Being Face To Face With A Big Cougar Limits Your Options

(From Replay, December 5, 1997): The last paragraph of Rich Landers’ Thursday column was inadvertently left off leaving the impression that state wildlife agent Ted Holden didn’t think novice hunter Tammy Worley made the right decision in shooting a big cougar. Here is what followed: Asked, then, what he would have done in the same situation, Holden said, “I’d have shot it in a heartbeat.”

Tammy Worley, a novice nimrod, took a stand for deer two weeks ago only to find herself being the hunted.

Worley, 37, was out with her husband, Dennis, on the last afternoon of the whitetail season. They were hunting from a relative’s home near Sacheen Lake.

“I’m an animal lover who never really considered hurting Bambis or anything else,” she said. “But I have four kids. Hunting is a matter of putting meat on the table at our house. So I said I’d give it a try.”

She learned about buck fever last year when she bagged her first deer. This season, she finally drummed up the courage to try hunting again.

While her husband ventured farther into the woods, Tammy decided to play it safe and stay within sight of the cabin.

“I’m new at this,” she said. “No way was I going to get more than a hundred yards from the house.”

Besides, she hadn’t planned to go hunting. “I was wearing perfume and makeup because I had going shopping in Spokane,” she said.

Tammy had been watching and enjoying the quiet of the woods for nearly an hour when she caught movement in her peripheral vision. It wasn’t a deer.

“I knew what it was,” she said. “But no one had ever told me what to do if I saw a cougar. I’d never thought to ask about anything but bears.”

She sat still, wondered whether she should be yelling or running. She thought of the kids she’d seen playing near the houses an hour earlier.

“I heard this click and chattering noise,” she said. “Then it was quiet. If the cat had kept going, I would have seen it reappear near the creek.

“But it disappeared.”

At this point in re-living the experience, Worley’s voice leaps an octave and words fly far faster than a mortal can type.

“I sat another minute, but something told me to stand and see where the cat was,” she said. “I was way too scared to pee my pants.

“I turned to the right and there he was, I mean right there! I’ve had buck fever before, but in this case I don’t remember my heart pounding.”

She didn’t have time.

The cougar was crouched within spitting distance, its eyes locked like radar on hers.

Worley instinctively twisted her 8mm rifle and shot from the hip.

“I hit it in the face and it jumped across the creek and fell under a tree,” she said. “That’s when I lost it.”

She shot again and screamed for her husband.

“It probably only took him five minutes to get there, but I was bawling and it seemed like an hour,” she said. “It was almost dark.”

She said her husband fired the shot that finally killed the cat.

Dennis probably had envisioned dragging a buck back to the cabin that evening. Instead, he had to drag his wife.

“My legs went limp and I dropped to my knees,” Tammy said. “He took my gun and had to pull me.”

After calling Ted Holden, state wildlife agent, the hunters went to the scene with a tape measure. The cat was 30 feet away when Tammy first saw it passing by, chattering with a sound a cougar often makes when it’s cruising for scent.

The cougar was only seven feet from Tammy when she stood up and shot.

This is the story as Tammy tells it, and the wildlife agent found no evidence to question it. However, inquisitive minds might question why Dennis Worley would buy a $24 cougar tag on the last day of the deer hunting season, which happened to be the same day his wife encountered one of the largest cougars ever taken in the area.

The cougar was a monster adult tom, weighing 175 pounds. The skin, which they’re having tanned, measures 8 feet, 6 inches long from the nose to the tip of the tail.

Dennis was able to legally put his tag on the cat because he said he shot the bullet that finally killed it.

If Tammy’s self-defense shot had been lethal, the cat would have remained the property of the state.

Mike Whorton, regional wildlife enforcement agent, said there’s been a significant increase in the number of cougars killed the same day as the hunters purchased the tag this year. Perhaps that’s to be expected in the season after state voters decided to take wildlife management out of the hands of wildlife biologists.

Instead of a highly regulated permit system for hound hunting, cougar tags are now available to anyone.

Some hunters are reluctant to buy a $24 tag for the rare chance of coming across a cougar. Yet shooting a cougar when the opportunity arises is awfully tempting.

“There’s no doubt we have a large number of cougars,” Whorton said. “The number of complaints about cougar problems has gone sky high.”

To help control the numbers now that hound hunting has been banned, the state has proposed reducing the cougar fee to $5 with the intent of putting a cougar tag in the pocket of every big game hunter. That would reduce the chance of decent hunters being tempted to kill a cougar illegally.

But in the case of the Worleys, there’s no evidence that the chilling event didn’t happen just as Tammy describes it.

“The game warden said if I’d have ran, there’s a good chance I’d have triggered a chase,” she said.

The housewife said she had to take medication in order to sleep for several days after the incident.

“I told my husband I’m done hunting,” she said. “He says I should be thrilled by this once in a lifetime experience. My husband’s a logger, 6-foot-1 and 250 pounds. I’m 5-foot-3. I don’t want to sound mean, but I wish it had been him.”

Holden has a slightly different view of the event, based on his years of experience as a wildlife agent.

“My guess is that the cougar wasn’t going to attack; it was just curious,” he said. “A cougar could never grow that large by trying to sneak up on a deer like that. It would never succeed. Normally they get within a hundred feet of their prey; then they sprint. That’s the way they hunt.”

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