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On February 4, Travis Kauffman was finishing a race on the Towers Trail outside Fort Collins when he heard the pine trees leave behind him. Usually, when he hears this kind of noise on a trail, it comes from a rabbit or another small animal. But it was not a rabbit.
"I turned around and was really disappointed to see a mountain lion chasing me," Kauffman said at a press conference in Fort Collins on February 14th.
He started screaming to scare her, but it did not work. When the mountain lion fell on Kauffman, he clogged his face with his hands. The mountain lion began to scratch him and eventually locked his jaw around his right wrist.
"That's when my reaction to fear turned into a reaction to the fight," said Kauffman.
They ran down part of the track together in what Kauffman described as a "wrestling match".
He knew that the back legs of the mountain lion could cause serious damage after learning in the most difficult way from Obi, the cat he and his girlfriend have at home. Kauffman thus stuck the cat's hind legs with his left knee to prevent him from scratching him further.
"As a pretty new cat owner, I realized that once you have a cat on your back, he goes crazy," he said.
Courtesy of Wayne Lewis from CPW
Kauffman then reached with his free hand for the nearby sticks to try to stab the mountain lion. But all the sticks that he caught were rotten, rendering them useless against the wild animal. Kauffman found a rock and struck the mountain lion twice on the head. It did not work either, and the mountain lion kept his jaw around his wrist.
"There was a point where I was afraid of not getting out of it," said Kauffman, adding that he feared another mountain lion would join the fight. "Fortunately, this was not the case."
Finally, Kauffman was able to move and put his right foot on the neck of the mountain lion. The environmental consultant of 5 "10", 150 pounds held his foot for three minutes, suffocating, to finally choke the mountain lion.Kauffman was then able to catch his wrist in the mouth of the dead cat.
Bloodied and beaten, stabbed and covered with cuts, Kauffman left the dead mountain lion on the trail and started running. After about two miles, he ran into another runner heading in the opposite direction. The two went down together and met a couple. The woman took Kauffman by car to the nearest emergency room, while the first man Kauffman met and his partner went to pick up Kauffman 's truck.
Kauffman received nineteen stitches on the cheeks, six on the bridge of the nose and three on the wrist. He also had several punctures of teeth and claws.
Annie Bierbouer, Kauffman's girlfriend, rushed to the labor hospital as soon as she learned what had happened. "Can I kiss her? Can I kiss her?" Recalls Bierbouer.
"I was just grateful that he had his eyes, his fingers and all his parts," she said at the press conference.
Moments before meeting the national media, Travis Kauffman and Annie Bierbouer kiss at our office.
Our live broadcast of the press conference will start at 1:15 pm MT @CPW_NE pic.twitter.com/s6pReZrMCa
– CO Parks & Wildlife (@COParksWildlife) February 14, 2019
Kauffman pondered all the attention he had after his near-death experience.
"It's a bit odd to feel famous for an undeserved reason," he said. "I will never be able to live up to reputation."
Kauffman joked that he was not Chuck Norris. "Chuck would like to go out without a scratch, you know him, and he would probably have the lion slung over his shoulder."
Kauffman, who has no experience of martial arts or wrestling but is an outdoorsman, was lucky that the mountain lion was not fully developed. Staff at Colorado Parks and Wildlife estimate that the mountain lion is in the fifty-pound range, while an adult mountain lion can weigh up to 150 pounds.
"We are all extremely fortunate that this attack was perpetrated by a young mountain lion," said Mark Leslie, Northeast Region Manager for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, at the press conference. Mountain lions rarely attack humans, and there have been fewer than a dozen victims of mountain lion attacks over the last 100 years in America.
Kauffman left Arkansas to settle in Fort Collins five years ago to take advantage of the state's outdoor recreation opportunities, which he still participates in, even though he has barely escaped death on a running path. He has even recently revisited the scene of his encounter with wildlife with the employees of Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
Kauffman said that he would not write a survival book in a short time because he has not much to say. "Maybe a booklet," he says jokingly. But he had some tips for the runners.
"Do not run with a helmet [when you’re in] some of these areas really further away, "he said, adding that he would probably no longer participate in long distance races. And just keep all your senses open and enjoy everything that happens. "
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