On March 23, 2024, while walking down a forest service road outside Georgetown, Calif., my nephews Taylen and Wyatt Brooks were attacked by a mountain lion.
Taylen, 21, and Wyatt, 18, grew up fully immersed in the outdoors, in a largely rural part of El Dorado County’s Sierra foothills, hunting deer and turkeys, quail and ducks, and fishing for bass and trout. On the afternoon of the attack, they had gone out in pursuit of shed deer antlers, a springtime ritual that resulted over the years in mountains of prongs and tines in the boys’ bedroom, garage and shed, each specimen meticulously labeled with the date and location of the find.
It was Wyatt who glimpsed the movement first, out of the corner of his eye. He was walking on the uphill side of the road, no more than five minutes out of the car, scanning the slope for the telltale jut of a fallen antler. When his head ratcheted around to take in the scene, a young male lion came into view no more than 10 yards away, walking almost casually in their direction.
Taylen, just behind his brother and off to the side, was scanning the lower slope for antlers and still unaware of the cat’s presence. Wyatt said his brother’s name, and both boys immediately followed the standard procedure for lion encounters: arms above their heads to appear larger, shouting and yelling while backing slowly away.
The lion kept coming, eyes locked and pads gaining ground. When the distance closed to a matter of feet, Wyatt hurled his backpack, grazing the cat’s face. The lion never paused, never seemed to react.
Then Wyatt tripped on a stick and fell backward. The cat launched, pouncing on him as he hit the ground. The upper fangs sank into Wyatt’s left cheek, just below his eye socket, the lower into his top lip and right nostril, flaying his face in four separate places.
Later, in the hospital, Wyatt told his father, my brother, that the cat appeared “huge.” In reality, it was half-grown at around 90 pounds — large enough to present a deadly threat, but not so big as to prevent my nephew from flipping it on its back and pulling its head away from his own, both hands clutching the lion’s throat. The cat went berserk, grabbing with its front claws and raking with its rear, in the way all felines use their haunches to eviscerate prey.
Wyatt had no choice but to spin away. The instant he did, the cat went for his brother. From Wyatt’s perspective, Taylen’s face disappeared behind the cat’s head as its jaws locked around his brother’s neck. He saw that Taylen’s hands were underneath the lion’s head, as if trying to grasp its throat the way Wyatt had. Wyatt then jumped onto the cat’s back. “I grabbed it by the neck again and tried to pull it off, but I couldn’t. No matter how hard I tried, it just wouldn’t let go.”
Even in his own frenzied panic, Wyatt realized Taylen’s arms had gone limp, and that the situation could only get worse. As he backed away, two thoughts flashed in his mind: Call for help and go for the car, on the off chance he could somehow use it to scare the animal away. He reached for his phone, found it was no longer in his pocket, then spotted it in the dirt. By the time he picked it up, the lion was dragging Taylen over the edge of the road, back into the brush from which it emerged.
Wyatt tried to dial 911 but couldn’t, his hands slick with blood on the phone screen. When he finally succeeded, the responder had no idea what to tell him, other than to stay in the car. With the dispatcher still on the line, Wyatt drove to the scene of the attack, marked now only by the backpack he’d flung moments earlier.
Fifteen minutes later a pair of deputies roared up, followed by an ambulance. The deputies spotted the drag trail through the brush and followed it to the cat, still crouched over Taylen’s body.
They shot at the ground to scare the lion away. Instead it rushed the deputies, who again tried another warning barrage. It flinched, then attempted another charge. The deputies shot into the ground yet again, and the lion finally vanished into the brush.
El Dorado County lies at the heart of California Gold Rush country, in the Sierra foothills just east of Sacramento. Growing up there in the ’80s, my brother and I, much like my nephews, hunted deer and quail and doves. Once wild turkeys began to proliferate, we expanded what had been an autumn passion into the green of springtime, the traditional season for gobbler hunting.
Everybody knew the mountain lions were around, but back then daytime sightings were rare. We would sometimes hear a lion scream in the dusk, a bloodcurdling sound, in the canyon behind our house. Occasionally somebody would glimpse one in their headlights on some winding mountain road. But we never went into the woods with any thought that we might be in danger ourselves, because at the time, as far as typical lion behavior went, we weren’t.
For most of the 20th century, the only known human deaths from a lion in California occurred in 1909, when a rabid animal attacked two people. (They survived the actual encounter but died later from rabies.) In that era, apex predators were largely viewed as having no ecological benefit, and California paid a bounty for lions, employing up to five state-funded professional hunters. That system continued until 1963, when the species was classified as vermin, except there were no longer cash rewards and also no limit to the number of lions that could be killed. No records were kept on how many actually were.
By the end of the decade, however, concerns grew that lions might be nearing extinction. The decline had been noted not just by animal-welfare advocates but by recreational hunters. At the time, the latter used dogs to trail lions by scent, and in response, the lions would climb trees to escape. Often, the dogs would be pulled away, an exercise referred to as “tree and free.” In 1969, in an effort to preserve the population, lions came under the protection of the California Department of Fish and Game, and in 1971, Governor Ronald Reagan signed a kill moratorium. Pursuit permits would still be issued to allow hound-handlers to tree the big cats, in part as a form of data collection to establish a population count.
In 1985, the number of livestock killed by lions, or what stock producers call depredations — a figure that had remained in the single- or double-digits for decades — increased to nearly 150. A similar number was recorded the following year, as well as the first attacks on humans in nearly eight decades: Two children, ages 5 and 6, were mauled months apart in the same wilderness park in Orange County. In response, the state lifted the kill moratorium, with the intention of establishing a quota-based hunting season.
But in 1990 — the year I turned 20 — voters passed Proposition 117 by ballot measure, designating the mountain lion a “specially protected mammal.” Lions would be shielded from lethal hunting, and for the first time in California history, turning a hound onto a cat’s trail became a criminal offense. Grizzlies and wolves had long been eradicated, leaving only hound-assisted humans as the mountain lion’s singular, top-of-the-food-chain competitor. With this final external pressure essentially eliminated (exceptions were made for scientific study and livestock kills), those of us in the rural foothills began to notice changes.
Depredations climbed. Our longtime neighbor, a man whose ranch had been in his family for generations, lost a couple of sheep in his pasture — a first. More strikingly, people all over the county were actually seeing mountain lions, not only in their high beams at night but in broad daylight, with increasing regularity: crossing the road, loafing at the edge of a fenced field, skirting a campground. My brother experienced the shock of having one run into the side of his pickup one afternoon, deflect away, and bound off into the brush.
The shift in lion behavior wasn’t unique to El Dorado County. In 1992, a 9-year-old boy on a bike ride near Santa Barbara was mauled by a young lion, resulting in more than 600 stitches. In ’93, Cuyamaca Rancho State Park near San Diego closed for several weeks after multiple visitors had too-close-for-comfort encounters. The weekend after reopening, a lion walked into a campground and bit a 10-year-old girl before being driven off by the family dog, which was also mauled. Park rangers shot and killed the lion.
Then, in April 1994, Barbara Schoener disappeared while jogging in El Dorado County, 10 miles from where Taylen and Wyatt were attacked. Her partially consumed body was discovered the next day — neck bitten and skull crushed — in a mound of debris. Schoener became the first lion fatality in California since 1909. Eight months later, another woman was killed in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, where the 10-year-old camper was attacked. In the interim, three other lions were also euthanized in Cuyamaca, after showing aggressive behavior toward humans.
With livestock attacks also steadily increasing, the Department of Fish and Game began to issue more depredation permits. Between 1995 and 2019, well over 100 lions on average were killed annually. Then, in 2020, a statewide directive changed the equation again. The new policy generally allowed multiple attacks by a lion on any given parcel of land before a lethal permit would be issued.
Whether by coincidence or as a direct result, six attacks on humans occurred between 2020 and 2022, all nonfatal and all but one targeting small children. Certain regions of the state, meanwhile, became hot zones of lion activity — out of 31 lethal depredation permits approved statewide in 2023, twelve were in my home county. Three hours west in San Mateo County, a 5-year-old survived an attack on a hiking trail. Soon, the incident with Taylen and Wyatt would mark the first death in two decades.
I graduated in the same high-school class as a kid named John Chandler. We didn’t know each other well then and had no way of predicting how fate would one day connect us. Like me, Chandler grew up hunting and fishing in the heart of California Gold Rush Country. He turned that passion for the outdoors into a career as the El Dorado County Wildlife Specialist, or county trapper. Any time an agricultural producer or horse owner or home gardener has a persistent issue with dangerous or destructive animals — skunks denning under a shed, raccoons raiding a chicken coop, bears gorging in a vineyard — Chandler can assist, either with advice or, if necessary, direct intervention. Over the past few years, more and more cases have involved mountain lions.
“I was skiing when the first call came through,” Chandler told me, about the day my nephews were attacked. It wasn’t a typical weekend contact from a dispatcher or general citizen — this was a call from Jeff Leikauf, the El Dorado County Sheriff, stating that a lion attack had just been reported, that he didn’t have all the details but needed Chandler to get down the hill from Tahoe.
A little later, he received a call from the state department of fish and wildlife: confirmed human fatality. He drove down the mountain at breakneck speed, crated his trio of hounds and sped on, arriving roughly two hours after he was summoned. Wyatt was already at the hospital. The coroner’s van was just leaving with Taylen.
By now a storm front had blown in, the late afternoon sky dumping rain. The deputies and a pair of state game wardens led him to the recovery site where Taylen’s crushed ball cap remained. Chandler turned his hounds loose, down into thicker timber. Within minutes, the dogs were barking, indicating that they had run a lion up a tree, less than a hundred yards from where Taylen’s body was recovered. After consultation with the wardens, Chandler killed the animal with a single shot.
Ten days later, Chandler was called to a livestock kill just outside the city limits of Placerville, the quaint town where we went to high school. He tracked the lion to a paved walking path, practically within rock-chucking distance of an elementary school, a senior living center and the Walmart parking lot.
After his dogs ran it up a tree, several hours of deliberation between Fish and Wildlife and local law enforcement ensued about how to proceed. Eventually, the cat jumped down and went after the dogs, and Chandler had no choice but to shoot.
Ten days after that he was called out again, after another lion came onto the same property and killed the landowner’s dog. Chandler’s hounds treed this cat about a hundred yards from where he treed the first. Both were big, healthy, mature males at the upper end of the weight spectrum, nearly double the size of the cat that attacked Taylen and Wyatt.
Lions attacking a pair of adult men, head-on. Lions jumping into a fenced suburban yard to snatch the family dog in broad daylight. Lions coming out of a tree to engage the hounds that chased it there. Lions hazed away by gunfire, then turning around and charging back for more.
“This is the weirdest year,” Chandler said. “Over 25 years, I’ve had calls for maybe a couple of horses that got attacked. This year, we’re already up to five.”
As Wyatt was being prepped for reconstructive surgery, his only concern was knowing what had become of Taylen. His father told him the news. Wyatt put his swollen head back against the pillow, looked up at that hospital ceiling, and said one word. “Seriously?”
A plastic surgeon worked through the night. The long pair of scimitar-like scars along his left eye will never go away, but the ragged flaps that had been his right nostril and the sliced-open cleft of his upper lip are now barely detectable. I’m not sure what that surgeon did, or how it’s even possible at all, but he made Wyatt look like himself.
“Can I hug you?” I asked, the first time I saw him a week later, not sure of his pain level. He put his arms around me, and the words that came out of my mouth are the absolute truth — I told him he was beautiful.
I was with his father and stepmother, Aaron and Stacy, the first time they entered Taylen’s bedroom, two weeks after the attack, to gather some of his things to send off with him when his body was cremated. Turkey feathers, fishing lures, guitar picks. Tokens he saved from his one young romance. We’re all haunted now by two things — the loss of possibility for what should have been Taylen’s life and whatever it was he had to endure in those violent seconds at the end of his life.
As for Wyatt, he summoned the resolve to head back into the field just a few days after his release from the hospital, on the general opener of turkey season. Not deep into the woods and not to hunt himself, just onto a friend’s property to tag along and try to call in a bird for his buddy. He has always been all-in for the outdoors, with relentless patience in a deer stand or turkey blind, and always the last one off the trout stream. But to go back out like this, so soon after an experience that could have justifiably made him turn away from the wild forever? I don’t know how to explain it, except to say that it’s what he has always done and, despite everything that happened, will always do.
What we love about this region can never be separated from the ways that it will remain largely untamed, with its plunging river canyons and sheer rock pitches, dense thickets of chaparral and manzanita. It’s perfect habitat for creatures that will also never be tamed, and that’s part of the beauty, too, and part of the reason people like my family choose to make a home and a life in such a place.
So the question becomes, how do we coexist going forward? There will most likely never be a perfect, harmonious balance between contemporary humans with modern lives and the wild, apex predators that have occupied the landscape for time immemorial. But as it happens, the practice that was outlawed decades ago in California — nonlethal tree-and-free hound pursuit — has lately become better understood as a means of reinforcing the mountain lion’s historic tendency to avoid humans altogether.
A growing body of work conducted by wildlife biologists in several states seems increasingly to bear this out. Bart George, a biologist employed by the Kalispel Tribe of Indians in northeastern Washington, recently concluded a four-year study that pinpointed collared lions by satellite coordinates, often in gulp-inducing proximity to walking trails and residential housing. He would approach, sometimes with hounds, sometimes without. His observation: The lions were scared off by the dogs but not by humans alone.
A second study, published in August 2024 in the science journal Ecology and Evolution, echoes that finding. Researchers contrasted lion behavior in California and Nevada, the latter of which allows both nonlethal hound pursuit and a legal, limited harvest season. The results indicate that the Nevada lions are considerably more inclined to avoid areas where humans live.
Still more recently, in the wake of human encounters culminating in the attack on my nephews, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife has emphasized the necessity of “adaptive” management — the notion that circumstances in different regions require different strategies. Starting this month, the department will partner with researchers from Utah State University to test the efficacy of various hazing strategies, primary among them the use of hounds. The project will focus on the current hot zone of El Dorado County, plus the adjacent Sierra foothills counties. For the first time since 1990 and the passage of Prop. 117, tree-and-free is not only part of the discussion in California but will actually be studied as a management tool.
As my family can now tell you, tragedy happens. And as we’re all finding, life still has to continue, even on different terms. My brother is no longer comfortable camping in a tent, or even rolling the trash can down his driveway without a 12-gauge in hand. Wyatt no longer takes his afternoon run down the same rural roads he used to. People I’ve known for years have begun to carry pepper spray to walk to the mailbox.
But nobody is packing up and heading for the city. They still have lives they enjoy, in rural places they love, near the wild regions that call to them.
The post A Mountain Lion Attacked My Nephews. What Could Have Stopped It? appeared first on New York Times.
