116 AFRICAN GAME ANIMALS 



slightly countershaded coat unquestionably has a conceal- 

 ing quality in the woods and among clay banks and rocks 

 under ordinary conditions, and for long we accepted this 

 as the chief element in explaining its invisibility. But 

 when we came to think out the matter we realized that a 

 totally different theory must be invoked to explain the 

 cougar's invisibility during winter in that large part of its 

 range which at that time is snow-covered. We have spent 

 some time in country where cougars were common, on the 

 Little Missouri and in the Rockies. In places the land was 

 thickly forested; in other places it was open, the bad lands, 

 hills, and mountains being sparsely clad here and there 

 with pifion, cedar, buckbrush, and the like. The wapiti 

 and blacktail that lived in such places were easily found and 

 seen — unlike what was true in the dense forests. But the 

 cougars were invisible, and this was just as true in winter, 

 when the landscape was white, as in summer. They could 

 be trapped, and they were readily killed with hounds; but 

 even the oldest and most skilful hunters hardly ever saw 

 them on other occasions. This means that the cougar's 

 coloration was really an insignificant and practically negli- 

 gible factor in its concealment. The prime factors were 

 its nocturnal habits, its sharp senses, its wonderful ability 

 to take advantage of even the scantiest cover, and its power 

 of lying indefinitely motionless and of advancing with in- 

 conceivably noiseless stealth. The cougar is found in boreal 

 regions of heavy snowfall and in steaming tropical forests, 

 on bare broken plains and in the Rockies and the Andes, in 

 the great hardwood and coniferous forests of the United 

 States and on the barren Patagonian grass-land, in thick 

 cover and in scanty cover. Everywhere it is equally invisi- 



