Nature Noir (18 page)

Meanwhile, by the 1980s a long-awaited economic boom had taken hold in the foothills, based on residential construction, service industry, and the computer industry's arrival in western Placer County. Now the postwar land rush from cities into the dense grids of suburbs close to Sacramento leapfrogged outward into dispersed, low-density subdivisions of old ranches in the hills, where new residents could establish a relationship with nature, of the nice-view-from-the-deck kind.

In 1970 there were just over 20 million people in California. The population of El Dorado County, where Barbara Schoener lived, was around 44,000, which wasn't much, considering that at 1,711 square miles, Placer County's southern neighbor was just a little smaller than Delaware. By 1994 the state's population had grown to 31.4 million, just over one and a half times what it was in 1970. In the same period El Dorado County's more than tripled, to 146,400 souls. Most of them settled in the low-elevation western hills, where they would be spared the serious snow shoveling common in the high country and the commute to jobs in greater Sacramento was reasonable. And so, from the late eighties on, these counties along the foothill front of the Sierra Nevada were among the fastest-growing in the state.

Today, if you drive up into these foothills and allow yourself to wander, you will end up on dusty roads off other unmarked roads, which are in turn off other roads. At the end of each of them sits a relatively new house with no economic relationship, as a ranch house or a miner's cabin would have had, to the land around it. Everything that gets up there, from the next quart of milk to the next stick of lumber for a fence, arrives in an automobile, a pickup truck, or a sport-utility vehicle. It is a way of life unprecedented in history, and one so freshly arrived in these hills that some of its attractiveness may be residual from the activities of previous occupants—such as the vigilant extermination of predators carried out by cattlemen and by government predator-control hunters in their stead.

***

On the morning of April 24, the second day of the search, four young men, long-distance runners and acquaintances of Barbara Schoener, went out to look for her. At about 7:15
A.M.
they found her water bottle along Ball Bearing Trail. Nearby they saw signs of a struggle in the steep duff below the trail. They followed these marks just far enough to see Barbara Schoener's feet sticking out of a pile of sticks and forest litter farther into the draw. They ran back to the trailhead and reported that they had found her, dead.

I made arrangements with one of the sheriff-coroner's deputies to meet for a death scene investigation later in the day, upon the arrival of a forensics specialist from the Department of Justice. It was either a wildlife killing or a homicide, he said. Hard to say right now.

Around four in the afternoon I drove through Auburn Lake Trails to the edge of the canyon. There I met the sheriff's deputies and the forensic technician, a cheerful woman named Faye wearing a blue jumpsuit. Hands were shaken, introductions made, and outcomes of other recent investigations asked about as we loaded cameras, equipment, and body bag into backpacks.

We started up the trail at the opposite end from where Barbara Schoener had entered. We were at most about half a mile from the nearest house, a conventional tract home with a two-car garage on a neat asphalt cul-de-sac, sitting in the middle of the grass and trees as if it had dropped from the sky. The switchbacks we walked up in the first one hundred feet of the trail were brand-new work. Being killed by an animal on this trail would have been unlikely thirty years before. The trail hadn't existed then, and neither had the road to the trailhead, nor the house.

We came to a place where the path traversed a hillside, falling off steeply to the left in the shade of oaks and firs. Some horses with orange search and rescue equipment hanging from their saddles stood in the trail, tied up to trees. Just beyond them, we ducked under a barrier of police crime-scene ribbon. Three sheriff's search and rescue volunteers were setting up fixed ropes down the steep hillside to assist us in getting the body out. They spoke to one another in low, funereal tones. I nodded a greeting to each of them as we passed, and they nodded back grimly.

About three hundred feet farther, the trail curved out from under the trees onto a rocky ridge surrounded by manzanita bushes that provided cover close to the path for anything that would have wanted it. One of the sheriff-coroner's deputies pointed outa divot of moss loosened from the bank uphill of the trail.

As we reconstructed it, the cougar had been sitting in the brush, maybe hungry, lying in wait for the next animal to come along the path. That happened to be a runner, a woman. The animal sprang down the bank, leaving the divot as it launched. It hit Barbara Schoener from above and behind. She staggered into the soft duff downhill of the trail, where her feet left two unmistakably deep impressions; she was heavy with the weight of both of them, struggling to remain standing. She went down against a fallen fir sapling that lay across the slope below the trail. There had been a struggle: branches were broken off the dead tree, and a dark stain on the soil smelled a way you don't forget. She stood up again and staggered downhill over the tree. There were a couple of more footprints in the duff. Just below and to the left of these, at the base of a Douglas fir sapling, I found one of Barbara Schoener's cotton gloves soaked red with blood and a Red Delicious apple with her dainty bites around its circumference.

From where these things lay, scuff marks led down to the bottom of the steeper part of the slope below the trail, maybe one hundred feet. There the dragging started, leaving a furrow in the ferns just as wide as a small woman's body, which continued another one hundred feet to where we found her.

Once, years before, as a boy hiking alone in the forests near my home, I had stumbled on a mountain lion kill, a deer, dragged into a cool canyon and covered with sticks so the cat could come back later to eat more. Nothing was scattered around; there was a kind of fastidiousness to it. I recognized it immediately when I saw Barbara Schoener.

***

The legislative history of cougars in California reflects the change in attitudes toward predators with the growth of an environmental ethic in the 1960s and 1970s, and the changing demographics of the state's electorate from rural-agricultural to primarily urban-suburban. Increased protection for mountain lions would probably not have occurred had the legislature continued to reflect the wishes of any sizable constituency who had their next mortgage payment tied up in a flock of stupid and defenseless sheep standing around at night in a remote mountain meadow.

Up until 1963, if you saw a lion, you could shoot it and collect the bounty from the state government: $50 for a female and $60 for a male. This reward was sometimes enhanced by counties.

There may have been only two thousand lions left in the state by midcentury. After 1963 the bounty was removed and the cougar was classified as a nongame mammal. In 1969 California reclassified the mountain lion as a game mammal, and for two years permits were issued to hunt it for sport. In 1972, as younger wildlife managers brought an appreciation for the role of predators in healthy ecosystems to their work and as concern grew for the shrinking populations of cougars, lions were entirely protected from hunting, except as necessary to protect lives and property. The shape of this protection has not changed appreciably to the present day. It has always been possible to get a depredation permit to kill one or several lions if they threaten people or livestock. Troublesome lions are generally exterminated by the ranchers who apply for the permits, by trappers from a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture calling itself, somewhat euphemistically, Wildlife Services, or by wardens from the state's Department of Fish and Game.

In 1990 California's voters passed a law known as Proposition 117, confirming their preference that the cougar not be hunted. The new law also created a habitat conservation fund for the purchase of wildland areas that cougars inhabited. Since much, maybe most, of California is cougar habitat, this provided acquisition money for parks and reserves that in practice protect all kinds of other wildlife that happen to inhabit them.

But critics of the cougar's protected status say that under the current regime, the state Department of Fish and Game has not been allowed to manage the overall population growth of cougars by opening a hunting season. They say the cougar population is expanding out of control. They point out—and most biologists agree with this point—that the pattern of habitat utilization by cougars involves the ejection of younger animals from more desirable remote country already occupied by dominant older animals into marginal areas along the suburban edges of wildlands. This, say the lion's critics, will increasingly bring young cougars into contact with people in the suburbs, and before long they will be experimenting with stealing children from their bicycles. That's hysteria, say the cougar's supporters.

Our retribution for the death of Barbara Schoener was swift. When I returned at seven in the evening from picking up the body, I notified the Department of Fish and Game's dispatch office that I believed I had just investigated the first killing of a human being by a mountain lion in the state in the twentieth century. Fish and Game notified the U.S. Department of Agriculture trappers, and the following morning I returned to the scene with two trappers and three Fish and Game wardens to begin the hunt.

Lions are hunted either by staking out a captive farm animal as bait and hiding nearby or by running them down with specially trained dogs. In the latter process, a houndsman will drive a rural road with the lead dog standing on top of his specially built truck until the dog, crossing a scent on the wind, gives voice. Then the trapper lets the rest of the dogs out of their cages in the back of the truck and puts them on the chase. A single dog is no match for a lion, but lions are scared by a pack. A lion will climb to a high spot, a cliff or a tree, and the dogs will keep the animal there and howl at it until the hunter catches up. Then it's like killing fish in a barrel, if you have a rifle or pistol.

That's basically how it was done this time. After eight days of tracking and dog work, the Department of Agriculture's hunters picked up the lion's scent when it came back to the scene of the kill, most likely to feed again. The chase was short, and the cougar was treed and shot a half-mile away, on the other side of Maine Bar Creek.

The dead lion was an eighty-three-pound female. Barbara Schoener outweighed her by about twenty pounds. The lion's udders were full, which meant she had a cub. Over the next couple of days the trappers went back out and found a kitten, which was displayed for the news cameras and then turned over to a zoo.

A few weeks later I sat in a lecture theater at the University of California Medical School at Davis, among newspaper and television reporters, state officials, and representatives from animal rights organizations. A procession of experts in forensic fields took the stage and described how they had identified the dead cougar as the one that had killed Barbara Schoener. A forensic odontologist had matched the animal's teeth with impressions in Barbara Schoener's crushed skull. Experts in DNA typing had swabbed the folds of skin into which the animal's claws retract (as a housecat's do) and located human DNA—not just any human DNA but of the same type as Barbara Schoener's. They had killed the right lion.

It did not stop there.

During that same year, at another California state park hundreds of miles to the south, just north of the Mexican border, there had been a series of disturbing encounters and close calls between lions and hikers. One ought to be cautious about drawing conclusions, yet there are some resemblances between the places: Like Auburn, Cuyamaca Rancho State Park had for many years been working land, a cattle ranch, before it was deeded to the state park system. And like El Dorado, the brushy hills of San Diego County had seen a massive invasion by housing tracts.

At Cuyamaca in December 1994, within eight months of California's first such modern-day fatality, fifty-six-year-old Iris Kenna was dragged off a fire road and mauled to death while hiking alone near a popular campground. It would be nearly a decade before another death, that of a thirty-five-year-old mountain biker, Mark Reynolds, who was attacked and killed while riding in the hills of Orange County in January 2004. At this writing, there have been eleven incidents in which lions attacked people in California since 1890. Three involved two victims each. Eight have occurred since 1986. Four people died from their injuries, and in 1909 two more died from rabies they contracted after a lion attacked but did not kill them.

The overwhelming majority of the roughly 230,000 Californians who die each year succumb to disease. Those who die from physical trauma do so principally as a result of their own actions or those of other people, not the actions of animals. In 1994, the year in which two women in the state were killed by mountain lions, there were 3,821 homicides and 4,212 traffic fatalities in California.

Nevertheless, after the 1994 killings, an angry "eye for an eye" sentiment prevailed among conservatives in the state legislature. Several bills to reinstate sport hunting of lions with dogs were introduced, supported and sponsored by the huntsmen's clubs. An initiative statute was prepared for the March 1996 primary election to repeal the protection mountain lions had enjoyed from hunting and to assign Fish and Game to manage and control the cougar population. The voters roundly defeated it. Urban and suburban people in California like their wildlife. Most of them have never even seen a lion, and many would like to see one, under the right circumstances.

I have seen only three cougars in my life, twenty-one years of which I spent working as a ranger in lion habitat. One of them ran across Foresthill Road in front of my Jeep about two miles as the crow flies from where Barbara Schoener was killed. I patrolled these roads in Jeeps, the trails on foot, and the rivers in boats for eight more years without seeing another. But I'd wager they've seen me, often. Remaining concealed is what mountain lions do for a living: They hunt as housecats do, hiding or quietly stalking until they pounce.