The two men had been fishing the inlet stream to Lower Quartz Lake in Glacier National Park when a mountain lion charged up a brushy path at Goerner. Sheltering behind a deadfall, Goerner swatted at the attacking cat and managed to keep it at bay until, at Montagnino's approach, it backed off. Crouching down a few yards away, it screamed at the men for several minutes, then melted away into the brush. No one knows for certain. About 15 people have been killed by lions since 1900, but of the hundreds of verified attacks, what's alarming is that three-quarters of them have come in the past 25 years.
Hunters often are the intended victims.
Keith Aune, who is compiling a statistical report on lion-human confrontations for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, says that about five hunters each year report close encounters where they were stalked or growled at in the field. But because many hunters, myself included, have experienced aggressive encounters that were never formally registered, the true figure is probably much higher. Aune himself was persistently threatened by a lion as he hunted deer in Montana's Bob Marshall Wilderness. He fired into the ground near the cat several times, but although it jumped at the shots, it continued to follow him, creeping closer and closer. Aune thought he would have to kill the lion, which followed for half a mile or more, but it finally lost interest.