Track of the Cat: Author Bob Butz went in Search of the Eastern Puma

March 9, 2005

There‘s nothing like a good mystery, and for outdoor writer Bob Butz, that means a plot with a wild side.
Butz, 33, is a resident of Lake Ann who’s written for numerous magazines, including “Sports Afield,” “National Wildlife” and “Traverse.” A native of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he made a name for himself as an outdoor writer when he moved to Northern Michigan in the mid-’90s to write for two specialty publications, “Pointing Dog Journal” and “Retriever Dog Journal,” published by Village Press. He calls it writing for the “hook and bullet scene” of fishing and hunting magazines.
Back in 2001, Butz read a newspaper article about a group who was trying to prove the existence of cougars in Michigan despite a longstanding belief that the big cats had been gone from the eastern United States for decades.
“I’m always looking for story ideas and I thought I could sell that one,” he recalls. “So I pitched a piece for the ‘New York Times’ and did a little story.”
Three days later, he got a call from a member of the Michigan Wildlife Conservancy which claimed that there were cougar tracks and scat at the Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore, just a few miles from Butz’s home. Butz went to the scene and sure enough, there were tracks identical to those of a cougar. “So I got personally involved in this thing from the get-go.”

DETECTIVE STORY
Cougar, mountain lion, catamount, puma, panther -- they’re all terms for Felis concolor, a long-tailed cat reaching 5-8 feet in length which once ranged all over the country before being eradicated by hunters, farmers and state bounties.
Once Butz got involved in the story, he found conservation groups all over the eastern U.S. insisting that stories of the nonexistent cougar were wrong.
“There was all this evidence of the puma’s return and all of these quirky people out there who were involved in the controversy; it got to be almost like a detective story,” he says.
That detective story is detailed in his new book, “Beast of Never, Cat of God” (Lyons Press), which tracks the controversy and characters behind what has become a hunt for hard evidence of the cougar’s return.
It often seems that the public is more willing to believe in the return of the cougar than are conservation officers. Despite numerous photos, tracks and sightings, Butz notes that many wildlife officials and game departments across the country dismiss the notion that native populations of pumas are breeding and reclaiming their old turf.
Often, cougar sightings are dismissed by conservation officers as being merely released feral pets or the misidentification of other animals, Butz says.
And in Michigan, there’s been frustration among cougar watchers over the lack of action on the cougar’s behalf by the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR).

DNR INACTION
Lack of initiative by the DNR is a bad thing for cougars if the species is trying to re-establish a native population.
“Three years have gone by since news of the cougars first came out, yet nothing has come of it from the DNR despite hundreds of articles on the subject,” Butz says.
“The feds mandate that the DNR should be looking for cougars, which are an endangered species,” he adds. “There are blanket protections for all endangered species, and the State could get out and look into this matter, but they’re not doing it. The DNR has to actively return cougars to the State of Michigan.”
Specifically, Butz feels that the DNR should get involved in the restoration, protection and propagation of Michigan’s cougar population, which presently has a ghostlike presence.
Another neglected returnee to Michigan’s wilds is the wolf.
“Like the wolf, there’s a lot of distrust and animosity towards the DNR among people who’d like to see more done for the animals,” Butz says. “The State has a wait-and-see approach when it comes to things like cougars and wolves. People have seen wolves in Michigan since 1997, but nothing has been done for them.
“The State doesn’t do anything until an animal turns up dead, which is incongruous to protecting endangered species. It’s not proactive,” Butz adds, referring to a wolf killed near Cheboygan in 2003.

URBAN LEGENDS
Much of “Beast of Never, Cat of God” tells the story of Patrick Rusz, “an anonymous PhD working on a shoestring for a little Lansing-based wildlife conservancy that likewise nobody had ever heard of.”
Rusz’s investigation of dozens of sightings earned him a reputation as the man who rediscovered a lost species. He was, in fact, the person who led Butz to his first look at cougar tracks and scat in the Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore.
In the book, Rusz pursues cougar sightings to the point of tracking down deer carcasses for evidence, such as one of three found on a beach at Seul Choix:
“The kill he described as oddly neat and lacking the frenzied mess of coyote or wolf pack attack,” Butz writes. “To him (Rusz), everything suggested a textbook puma kill: the concealed carcass; the toothy punctures two inches apart on the back of the deer’s broken neck; the neat shearing of the rib cage; the guts (minus organ meat) pulled neatly out of the deer’s chest cavity and moved off to the side.”
Inevitably, Rusz’s passion for tracking down cougars also earns him a quirky reputation from skeptics, some of whom call him “Professor Plop” or the “Sultan of Squat,” in reference to his habit of poking at puma poop.
Butz too is skeptical of the claims of some cougar watchers, noting that many tales appear to be nothing more than urban legends. One recurring story he hears is that of a big cat hit by a car and spirited away by the DNR, never to be seen again. Unfortunately, there’s never a concrete witness or evidence to verify such stories, leaving one to speculate whether that may be why the DNR tends to be ambivalent about cougars.

WELL-WRITTEN
Nonetheless, the book does an exceptional job of capturing Michigan’s cougar watchers caught up in their passions, and gives Patrick Rusz and the Michigan Wildlife Conservancy their due for opening the door on a mystery which deserves further investigation.
And for those who love outdoor writing, Butz’s book is a cut above the usual deadly dull and placid “up-in-Michigan” Hemingway rip-offs of the hunting and fishing scene. The people he writes about are well-grounded in the detritus of places like Benzie County’s backroads or the beaches overlooking the swells of the U.P. And Butz ‘keeps it real’ in terms of describing his own sensations while on the track of the cat, as well as those of his companions, who run the spectrum from “legit to whack-a-do.”
There’s also solid reporting in the book on the state of wildlife in Michigan, as well as that of the cougar’s spread throughout the eastern U.S. Additionally, Butz offers a history of predators in Michigan and why people tend to fear them needlessly. One of his tid-bits is that you’re far more likely to be killed by a whitetail deer crashing through your car window than you ever are by a hungry mountain lion.
Although the book just came out, Butz says he’s looking more towards writing a novel than he is in promoting it on the book tour circuit.
“The book left me very cynical in the end,” he says. “It’s hard to immerse yourself in a culture which takes all you have in pursuit of the subject. By the time you’re done with it, you’re done.”