J. R. Stoddard

In October of 1996, I went on a hiking and fishing trip at the Hoh River in the Northwest area of Washington State. I was fishing, alone, on a rainy afternoon on a section of the river inside the Olympic National Park. I’d been fishing all day, without much luck. The river was murky from the rain runoff. About an hour before sundown I began to get a feeling that something was watching me. The hair on the back of my neck was bristling. After turning around many times in the next fifteen minutes and seeing nothing, I decided to quit fishing and returned to my RV to make some dinner. While sitting under an awning watching the river and the mountains the park ranger came up to my campsite and informed me that a cougar had killed an elk, just the night before and pointed to the place about 30 yards from where we were standing. The place where I had been fishing was just on the other side of where he was pointing. As it turned out I was the only one in the park, other than the ranger.

The cougar had likely been observing me. When I returned home from that trip I picked up everything I could find about cougars. It turned out there wasn’t very much, and most of it was many years old. In my quest to learn more I found a web site by Tom Chester, mountain lion attacks on humans, his masters thesis. Updates on cougar attacks have been maintained by Linda Lewis since 2000. In the past 12 years I have studied nearly every cougar attack on a human that has been documented in the last hundred years. This research has led to three novels.

My novels deal with cougars in backyards, jogging trails and other places where humans don't normally expect to encounter these animals. The stories are based on actual incidents that blend facts about cougar behavior with fictional situations. They are intended to be both entertaining and educational.

The novels are currently the only fiction books on the market that deal with the potential problems of cougar and human interaction. In addition, my readers have been telling me that COUGAR HUNT is the new JAWS.

He retired from the US Navy in 1992 after eighteen years as an officer, and two years as an enlisted man in the US Army. He was a Naval Flight Officer with nearly 5,000 flight hours in EC-130's (Strategic Airborne Communications Aircraft), S-3's Vikings, with 96 aircraft carrier landings, and as a battle staff member for the CINCPAC Airborne Command Post flying EC-135's.