Steve & Me

by Terri Irwin

  I wound up building a mini Fort Knox—which cost about six thousand dollars—in my backyard. I began furnishing it. The den box was huge, made of wood, bolted down off the ground, with a big rubber top. I put in a large picnic table. The cougar enjoyed that, since it was wood and she could leap up in two little steps to get on top. Then I hired another builder to put a roof over half the enclosure.

  The money disappeared quickly. I learned that it cost about five dollars a day to feed this “ideal pet,” and that the bigger she got, the more she enjoyed the pouncing game.

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to come up with a name for her, since she already came with a beautiful one—Malina. Instead of letting her jump on my head whenever she felt like it, I sought guidance on how to discipline her. I would let her play with me until she gave me a nip or grabbed me with her big feet and pulled me in for a good bite. Then I would scold her and pop her gently on the nose. We got to know each other, and Malina began to respect me. She soon became very territorial about her enclosure, and that’s where Shasta came in.

  Shasta was a brilliant sidekick. She would go into Malina’s enclosure and find any little scraps of meat that might be left over after dinner. Malina didn’t appreciate this much, but every time she tried to defend her territory, Shasta would bark, growl, and snap, quickly putting the cougar in her place. Soon Malina realized she wasn’t top dog, and her attitude problems were quickly resolved.

  She would sit passively in the corner and look slightly annoyed as Shasta went through every square inch looking for little scraps. This turned out to keep Malina in check and made the situation a lot safer as I came and went, cleaning her enclosure.

  Malina also learned that it was fun to go out for walks on her leash. I took her everywhere. Early in the morning we would hit the local playground. The fences of the tennis courts were high enough that I could let her run around freely. Utilizing a thirty-foot lead, I’d also take her to the beach. Although Oregon beaches are usually quite deserted, occasionally a beachcomber would pass by us. Malina crawled on her belly as close to the stranger as she dared. She hid in the beach grass, flattening her ears to the side, looking like a funny cougar airplane, and would sit absolutely motionless.

  People strolled by, and we would exchange hellos, but they never knew that three feet away from them was a crouching cougar.

  Soon I was taking Malina out for events to educate people about cougars. She came with me to schools—everything from small classrooms to universities—and I would take her to various community events too. She loved it! She’d sit behind a roped-off area, flicking her tail, people-watching. I found it dismaying when a classroom full of children would see her and cry out, “Look at the tiger!” or “Look at the cheetah!” No one seemed to know what a cougar was, and yet Malina’s wild cousins literally lived in our own Oregon backyards.

  I began taking my cougar with me to court hearings. I’d join environmentalist attorneys and concerned people about the cruelty of certain hunting practices, such as bear baiting and hunting cougars with dogs. By taking Malina into the courtroom, I not only got press, I brought the hunters face-to-face with the animal they were trying to persecute. Instead of the snarling, terrifying demon of the night that they imagined stalking their children, they would see a beautiful, noble spirit of the wilderness. Malina changed people’s minds. I saw it happen.

  Malina marked the beginning of my affinity for predatory mammals. After an internship with the Department of Fish and Wildlife, I earned my certificate as a wildlife rehabilitator. I had found my purpose. I didn’t realize that within the next few months I would almost pay for it with my life.

  Chapter Three

  Rescue

  Soon more enclosures began to sprout up in my backyard. As a wildlife rehabilitator, I took in foxes, bobcats, raccoons, and possums. All sorts of animals came into my care, but I seemed to have a knack with predatory mammals above all others—with the exception of wolves. For some reason I never connected with wolves, but that didn’t stop me from trying to help them.

  One timber wolf I was called to rescue was beautiful but extraordinarily thin. She’d just had a litter of pups and was nursing them inside a mobile home. Somehow she got out of the trailer and was separated from her babies. The owners weren’t home, and she could hear her pups crying inside. She systematically (and frantically) went around to every entrance to the trailer. Using her immense jaw pressure, she flattened all the doorknobs, tore off the window screens, and shredded the sides of the trailer trying to get back to her puppies.

  “She destroyed our home,” the wolf’s owner told me over the phone. “She’s got to go.”

  I put the wolf and her pups inside a dog kennel in my backyard. She immediately decided she didn’t want to be in there. She grabbed the side of the cage in her jaws. Even though the kennel was seven feet wide and fourteen feet long, and had a roof on it, she started tugging until she pulled the cage partially off the concrete pad. At sixty pounds, probably half her normal weight, and lactating, the wolf was still demolishing her enclosure. I wasn’t going to be able to hold her.

  By now it was dark, and I didn’t have many options. I knew I couldn’t put her in the garage, since she would destroy it just as she had her former trailer home.

  I thought of the one place she couldn’t escape—my very own Fort Knox.

  Wolf and cougar switched places. I moved Malina into the dog kennel and put the wolf and her pups in the four-hundred-square-foot cougar enclosure. I enticed the mama wolf away with some food so I could check on her puppies. The tiny wolf pups, whose eyes weren’t even open yet, growled menacingly at my approach. They hated me without even seeing me.

  Malina wasn’t too thrilled with the new developments either. She didn’t like her new small enclosure, but I was too busy to notice. After all, it was only going to be a few days until I placed the wolf and her puppies with a rescue group that specialized in wolves. That weekend, I drove up the coast and left them in much better hands than mine.

  It had been a big day. I returned home after dark and went in to feed and brush Malina—our usual evening routine. She sat up on her den box inside the small enclosure. As I was brushing her, she put her forehead down to me as she always did, asking for a bit of a rub. As part of this process, Malina would usually bump her head into mine. It always hurt a bit, but it was a sign of affection, so I bumped heads back.

  When I turned around to walk out of the enclosure, without warning, Malina pounced. All of a sudden, I felt her muscular forearms enveloping my shoulders. It was like being in the grip of a full-grown man. She grabbed the back of my head so that her upper teeth dug into the top of my skull, with her bottom canines hooked neatly under the lip of my skull at the back of my neck.

  Malina began to bite down, and the pressure was intense. I could feel her canines puncturing my scalp. My head was going to explode. Her arms braced my shoulders, squeezing tightly. I had nothing to fight her off with. I started swinging wildly backward with the brush in my hand, hitting her on the top of the head. She didn’t budge. The pressure grew so great that I knew something was going to give.

  “NO, NO, NO!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. She loosened her grip for a moment and I quickly twisted away. She dropped down to the floor of the kennel but immediately pounced again, grappling me around the front and biting at my chest. I beat her away a second time and backed for the door.

  Malina assumed her pounce position once more, with her tail wiggling and her rump swaying back and forth.

  I felt the adrenaline surging through my arms and into my fingertips as I reached behind me and fumbled with the latch. It was tricky, but I didn’t dare turn around. I managed to unlatch the door and slam it behind me. I collapsed. I had not an ounce of strength left. I felt sick.

  With a huge, booming bang, Malina crashed into the door just after it shut. She turned around, gave me a dirty look over her shoulder, and sulked back to her den box.

  I learned a few valua
ble lessons that night. First of all, I needed to be really careful about working with wild animals when I was by myself. Second, never take an animal that is used to one enclosure and put it in a smaller one. And last, a wild animal is just that. You can never tame them or train them. I could work with them and develop some level of mutual respect. But I could never forget they were wild.

  I was more or less prepared for the physical aspects of wildlife rescue. I never shied away from hard work. My father always worked multiple jobs when I was growing up—I respected him for it and modeled my work ethic on his. As I took on more and more rescue work, I was also still running my pilot car company, Westates Flagman.

  So physical challenges I could face. But I found myself less prepared for the emotional challenges of the rescue work I was taking on. The way some people treat wildlife is beyond comprehension.

  A cougar hunted by dogs is put through unbelievable trauma. I didn’t think I could possibly understand what the terror must be like, but I got some idea from a friend who worked with predatory mammals and who was also a Vietnam vet.

  “In the war,” he told me, “the Vietcong used to hunt the American soldiers with dogs.” It was terrifying, he said. He knew he was being hunted, and he knew he couldn’t escape. He spent a lot of time running through streams, backtracking, trying to escape the relentless dogs. These were animals that tracked not only by sight; they could also smell, hear, and sense your presence.

  Instead of just hating the hunters, I tried to learn from them. I went to hunting exhibitions and fairground events. I learned that a mother cougar will climb a tree when a hunter approaches, leaving her cubs to be torn apart by hunting dogs. A cougar’s fear of humans is so great it outweighs her instinct to protect her young. The stories were heartbreaking, but in some ways these people knew more about cougars than I did.

  Still, the more I learned, the more determined I became to stop these wildlife perpetrators. I would even sit in on court cases to show support and encouraged others to do the same, especially with truly heinous crimes against wildlife. For one memorable trial, the judge moved the venue three times to increasingly larger courtrooms, because there were three hundred of us who showed up.

  On trial were two men, one in a plaid shirt, and the other with a long, ZZ Top-style beard. They looked intimidated by the crowd that had turned out, even though Plaid Shirt stood six foot four. He was the main perpetrator, charged with animal cruelty. He had brought his young son along during the bear killing for which he was on trial.

  The main reason the state managed to bring charges is that the hunters had made a videotape of their gruesome acts. The state trooper who confiscated the video couldn’t even testify at the time of the trial, he was so emotionally overcome.

  Then they showed the video in court, and I understood why. ZZ Top and Plaid Shirt cornered the bear cub. In order to preserve the integrity of the pelt, they attempted to kill the cub by stabbing it in the eyes.

  It was absolutely gut-wrenching to watch. The bear struggled for its life, but Plaid Shirt kept thrusting his knife, moving back as the animal twisted frantically away, then moving forward to stab again. The bear cub screamed, and it sounded eerily as though the bear was actually crying “Mama,” over and over. Plaid Shirt and ZZ Top sat unfazed in court. The bear screamed, “Mama, mama, mama.” From my place in the gallery, I watched as a towering man in a police uniform burst into tears and walked out of the courtroom. At the end of the video, Plaid Shirt brought his nine-year-old son over to stand triumphantly next to the dead bear cub.

  “Clearly, you deserve jail,” the judge told Plaid Shirt as he stood for sentencing. “Unfortunately, the jails are filled with people even more heinous than you: rapists, murderers, and armed robbers. So I am going to sentence you to three thousand hours of community service.”

  I approached the judge after the trial, furious that this man might end up collecting a bit of rubbish along the highway as his penance.

  “I want him,” I said, referring to Plaid Shirt. I said that I ran a wildlife rehabilitation facility and could use a volunteer.

  The first day Plaid Shirt showed up, he actually looked scared of me. He cleaned cages, fed animals, and worked hard. He liked the bobcat I was taking care of, “Bobby.” He said it was the biggest one he had ever seen. It would make a prize trophy.

  I asked him every question I could think of: where he hunted, how he hunted, why he hunted. Whether he had any kind of shirt other than plaid. I felt as though I was in the presence of true evil.

  For months he helped. He had some skills, like carpentry, and he could lift heavy things. He fulfilled his community service. In the end, I couldn’t tell if I had made any difference or not. I was only slightly encouraged by his parting words.

  “You know,” Plaid Shirt said, “I never knew cougars purred.”

  The emotional roller coaster of rescue work never seemed to end. I named my facility “Cougar Country” to highlight my focus, but I found myself called to help many different animals—in veterinarians’ offices, in the field, in classrooms and courtrooms. Somehow I kept it all together, and ran Westates Flagman, too. My day had forty-eight hours.

  It helped that I had no social life. I recall a poor fellow who asked me out during this period. I agreed to meet him for dinner. As I was getting ready, the phone rang.

  “We’ve got a possum that’s been hit by a car,” the county animal control office said. “Can you help?”

  I’ve always liked possums. Like a lot of wildlife, they are completely misunderstood. Virginia opossums are the only North American marsupials. Marsupials tend to have lower body temperatures than other animals, so possums are among the least likely of any mammal to contract rabies. In fact, they are one of the most disease-free animals I’ve dealt with.

  That evening, answering the call as I dressed for my big date, I didn’t think twice. I thought I could pick it up and still make dinner. But when I got the injured possum home and examined it, I realized that it had probably been hit by the car two or three days earlier, and its body teemed with maggots.

  There wasn’t any way I could head out for a lovely evening, not with a maggot-infested marsupial under my care. I grabbed my tweezers and began flicking off the fly larvae, one by one. The possum was cooperative, but as the maggot-picking process wore on, it became evident that I was not going to able to make dinner.

  I called the fellow. “Here’s the situation,” I said. “I am working on a possum that was hit by a car. There is just no way I am going to be on time. What do you want to do?”

  There was a long hesitation on the other end of the line.

  “Why don’t I come over and help?” he finally asked. Great! I could always use help. A half hour later, in he came, looking smart and smelling of cologne.

  His face immediately turned pale as he saw what the project entailed, and he made a halfhearted attempt to help. After a while I wasn’t sure whether I was going to be finishing up with the possum or providing medical aid for my poor date, whose face had now turned a whiter shade of green. He excused himself and headed off into the night, never to be heard from again.

  Life was rewarding but hectic. After a particularly long day, I got a phone call out of the blue.

  “I’m going to Australia to scuba dive the Great Barrier Reef,” my friend Lori said to me in September of 1991. “You ought to come along. We’d have a great time.”

  My first thought was to pass. Diving had never interested me. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it just wasn’t natural to breathe underwater.

  “I know you’ll have a good time,” I told Lori, “but scuba’s not really my thing.”

  Lori was persistent. “Yeah, I know I’ll have a good time,” she said, “but you’d have a good time too. You need a good time.”

  A lot of things argued against this trip. I thought of tortured bears, sick raccoons, and the endless parade of injured and abused animals that passed through my care. My backyard was full of rescu
ed animals that needed care and attention, 24/7. And I knew the key to running my business was being there every single day. I loved my life, but maybe Lori had a point. I had been burning the candle at both ends and some in the middle.

  “I’ve got a girlfriend over there,” Lori continued, trying to convince me. “We’d have someone to hang out with who knows the country.”

  I’d been to Australia once in my early twenties, journeying up the coast from Sydney to Brisbane, seeing everything in between: a Mostly Mozart concert at the Sydney Opera House, a beautiful old cemetery, pet wombats and tame kangaroos, the surf and sea at Great Keppel Island. It was the most wonderful place I had ever visited. I had fallen in love with the wildlife, the wild places, and the open, friendly people.

  And there were the cougars. In the back of my mind I thought I might be able to combine my passion for rescue work with my love of Australia. Cougars had always been my focus, the reason I had started on the path I was traveling.

  Cougar Country was taking in cougars from everywhere: when they were raised as pets but discarded, when they grew too dangerous, and when they were orphaned by hunters. I couldn’t keep them all myself. I needed responsible facilities to take them. Completely naive about Australia’s importation and quarantine regulations, I nevertheless thought that surely there might be some opportunities down under for people doing educational work with wildlife, who might be able to take a cougar.

  Visiting Australia again, I thought, might not be a bad idea. How could I have known then that my decision would result, only a short time later, in a chance meeting with the man who would change my life?

  Chapter Four

  Burdekin

  After meeting Steve for the first time in the Queensland heat, I arrived back home to a cool, foggy Oregon in the fall of 1991. Malina and Cougar Country were waiting, and my old life quickly swept me up. But the world had changed. I had changed.