In 1980, we lived in a small trailer park just outside a gold mine construction job...70 miles outside of Ely, Nevada.
A week or so before Christmas, my wife took my two small kids, (daughter was 1-1/2, son was almost 5) out walking looking for a tree to cut for Christmas.
She got almost a mile away from our camp and got nervous. She said she could hear a weird sound...and said it felt like she was being watched...so, she and the two kids trudged their way through the snow back to the camp...and said she KNEW she was being followed. She could hear noises, and continued to feel that she was being watched.
The next day, my father-in-law & I backtracked her steps, and sure enough...at some points, there were cougar tracks within 10-15 feet of theirs...and they had followed her and the kids for over half a mile...never getting TOO close, but never getting very far away.
One of the old-timers on the mine job had worked and hunted there for years, and told us that there were at least two adult male cougars in that part of the valley. They were seen from time to time, and folks found their deer kills every hunting season.
The footprints were pretty big, (snow prints are usually larger than life) and they indicated that the cat, had it really wanted to, could have taken any/all of them at its leisure. 😱
The camp was so far out in the boonies that there was only one telephone within about 20 miles...and we had herds of wild mustangs range through the camp several times per year...plus deer on a regular basis.
