Previous chapter [“The divorce,” November 15]: The death of Cougar Nancy’s father in the early 1960s prompted her to return to her homestead in the rainforest to look after her aging mother. The move also prompted Nancy and her husband, who was left back in Powell River, to get a divorce after just a couple years of marriage. Cougar Nancy was back in the wilderness, this time for good.
One late spring morning in the mid-1960s, Nancy Crowther was sitting on her front porch working on her gun. She had taken a few pieces of the rifle apart to adjust the sites, when Nancy’s mother emerged from the kitchen with a tin pail. She asked Nancy to pick some of the colourful salmonberries that were ripening on the bushes on the edge of the clearing.
Nancy did as she was told, and, as usual, a couple of dogs and several goats dutifully followed along. Nancy picked and she picked, with her menagerie out of the yard and up the dirt road.
She heard it before she saw it. Nancy told this story to Powell River journalist Murray Kennedy back in 1987, and Murray recorded the interview. Here’s what happened next, according to Nancy Crowther.
“I heard a terrific rushing sound and here was this huge dog. I had never seen a dog so big,” recounted Nancy. “It looked black when I first saw it, but it was charcoal grey with black guard hairs. It had saliva hanging over a foot long.”
Nancy quickly realized it was not a dog, but in fact a very large wolf, its ears erect, its shoulders hunched, its black lips curled, showing gleaming white teeth.
Without taking her eyes off the wolf, Nancy instinctively squeezed her empty right hand, the hand that usually cradled her rifle. Like someone feeling for their reading glasses, she then moved her hand to her chest for her rifle strap, but the gun was in pieces back on her porch.
Unarmed but for a bucket full of salmonberries, Nancy stood her ground, staring back at the wolf. The goats nervously circled around Nancy, and her dogs, Tippy and Mac, two smaller terriers, stood silently on either side of her.
The goats couldn’t stand it. They panicked and tore down the hill in herd formation. The wolf’s chase instinct kicked in. It sprang into action, brushing right past Nancy and her cowering dogs.
Then, as the goats disappeared around the corner, the wolf short stopped and turned around. It crouched down and stared back at Nancy and her dogs, its gaze shifting from one dog to another, ignoring Nancy.
Nancy raised her arms, stomped and yelled. The wolf, as if sizing up the situation and deciding it wasn’t worth the bother, slowly turned to go. That was all Nancy’s dog Tippy needed to leap forward and start barking.
“That wolf turned around like greased lightning and picked up my dog like a suitcase and ran off with it,” described Nancy. “My little dog was looking back at me and crying. I couldn’t run fast enough to catch up and I didn’t have a gun so I couldn’t do a thing about it.”
As the wolf disappeared into the forest with the Nancy’s dog in its jaws, she dropped the bucket of salmonberries and ran back down the hill. With trembling fingers, she put her gun together as quickly as she could. She grabbed a handful of cartridges, rounded up the other dogs and set off after the wolf.
They easily found the bloody trail. A few of the dogs ran ahead into the forest. Soon Nancy heard another one of her dogs yelping hysterically in pain and fear. She knew the wolf had caught another.
“But the dogs kept after it, until we came to another spot where there was so much blood that my dogs lost complete interest,” recalled Nancy.
She soon found the carcasses of her dogs, Tippy and Mac. They had both been torn apart. The wolf had quickly devoured the little dogs.
To Nancy’s great alarm, the wolf suddenly emerged, leaping up on the trunk of a fallen fir tree, 15 metres ahead on the forested hillside. The way the wolf was panting almost made it look like it was smiling down upon her.
Cougar Nancy had a clear shot. She raised her rifle to her shoulder, closed one eye and cocked the gun. The wolf stared right at her.
“I shot at him, but I missed,” recounted Nancy. “My gun wasn’t shooting straight; there was something wrong with it.”
In her haste and the wolf’s good fortune, Nancy forgot to adjust the sights when she put the gun back together. Her bullet screamed by the wolf entirely, but the blast was enough for the wolf to flinch, and take one last look at Nancy. Before she could get off another shot, the wolf disappeared into the forest.
“It took off like a rabbit,” concluded Nancy.
She returned to the cabin, collecting the pail of salmonberries along the way, and broke the news to her mother that they had lost two dogs.
Nancy and her mother were very close, and they loved their animals. Losing dogs and goats is one thing, but you can imagine how heartbroken Nancy was when her mother passed away, just six years after her father, in 1967. Doris Crowther was 80 years old.
Besides occasional visits from neighbours and extended family, Cougar Nancy Crowther was now alone. However, she would soon face an invasion that would prove to be much more challenging to scare off than any cougar, bear, or wolf: the hippies.
You’ll read that story in the next chapter of the Cougar Lady Chronicles.
Grant Lawrence is an award-winning author and a CBC personality who considers Powell River and Desolation Sound his second home. Portions of the Cougar Lady Chronicles originally appeared in Lawrence ’s book Adventures in Solitude and on CBC Radio. Anyone with stories or photos they would like to share of Nancy Crowther are welcome to email grantlawrence12@gmail.com.
