Cougars, known in the Park as elsewhere through the West as "mountain lions," are plentiful, having increased in numbers of recent years.

Except in the neighborhood of the Gardiner River, that is within a few miles of Mammoth Hot Springs, I found them feeding on elk, which in the Park far outnumber all other game put together, being so numerous that the ravages of the cougars are of no real damage to the herds.

But in the neighborhood of the Mammoth Hot Springs the cougars are noxious because of the antelope, mountain sheep and deer which they kill; and the Superintendent has imported some hounds with which to hunt them.

On this first day of my visit to the Park I came across the carcasses of a deer and of an antelope which the cougars had killed.

On the great plains cougars rarely get antelope, but here the country is broken so that the big cats can make their stalks under favorable circumstances.

The others, including a bull, three cows and a score of yearlings, had been killed by cougars.

The cougars were preying on nothing but elk in the Yellowstone Valley, and kept hanging about the neighborhood of the big bands.

As the elk were evidently rather too numerous for the feed, I do not think the cougars were doing any damage.

"Either during the winter or early spring the sheep had been down in the timber on the east side of the ridge, as I found the remains of several, in the winter coat, that had been killed by cougars.

The last-mentioned Indian spoke of the lunxus or Indian devil, (which I take to be the cougar, and not the Gulo luscus,) as the only animal in Maine which man need fear; it would follow a man, and did not mind a fire.

Before starting on the trip itself, while travelling in the Argentine, I received certain pieces of first-hand information concerning the natural history of the jaguar, and of the cougar, or puma, which are worth recording.

One day Doctor Moreno handed me a copy of The Outlook containing my account of a cougar-hunt in Arizona, saying that he noticed that I had very little faith in cougars attacking men, although I had explicitly stated that such attacks sometimes occurred.

I told him, Yes, that I had found that the cougar was practically harmless to man, the undoubtedly authentic instances of attacks on men being so exceptional that they could in practice be wholly disregarded.

But there is one particular spot in southern Patagonia where cougars, to the doctor's own personal knowledge, have for years been dangerous foes of man.

These observations of Doctor Moreno have a peculiar value, because, as far as I know, they are the first trustworthy accounts of a cougar's having attacked man save under circumstances so exceptional as to make the attack signify little more than the similar exceptional instances of attack by various other species of wild animals that are not normally dangerous to man.

I tried it because I had found cougars such good eating; I have always regretted that in Africa I did not try lion's flesh, which I am sure must be excellent.

Jaguars also stalk and kill the deer; in this neighborhood they seemed to be less habitual deer-hunters than the cougars; whether this is generally the case I cannot say.

They also told us that the cougars had the same habits as the jaguars except that they did not prey on such big animals.

The cougars on this ranch never molested the foals, a fact which astonished me, as in the Rockies they are the worst enemies of foals.

One of the vagaries of the ultraconcealing-colorationists has been to uphold the (incidentally quite preposterous) theory that the tail of our deer is colored white beneath so as to harmonize with the sky and thereby mislead the cougar or wolf at the critical moment when it makes its spring; but this marsh-deer shows a black instead of a white flag, and yet has just as much need of protection from its enemies, the jaguar and the cougar.

We also saw the footprints of cougars and of the small-toothed, big, red wolf.

Cougars are the most inveterate enemies of these small South American deer, both those of the open grassy plain and those of the forest.

"Good!" said Cousin Benedict, who, by chance, was listening to the conversation: "if there are neither lions nor tigers in the New World, which is perfectly true, we at least encounter cougars and jaguars.

At the same time the herbs, roughly scattered, exhibited on the soil, a little marshy, prints of steps which could not be those of jaguars, or cougars.

"Emett, does he mean he saw a cougar or a track?" questioned Jones.