Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 August 1875 — A Disagreeable Companion. [ARTICLE]

A Disagreeable Companion.

As a test of nerve the recent experience of a wayfarer, traveling a wood road near Olympia, Washington Territory, was as remarkably as any on record. The man was a speculator looking out wild land, and lid trudged through the forest, following the almost unused path formed by an old road made by pioneers in the wilderness. His mind was devoted to one subject—the critical examination of the kind of trees upon the land about him and of the character of the soil, and he failed to notice for some time a “piha-pit” upon the dead leaves near him. He at first scarcely looked down, when he felt something rubbing against his legs and heard a slight purring, but when he did look his heart came up to his mouth, a cold sweat started as suddenly as though lie were suspended by a weak rope over Niagara. Pressing itself softly against his legs, twining about him as he walked, moving its flexile body swiftly but with never a sound, turning up fierce eyes with something almost like a terrible laugh in them, yeas a huge cougar! No chicken was this man in the woods, but his account of the manner in which his hat was raised by bis hair is not to be considered as apooryphal at all. Sleek and supple and muscular, the beast glided about, and at intervals it would come closer again and press its body against the legs of the man, the light touch making goose-flesh of every inch in his form. It was a terrible experience, that interview with the cougar iD the forest primeval, and it was well for the man that his nerves were of the kind to do honor (p a frontier adventurer. Steadily pursuing his course with steps that would falter a little occasionally, he kept on, and with him the beast continued its treacherous gamboh. At times it would glide a few paces to the front and roll over and over in the road and wait for the man to come up, and then it wquld circle around him until the impulse, almost too strong to be resisted, would come upon him to spring upon the brute, opposing fists to fangs, and ending the intolerable suspense at any risk. The movements of the terrible animal were but as the playing of a cat with a mouse; and the man knew it. The momentcame, at length, when the strain could be borne no longer, and the man kicked desperately at the beast as it passed by him. In an instant it bounded in front and crouched for a spring, growling hoarsely and showing its teeth. The man stopped and shouted hopeleasly for aid, while the cougar did not spring at once, but appeared waiting to gratify its humor a little longer. The shout, fortunately, was not in vain. There were hunters and dogs in the immediate Tricmity, as rare fortune would have it,and the hounds dashed suddenly from the covert as the cougar, seeing them, leaped for a treee. A few moments later the beast fell a victim to bullets, and the man with whom it had taken a stroll was telling his story and trying to restore the normal condition of his nerves by internal applications from a small flask. It was one of the episodes which turn men’s hair gray—one M-hich would, doubtless, have brought death to a man with less nerve than the hero of the affair. —Dowagiac Monitor.