The Cougar Who Saved a Cyclist’s Life
A Tacoma engineer recounts his miraculous escape after a mountain lion knocked him upright on his bicycle during a terrifying encounter.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
TACOMA, April 15. — Mr. Elvy, an engineer at Stock Quarry, Washington, lives about a mile from the scene of his daily labor, going to work each morning before daylight and returning by bike at night. One morning this week he was bowling along at a fast pace when he suddenly ran into a large mountain lion lying asleep in the pathway. Neither heard the other until it was too late for polite avoidance.
The bicyclist rode over the big creature's foot, which disengaged Elvy's equilibrium and he was about to fall off his wheel, when, according to his own story, he was miraculously righted by a stroke from the animal's paw. The blow was just of sufficient force to put him again in an upright position on his wheel ready to scoot, and as it did not kill his new friend, he would not even look back to see how the cougar took the encounter.
On reaching home he found that his shirt was torn through the chest and other evidences of the truth of his story revealed in four bloody streaks where the claws of the cougar had scraped his skin.
It is a little hard to believe any city dweller's story to be truthful narrative of an encounter that did not end in death, but it has been known that cougars used to live in the locality and have been seen. Only a few weeks ago a neighbor of Mr. Elvy saw one just outside his cattle fence. An effort is being made by the neighbors to hunt and kill the wild animal; the settler has a number of hounds and they will be employed in making their trail.
This 1904 account of a near-miss with a cougar in Tacoma highlights how recently urban sprawl collided with Pacific Northwest wildlife. While modern Seattleites might encounter deer or bears in the suburbs, a direct physical interaction with a mountain lion is now virtually unheard of in the city limits, marking a significant shift in our relationship with the local ecosystem.
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