The characters are cardboard: Taggert was a sensitive boy who became a killing machine to live up to this dad’s expectations the conservationists seem molded out of some high-fiber substance.

The book reads well for a scientific text on pumas, but stumbles as a novel. Pumas show up on T-shirts on city streets as symbols of the wild and the free.įact, one is always a bit unsure just what is fact and what is invention. I’ve seen two mountain lions in my life, and those brief encounters still feed and comfort me during various bleak urban days. This is the book we are almost preconditioned to want to like. There are many kills in the story, and these descriptions are convincing and oddly comforting-a welcome respite from feel-good environmentalism. Just as Farley Mowat’s “Never Cry Wolf!” educated a mass audience about pack behavior, this novel will teach almost everyone facts they didn’t know about an elusive carnivore. In many ways, this is the most valuable part of the book. Lawrence’s scientific training sometimes pops up in his choice of language-”As he entered the darkened grotto, memory nagged at his cortex”-but more often appears in asides about the biology of pumas, their prey and their habitat. And, of course, the cops are told of the poaching/smuggling network and shut it down. In the end: Heather bonds with the white puma, is accidentally shot by Steve Cousins, converts him to conservationism, and sets up a research project in which Cousins, having sworn off hunting because he now realizes animals can think, becomes the official game warden protecting the cat. When word of this hunt gets out, a Canadian conservation group headed by Heather Lansing intervenes. The cat twice tries to kill them-once attacking Taggert on horseback, the second time dive-bombing their tent in the night.īesides selling parts of bears, lions and other animals as love potions in a smuggling operation in the Orient, the two men agree to track and kill the white cat for a $12,000 payment by a rich German hunter.

After killing the cat’s sister and mother (which is, unknown to Taggert, the puma responsible for his severed arm), the two men become bogged down in a war with the animal. Eventually, a white puma turns up in the hundreds of square miles where the two men hunt.

The White Puma by R.D. Lawrence