Heart of a Lion: A Lone Cat’s Walk Across America

In this short but wide-ranging book, Stolzenburg (Rat Island) traces the lone odyssey of a single male mountain lion across the United States, culminating in June 2011 in Connecticut with the cat’s demise on a motorist’s fender. The book more broadly examines the current population of the mountain lions of South Dakota’s Black Hills, where the titular cat originated. The evidence of his eastward journey is presented sporadically throughout the text, with a live sighting here and a trail camera video there, as well as various clues of tracks and scat. Stolzenburg intersperses cougar history into the narrative, stretching back to prehistoric times and forward through to the early 21st century. He profiles humans who interact with these big cats, such as researcher and advocate Chris Spatz of the Eastern Cougar Foundation, and even conspiracy theorists who believe the government is secretly airlifting cougars into the eastern U.S. to control deer populations. Stolzenburg’s prose occasionally misses the mark; his description of famed cougar hunter Ben Lilly reads more like a tall tale, and elsewhere his writing veers toward hyperbole (“Eastward before him lay the black abyss of alien prairie”). Agent: Russell Galen, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary. (Apr.)