The Terrifying Story of a Killer Cougar in the Aftermath of California’s Mountain Lion Hunting Ban

The tracks were clear. The mountain lion was alerted to sounds near the stream. He trotted out of his lair and crouched at the edge of the bushes, his tail swishing a fan-shaped pattern in the sand. Forty feet away, the Small family—Don, 39, an optical engineer; his wife, Susan, 37; and their children, David, 9, and Laura, 5—were enjoying their hike in the 7,500-acre Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park, 60 miles southeast of Los Angeles in the Santa Ana Mountains.

The big cat returned unnoticed to his hideaway in the dense undergrowth, and Don Small hiked down the trail with David on that pleasant Palm Sunday afternoon, March 23, 1986. Susan Mattern-Small and little Laura decided to stay and search the quiet pool in the stream for tadpoles. The pool was eight to 10 feet deep and 15 to 20 feet across.

Again, the lion alerted—probably to Laura’s delighted squeals—and trotted to the edge of the dense clump of bushes. Another fan-shaped pattern was formed in the sand by the cat’s swishing tail. Susan and Laura were in the water. Once more, the cat returned to his lair.

The third time the lion came out and made a pattern with its tail, Laura had just stepped out of the water and placed her pail next to her shoes on the sand. Unhurriedly, the cat rose and moved toward Laura. Susan, about six feet from her daughter, was looking upstream, but she saw movement out of the corner of her eye and thought that it was a trotting dog. Wondering why anyone would let a dog that big run loose, she turned to look and saw the lion with Laura’s head in its mouth. In a cat-quick turn, the cougar vanished.

The cat had taken the girl in no more than three seconds, and it took another second for Susan’s mind to adjust from the fun of the day to horrible reality. Then she realized that the mountain lion, after entering the bushes, could have gone in any direction on her side of the pool and stream, and that it intended to kill and eat her daughter. Susan screamed in terror.

Don Small heard the screams. For a moment before recognizing his wife’s voice, he thought that it was someone who was joking. Then he raced back down the trail.

“Don,” Susan sobbed, “a mountain lion has Laura, and I don’t know where it went!”

Don tried to make an instant judgment on which way the lion might have gone. The horrifying truth was that if he was wrong, and if the lion was leaving the area with Laura, the couple would never see their daughter again. The dense bushes lay between a bluff and the stream. The terrain downstream appeared so steep and rugged that Don thought even a lion would not be able to carry off a child there. He raced upstream, hoping to cut off the lion.

About 200 yards away, perhaps a little farther, Gregory Ysais, a 36-year-old electronics technician from San Juan Capistrano, also heard the screams, and he also thought that teenagers were joking. But he stopped and glanced at his wife, Andrea, and his 11-year-old daughter, Jessica. He listened more carefully. There was real terror in that voice. Greg ran toward the screams, leaving a very frightened wife behind. Was it a gang? A sniper? What was her husband running to? And Andrea couldn’t follow, because of Jessica.

Another young couple ran past Andrea; they were yelling, “Get a knife! Get a gun! Get help!” They didn’t say why. They had been closer to the stream and had seen Mrs. Small, but they were too intent to stop.

Susan Small was in shock. She put on her shoes. She picked up her camera. She wandered aimlessly for a minute, not knowing what else to do. And then Susan heard a moaning call. She ran toward the sound. Laura was in the middle of a dense clump of brush. Susan couldn’t get through. She ran around to the other side to find an opening. There was none. Panic-stricken, she ran back. Then she saw the lion. It had Laura by the neck. Susan screamed and screamed and screamed.

Don turned back toward the renewed screams. Gregory Ysais arrived just as the screams ended. He had no idea why the woman was screaming.

Somehow, Susan made him understand that a lion had dragged her child into those bushes. Greg had hunted as a boy, before urban sprawl had ruined his favorite haunts. He glanced at the bushes and instantly saw the drag-trail through the leaves. He ducked low and crashed through. Yard-high prickly pear cactus blocked him. He tried to jump over the cactus and broke through it with his legs. He landed slightly more than an arm’s length from the lion.

The young tom was sitting up, gripping Laura by the neck. The young girl was still squirming and groaning. Greg broke a limb from a dead tree on his left. It wasn’t substantial. The lion was in a den-like pocket under the overhanging limbs of the thick brush, so there was no room to swing the limb. Laura’s head concealed and screened most of the lion’s face. Greg yelled, brandished the limb threateningly, and poked it at the big cat’s eyes.

The cougar swatted at the limb with one paw. Greg dodged the swats and kept poking at the eyes and yelling. To the lion, Greg must have seemed like a larger animal that was trying to steal his prey. He hung on to Laura’s neck and defended himself vigorously with one paw.

Finally, Greg intimidated the cougar so much that it stood up. Perhaps the cat felt cornered in that pocket of underbrush because he could only move to one side or the other, not back. And perhaps the cat also heard Don Small running toward him through the bushes. The lion started to turn sideways as if to leave with Laura. Greg’s yelling and poking became more frantic. In the middle of the turn, probably to defend himself better against Greg, the lion dropped Laura.

Ignoring the fact that the now unencumbered lion could easily attack him, Greg crowded the cougar, poking at the animal’s side. The cat moved a couple of steps sideways, and Ysais jumped between the lion and Laura. Now he was closer to the cat.

Greg had no time to think; he could only act. But now the action accelerated so much that, as often happens in such cases, Greg’s memory failed to record details. But, again, everything that happened was clearly printed in the sand and soil. Repeatedly, the cougar moved off a step or two, only to whirl back at Ysais threateningly and then skid to a stop just short of an attack.

Greg’s eyes never left the lion’s. This was not a conscious tactic. It was simply defensive awareness, much like a boxer’s. To all animals, including predators, however, an unfaltering stare comes only from a confident killer about to attack its victim. The cougar must have read more aggression in Greg’s eyes than Greg felt. Little by little, the whirling rushes the lion made at Ysais fell shorter and shorter, until Greg had the safety of several feet. He yelled.

Susan’s mind had blacked out almost completely when Greg arrived on the scene. She remembers nothing from that moment until he yelled at her, but those words are clearly burned in her memory: “Pick up your baby and get out of here!”

Mrs. Small ran through the cactus and grabbed little Laura. The child looked dead. She wasn’t struggling anymore. Her scalp was in shreds, and her head was covered with blood from 50 cuts and punctures in her face and scalp.

At that instant, Don Small came crashing through the bushes, and the lion gave up. He couldn’t defend his kill against three humans. “Get her to the clearing,” Greg yelled as the cougar ran into the bushes.

Greg ran ahead, but the Smalls didn’t stop at the clearing. If there were any life left in Laura, only quick action could save her. They ran to a dirt road and then toward the nearest road open to vehicles. At first, Susan carried the girl, then Don, and both continuously cried out for others to get help. “There’s a mountain lion,” they yelled. The park was crowded with 250 people that day.

Greg also encountered other people who offered to run ahead. Exhausted and slowing down, he let them do it.

One man came back to meet the Smalls, and he carried Laura the last 100 yards to the road, where a ranger truck was already waiting. At the visitors’ center, they learned that although the regional trauma center was just 20 minutes away by ambulance, there was a rodeo at San Juan Capistrano. They could easily become entangled in the traffic. A helicopter could get them to Mission Community Hospital in Mission Viejo in only three minutes, but no helicopters were available. Finally, an Orange County Sheriff’s Department helicopter was brought in. Laura’s parents followed in a police car.

In the helicopter, Laura regained consciousness enough to ask whether her mother and father were safe. Hearing her mother’s screams had caused her to fear that something had happened to them, too. This occurred about one hour after the 1:20 p.m. attack. By 5:30, Laura was in surgery, where doctors worked for 13 hours. Besides the deep lacerations, there were five punctures through Laura’s skull, one-half of the circumference of her right eye was damaged, and a bone fragment against her brain paralyzed her right side.

Joel Shows, a Louisiana-born federal trapper for almost 20 years, was called from his home near San Bernardino to help catch the lion. In addition to his job with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (he has since been transferred to the U.S. Department of Agriculture), Shows maintains a pack of his own strain of treeing Walker hounds that he uses to sport-hunt bobcats. Although there hadn’t been an open season on lions in California since 1972, Joel was occasionally asked to use his hounds to kill a cougar on a state depredation permit.

Shows arrived at 9:30 p.m. “The tracks were so clear that it was like standing there and watching it happen,” Joel said. “When I saw those three places where the lion had lain swishing its tail, I thought at first that there was a bunch of lions. Then I realized that the same cat had made all of the signs and tracks. I was terribly afraid that the little girl wouldn’t live. There was a big circle of blood soaked 1½ inches into the sand in the place where the lion had dragged her. Blood had splattered up onto the leaves of the bushes. It got up there when the lion shook her as a dog shakes a rabbit.”

Joel tried to start his hounds on the lion’s trail, but they couldn’t smell it anywhere except in that pocket in the bushes.

The lion had returned shortly after Ysais drove him off. Not long after the attack, a man with a gun (illegal in the park) was seen pointing it into the bushes. He said: “A lion went in there. It was drinking from the stream. It walked right past me.”

That prompted the dispatch of a helicopter to search the area for the lion. The circling helicopter probably drove the cat into another part of its territory.

“We tried until 2 a.m. to get the hounds on a track,” Joel told me, “but too many people had left scent around the area. By the time we left, the people, including myself, and my eight hounds had obliterated nearly all of the tracks.”

Early the next morning, Shows joined men from the Orange County Park Service, Orange County Animal Control, and the California Department of Fish and Game to resume the hunt. Before the attack, park rangers had been seeing numerous lion tracks on the big ridge above the attack site. Assuming that the lion had moved into that part of his home territory, the hunters decided to free the hounds there. No fresh tracks were found, however. Joel twice stopped his hounds from running bobcats, but nothing promising occurred until two animal-control men delivered a rumor that a lion had been seen crossing the lower road.

Joel asked where and took his hounds for a look, but found no tracks. This brought him close to the attack site, however, so he decided to have another look. Sure enough, the lion had returned! Tracks matching those under the bushes were freshly printed right where the lion had grabbed little Laura.

It was then 7:30 a.m. The tracks were not very fresh, and the hounds couldn’t carry the trail, but Shows wasn’t worried. His hounds drift along a cold track instead of following it print by print. One hound will bark its discovery of slight scent, and then the others will race in to help. If they can’t run the track, they fan out again until another hound smells something. In this way, the hounds can roll along rapidly on a very cold trail. The lion’s scent led the pack around the basin, in and out of the canyon, and up and down the ridge.

Hounds quickly get out of hearing in canyons and behind ridges, so Joel was driven around to the top of the mountain, where he could hear the chase better. An hour later, Shows heard his pack barking treed, and he rushed down to the dogs. The lion was in a tree, but Shows was unarmed and couldn’t kill it. The decision had been made to tranquilize the cougar, not with the intention of releasing a killer cat in another area but so that it could be studied alive in an effort to learn why it had attacked.

All the while Joel Shows called for someone to bring the tranquilizer gun, the lion exhibited no signs of nervousness. Normally, too much yelling will make a cougar jump out of a tree. The cat showed fear only when the dogs moved.

Capt. Rod Shackelford of the department of fish and game heard Joel and the hounds, but it took another hour before he could round up the necessary men and equipment. The cat remained calm.

Finally, the tranquilizer gun was loaded by one of the animal-control people, and Joel tied back his hounds so they would be safely out of the cat’s reach. A warden shot the animal in the shoulder. The cougar bit at the dart but couldn’t reach it. Then the cat bailed out of the tree, jumped up another, dropped out of that one, and went up a third. There the tom lost his footing, fell, and vanished in the bushes.

Joel had been told that the lion would be unconscious in five minutes. He waited six minutes before releasing his hounds to find the animal. By the time the hounds had lined out on the track, eight to 10 minutes had elapsed.

The chase led out of the canyon, over a ridge, and across a big brushy flat. Joel ran behind the pack as hard as he could go, knowing that a properly tranquilized lion shouldn’t be traveling that far.

Shows heard his hounds catch the lion. The cougar roared as loudly as the dogs barked. When Shows caught up, they were fighting in thick brush. The cat’s hindquarters would go out from under him when he tried to whirl around at a dog attacking his rear. Otherwise, the cougar gave no indication of being tranquilized. His forward moves were normal. The hounds were getting braver and braver now that Shows had arrived.

That’s when Joel realized that for a second time, he had run off unarmed and had left everyone else behind. Joel yelled for someone with a gun. No one answered. Still yelling, Joel looked for a club, dreading the cry of a dying hound that he knew would come soon if he didn’t do something. Ordinarily, arthritis in his fingers makes it impossible for Joel to break a pencil, but somehow he broke off a green limb. He started wading into the bushes just as one of the wardens answered his calls. Joel shouted: “You got a gun?” “Yes!”

Shows dropped his club and ran to meet the warden, who handed him what he wanted least—the tranquilizer gun that had underdosed the lion.

“Oh, hell! That cat will kill some of my dogs!” he shouted.

“Well, I’ve got a pistol, too,” the warden said.

Joel took the .38 Special revolver and forced his way through the almost impenetrable bushes to within arm’s reach of the lion. Straight down was the only way to shoot without hitting a hound. Shows stuck out his arm, pointed the barrel down, and fired. The sound of the .38 made the hounds all the braver, but the lion, although struck in the shoulder, gave no signs of being hit. Quickly, Joel fired again, and the cougar dropped instantly with a broken neck.

The lion was a young tom, 18 to 24 months old, and weighed 92 pounds. He was thin, but only as young animals are thin before they fill out. An autopsy revealed no health problems that would have forced a lion to seek easier prey. In addition, Joel Shows found two deer kills in this animal’s territory, so lack of food was not a compelling reason for attacking a human being. Nor was the cougar a released pet that had lost its fear of humans. He had not been declawed or defanged. He had none of the tooth decay usually found in pet lions.

Concern arose over whether the right lion had been killed because no human hair was found in the intestines. But little Laura did not actually lose any of her scalp, even though it was badly shredded. The tracks at the attack site matched the cougar’s paws in size. But behavior is an even better indicator of an animal’s identity. The cat had returned to the attack site and to his lair, where the chase had begun, and until the very end he had demonstrated his lack of fear of humans, as do many animals that live in parks and other places where hunting has been forbidden for a long time. Sport hunting can be used to teach many animals, including mountain lions, to fear human beings and to stay away from them.

At this writing, little Laura Small is at home with her parents. Speech is returning. Control over her right side is slowly improving, but it’s uncertain whether she will ever have full use of her arm and hand. After four operations, she still has almost no sight in her injured eye. Doctors are watching the bone regrowth before deciding how to cover the five punctures in her skull. Laura may always have sight and motor problems, so a trust fund has been set up for those who want to help the child cope with her future. Hospital bills alone for the first week came to $40,000. 

Susan Small is both grateful and bitter—grateful because Laura is alive, and bitter because she believes that it never should have happened.

“Right now,” Susan told me with a sad smile, “Laura is experiencing the ‘princess syndrome.’ How can you get angry at the poor little girl who was attacked by the lion? But her real personality is unchanged, and she’s alive! And more and more I understand what Gregory Ysais did for us.”

Susan Small’s mood changes sharply, however, when she reflects on the lack of fear of humans that the lion exhibited. She blames that, in part, on California’s 14-year moratorium on lion hunting.

“When you put your finger on one part of a situation,” she said, “you’d better have a good sense of what will happen to the rest. The governor refused to continue the moratorium [on hunting cougars], but even so, the California Department of Fish and Game is insisting on more study before opening a season on lions.”

Two days after killing the Caspers Park lion, Joel Shows was called in to hunt another cougar that had attacked a dog at Idyllwild, California, and that was suspected of killing two others and injuring one more. The lion had walked beside the house and leaped at the dog on an outside flight of stairs. When it missed, the cat sank fangs and claws into a step, and then bounded to the top of the stairs, where it slammed into the door just as it caught the 80-pound Pit Bull/German Shepherd cross. The homeowner opened the door and saw the cat.

Show’s hounds treed the lion on a boulder 300 yards from the house. The cat had taken the partially eaten dog to the boulder.

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“The frightening part about this,” Joel Shows said, “is the number of children playing in the area. One boy, looking down at the rock where I killed the lion, said, ‘We were playing down there just yesterday! If this keeps up, someone is going to be killed, and you can bet it’s going to be a child.’”

Capt. Rod Shackelford, who was along on the Caspers Park hunt and under whose orders the lion was killed, believes that the department of fish and game will take the appropriate steps.

“Regulations for the 1986 season were already established before the attack occurred and before the governor declined to continue the moratorium,” Shackelford said. “The main reason for delay is the need to open a season in carefully planned zones that will best use as well as protect the resource. The department is asking for several months of study to avoid mistakes.

“We have also tranquilized and captured another lion and her cub in Caspers Park. These are not problem animals, so they’ll be released elsewhere, but this should help avoid future trouble in the park.”

This story was originally published in the December 1986 Issue of Outdoor Life.