To Be Thorough
Mike Smith
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It was mid-June, in 2008, in the small southeastern New Mexico mining community of Pinos Altos. Fifty-five-year-old Robert Nawojski stood a few dozen yards from his desert-set mobile home, bathing and shaving on a rocky ledge—getting all cleaned up for his funeral.
Shortly thereafter, a mountain lion attacked him. The big cat evidently pounced on the man after he had walked below the ledge; it grabbed Nawojski in its teeth, dragged him a short ways, tore away and ate parts of his body, and then buried much of what remained.
New Mexicans—upon reading of this story in the Albuquerque Journal, the Silver City Sun-News, and other papers, following the June 20 discovery of Nawojski’s body—were understandably alarmed, despite such attacks being extremely uncommon, despite no human having been killed by a New Mexico mountain lion since January of 1974.
This seemed to be the sort of thing that could happen to absolutely anyone, and so to many people it seemed especially frightening. Everyone has to bathe, after all, and the next victim might be anyone.
If only someone, somewhere—most New Mexicans no doubt thought—if only someone would invent some sort of enclosed area—some sort of walled-off space containing something kind of like a rocky ledge but more concave—some sort of interior “bathing area” or “room with a bath in it”—some sort of special little containment facility that would make it so we didn’t have to wash outside with the wild pumas. If only... Oh, just leave me here with my dreams. My impossible, stupid dreams.
Opting against innovation, the authorities instead decided to track down and kill the mountain lion that had killed Nawojski. They did—and in a June 25 press release, the Department of Game and Fish announced it had captured and killed the animal, a 125-pound adult male—a lion already wounded by a game officer who had seen and shot at it around Nawojski’s home shortly after the discovery of the body.
That should, one might be tempted to think, be the end of the story. A mountain lion killed a man, and then men killed the mountain lion. No victim remained to be avenged, and no killer remained at large. Fin.
But then came today’s paper—the July 2, 2008 Albuquerque Journal—and its initially baffling headline, “Second Cougar Caught, Killed After Man’s Death.”
“We knew from tracks that we had two lions in the area, and we wanted to be thorough,” state Game & Fish officer Leon Redman said in a news release. The second cougar was a healthy 80-to-90-pound female.
The snaring operation that followed the fatal attack on [Nawojski] also caught some unintended victims. A javelina, a horse that threw its rider and a bear also were caught in the snares. The bear, which was feeding on the ensnared javelina when it also became entangled, was seriously hurt and had to be killed.
...The horse that was ensnared, and the woman who was thrown from that horse, suffered minor injuries, the state news release said.
In a related story, police shot and killed a suspected murderer in Albuquerque today, and then, to make certain that no other potential murderers remained in the area, rounded up and executed everyone within an eight-block radius.
—Mike Smith
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Reader Comments (5)
Let's also keep in mind that there are people who love wildlife in the area who were intintionally or unintentionally baiting in these lions. Now just becuase deer graze on your lawn doesn't mean lions are likely to come into your community, not unheard of but not all that common especially with local dogs and other sights and smells lions generally can't stand. But something made both these lions stalk people for up to three weeks, yes the lions plural were seen at cooresponding times following people. Very unnatural behavior. Now I won't say someone was actually hand feeding them but it certainly seems fishy.
The worst thing is that New mexico dept of game and fish were told up to two weeks earlier of this completely unnatural behavior and did nothing until someone innocent and helpless died.