elk he had shot).

"It's not too surprising that hunters have these close encounters every year," Castillo said.

Even something as simple as sitting very still or moving very slowly and quietly through the woods can lead a mountain lion to confuse a human with a large prey animal.

By sitting down on a log, Wheeler made himself appear smaller and, thus, more vulnerable to a mother cougar with young to feed - and/or teach to hunt.

One of the things experts advise people encountering a mountain lion to do is raise their arms and "make yourself appear as large as possible."

But often people are unaware of a cougar's close proximity. The big cats, after all, make a living on sneaking up on their dinner.

"When that encounter occurred," Wheeler said, "I had been sitting for over three or four minutes, so she shouldn't have seen me as a threat to her cubs...in my mind, I think she was trying to feed the cubs."

Those still-spotted kittens fled when the shots were fired. Looking for their den was one of the priorities for the OSP game officer who responded to Wheeler's call and accompanied him to the site the next morning.

"He could see from the tracks what had happened," Wheeler said. "The tracks told the story of where she jumped and circled..."

But the young cats were not heavy enough to leave tracks that the trooper and Wheeler could follow.

The incident marked the first time that Wheeler had ever seen a cougar in the wild.

"My father and my mother had actually both seen cougars, and I was sort of jealous that I'd never got to see one," Wheeler said. "Not anymore."

Fifty years ago, cougars had been virtually hounded out of Oregon. Bounties were paid on them through 1961, when the statewide population was estimated at only 200 cats. The chance of ever encountering one was extremely remote.

Since being re-classified from a predator that could be killed at any time in any fashion to a game animal protected by regulations, Oregon's cougar population has made a remarkable recovery.

More than 5,000 cougars are now believed to live in Oregon, according to the revised Cougar Management Plan up for adoption by the Fish and Wildlife Commission.

The bottom line is that, as always, hunter safety requires being aware of all other hunters in the field - including the fact that not all of them are two-legged.

Mike Stahlberg can be reached at [e-mail].