THE LIFE OF MAMMALS 
breeds only once in two years. If this be true it is a striking 
example of one of nature’s limitations of these destructive 
beasts, which would seem at first thought to have a clear field 
for indefinite multiplication. But though their food is ordi- 
narily plentiful, and no active cnemics are to be feared, at least 
outside the Tropics, there are certain insidious foes which they 
are powerless to resist, in the form of parasites (especially 
internal), taken into the system from the living animals on 
which the cat feeds — particularly from hares and other 
rodents. 
“In its essential habits and traits,” savs Roosevelt,’* ‘the 
big, slinking, nearly unicolored cat seems to be much the same 
eee everywhere, whether living in mountain, open plain, 
or forest, under arctic cold or tropic heat. When 
the settlements become thick it retires to dense forest, dark 
swamp, or inaccessible mountain gorge, and moves about only 
at night. In wilder regions it not infrequently roams during 
the day, and ventures freely into the open. Deer are its cus- 
tomary prey when they are plentiful, bucks, docs, and fawns 
being killed indifferently. Usually the deer is killed almost 
instantancously, but occasionally there is quite a scuffle, in 
which the cougar may get bruised, though, as far as I know, 
never seriously. It is also a dreaded enemy of sheep, pigs, 
calves, and especially colts, and when pressed by hunger a big 
male cougar will kill a full-grown horse or cow, moose or wapiti. 
It is the special enemy of mountain sheep. In 1886, while 
hunting white goats north of Clarke’s Fork of the Columbia, I 
found them preying as freely on the goats as on the deer. It 
rarely catches antelope, but is quick to seize rabbits, other 
small beasts, and even porcupines.” 
The panther was greatly dreaded by the early pioneers of 
New England and New York, but careful inquirers could find 
little foundation for their fears. De Kay asserts that he had 
never met with an instance of their having attacked a man. 
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