Doug, my neighbor, shot a cougar this summer. His little girl fell off her bike while crossing the bridge at the bottom of the dirt path they call a driveway. Fortunately, this time her big brother stopped for her to get up. "Come on!" he started to say, but halted at the sight of a strapping young male cougar quietly stalking his sister. The girl, still on her hands and knees, was engaged in a staring contest with the cat -- him with a hunter's calculation, her with pure terror. Everyone -- sister, brother, and cat -- knew what might happen next. They say cougars kill their prey by jumping on an animal's back, grabbing the back of its neck, and snapping it. If a cougar could snap the neck of a 200-pound deer, it could do that to a 50-pound little girl.

The next few minutes must have lasted a lifetime. The boy and girl started a slow retreat and the family's dog put up a loud defense until Doug's wife joined the scene to distract the cougar. The kids suppressed the urge to flee and slowly made it to the house to alert Doug. "Dad! A cougar's got Mom cornered out front!" When Doug came upon the scene with his loaded gun, the cat was circling within 10 feet of his wife. He fired over the cat's head and the cat came toward him. He lowered his sight and hit it in the chest. Only then did the cougar jump into the woods. Doug spent days walking the nearby ridges looking for evidence of the injured cat, and supposedly so did someone from the state department of wildlife. But no one found a trace. The kids, meanwhile, stayed inside for a few days.

It is stories like this that make me pause when I hear noises in the trees above me. They make me fear for my two daughters when they travel down to the river or up the ridge behind our house. They reinforce my respect for wilderness. For as beautiful as it is, wilderness is not primarily beauty. It is not pristine or comfortable. It is mostly raw and powerful, like a cougar. It is objective. Wilderness is about life and death, but its forces do not care about any one creature's life or death. These forces -- wind, rain, rocks, animals, trees -- will kill a human, or a cougar for that matter, that is unskilled or unlucky enough to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

It is for this reason that I most appreciate cougars. They help me see real wilderness, and through the lie of pretty calendar pictures. Those pictures capture only one of the senses that come alive in such places. They do not capture the cold breeze on your face, the trickling sound of nearby water, or the pungent odors of fresh blooms or decaying leaves. But mostly, pretty pictures do not reflect the fear triggered by wild places. The fear of being lost, of being alone or uncomfortable. The fear of approaching darkness and big animals. The fear of encountering the unexpected and being totally unprepared. The fear of all that is not human.

I met my first cougar yesterday. I was bombing down a deserted logging road on my bicycle when a cat appeared on the road far ahead. It swung its long tail and struck a classic cat pose, displaying its profile and checking me out as I approached silently in front of my trailing dust cloud. I hit the brakes, but by the time I stopped the cougar had bounded across the road into the nearby brush. It all happened so fast. Various images flooded my mind as I then approached the spot where the cat disappeared. Was the cat hunting? Why was it out in the middle of the day? Was it watching me from behind the bushes? Was it the same one Doug had winged with a bullet? That thought scared me. I noticed my heart racing even as my fascination urged me to wait for the cougar to reappear. I was driven to explore but was terrified at the thought of sticking around.

I now realize that my response in that moment was the same as my attitude toward wilderness in general. I long to be a part of it even as I seek to flee to safety and comfort.

Aldo Leopold, the great ecologist, spent much of his early career with the Forest Service killing cougars in the American southwest. He apparently was good at his job but grew to despise it. Cougars, he concluded, are part of a working and greater whole. Viewed this way, it made no sense to eliminate them. The whole idea that cougars are more or less desirable than any other creature is synthetic. "When we attempt to say that an animal is 'useful,' 'ugly,' or 'cruel,'" he told a college class, "we are failing to see it as part of the land. We do not make the same error of calling a carburetor 'greedy.' We see it as part of a functioning motor."

I agree with Leopold. But not all creatures are equal in their ability to inspire fascination and fear. The Cougar is different from me. It is totally Other.