The Marauder of the Poultry Yard
A venerable, toothless cougar met its end after a spree of terrorizing local goose pens.
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.
On February 26, a cougar made a visit to Simon Elwell's ranch at midday and killed all his geese. On March 4, the animal visited the ranch of J. W. Mann and killed three more. Mr. Mann informed his father, an old-time hunter from Maine, who took his dog 'Spot' and started to hunt. Following a hot trail, he found the marauder resting on a bed of down plucked from the goose it had just eaten. Spot treed the animal, and Mr. Mann, unarmed, called for W. A. Langlay, who arrived with a Winchester rifle. After five shots, the cougar descended. Judges of animals say the cougar must have been 50 years old; it had only three teeth left, which explains its preference for fat, easy geese, and both its ears had been frozen off. It measured 8 feet 6 inches from tip to tip.
“He had only three teeth left in his venerable jaws, which probably accounts for his fondness for fat geese.”
While Washington's cougar population has rebounded significantly since the 19th century, this story captures the frontier-era anxiety of rural settlers protecting livestock. Today, the 'predator' narrative has shifted toward human-wildlife coexistence, though tensions remain in urban-fringe areas.
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