Mountain lions

Mountain lions are a recurring presence in the changing landscape after the Great Disaster, not a single, isolated menace. Their numbers rise and fall with the abundance of prey, and their approach to The Tribe turns ecological change into a practical danger: people must carry rifles, protect their dogs, and reckon with the limits of travel. When one attacks Ish, the encounter leaves him with a lasting disability that shapes his life for years.

Predators in a Rewilding Landscape

Ish’s observations of the animals he encounters on the road place mountain lions within a broader, uncertain reshuffling of wildlife. Near Oatman, Princess rushes at two burros; the jack lays back its ears and charges, driving her back to the safety of Ish’s car. Ish judges that the donkey would be more than a match for a wolf, and that even a mountain lion might regret attacking it. The moment gives the mountain lion a place in Ish’s ranking of animal strength, while showing that the new landscape is not simply a contest between people and predators: other animals can defend themselves, and the outcome of an encounter depends on the creature involved.

The future of mountain lions is also part of Ish’s effort to imagine what will happen when human management disappears. Across overgrazed range, cattle might multiply and consume the grass before their predators could control them; alternatively, hoof-and-mouth disease might reduce the herds, or wolves and mountain lions might increase faster than he expects. Ish cannot settle which chain of events will prevail. He anticipates that a moderately stable condition could emerge in twenty-five or fifty years, with the country gradually coming to resemble its state before white settlement. His account makes the cats one possible influence in an ecological balance, not the guaranteed agents of a simple restoration.

Sheep offer a more severe example of the consequences of domestication. Ish imagines flocks left without shepherds, vulnerable to winter blizzards, summer thirst, spring floods, and stampedes over cliffs. Dogs, wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, and bears continue to prey on them; over time, the enormous flocks break into small, frightened groups and disappear. In this account, mountain lions belong to a community of predators, but sheep’s dependence on human protection is what makes their disappearance likely. The contrast underscores that the end of human control benefits some animals while leaving others poorly equipped to survive.

The Year of the Lions

By the seventh year, mountain lions have become an immediate danger around The Tribe’s homes. People scarcely dare walk between houses without a rifle, and they keep a dog close to warn them. The children have to remain indoors. The cats do not quite dare attack a person, but they kill four dogs, bringing the threat close to the settlement even before Ish is injured.

Ish interprets the sudden pressure as an aftereffect of the cattle boom. While cattle were plentiful, mountain lions must have bred rapidly; after drought killed off the cattle, the predators were left without their accustomed food and began closing in. The connection makes the lions’ arrival more than an inexplicable attack: a human-created imbalance in animal numbers has helped produce the danger, and the collapse of the herds changes where the predators hunt. The Tribe names the year for the animals that have made ordinary movement unsafe.

Ish’s Injury and Its Aftermath

The danger becomes personal when Ish misses a shot at a mountain lion. Instead of killing it, he wounds it, and the animal charges and mauls him before Ezra can shoot it. Ish survives, but afterward he walks with a limp and tires when he must remain seated for a long time, as when driving. The encounter is therefore not a passing adventure followed by a return to normal: it changes what his body can do and becomes one of the enduring conditions of his life.

That limitation matters as The Tribe’s options narrow. The roads deteriorate, cars become unreliable, and there are few reasons to drive; much later, Ish is still poorly suited to long walks, even for the trip to a reservoir less than a mile away. When The Tribe considers an expedition to find out whether the United States Government has been reconstituted, his old injury rules him out. The decision rests on his physical capacity, not on a lack of interest: he can scarcely offer a strong protest before the group selects Robert and Richard instead.

The injury also shapes Ish’s anxieties about that expedition. At night he imagines the dangers the younger men might face, including mountain lions, bears, and bad-tempered bulls, as well as storms, floods, and a car breakdown far from home. The cats recur in his thinking as one element among many in a country where travel no longer enjoys the protections of maintained roads or dependable institutions. His fears are not proof that the expedition will meet a lion; they show how the earlier attack has made the risks of the altered environment concrete for him.

Ecological and Narrative Significance

Mountain lions acquire their narrative force through changing relations among species rather than through constant pursuit of human characters. Their abundance is linked to plentiful cattle, their movement toward people to the loss of prey, and their danger to sheep to the disappearance of shepherding. These connections give the animals an independent place in the novel’s account of a world reorganizing itself, even as Ish’s observations remain the main means by which that world is described.

At the same time, the attack on Ish makes the ecological shift inseparable from human vulnerability. The cats do not need to become a constant enemy: the deaths of four dogs, the need for caution around the houses, and one lasting injury are enough to alter daily life and long-term choices. The Year of the Lions marks a period when the effects of the cattle collapse arrive at The Tribe’s doorstep, while Ish’s limp carries that encounter forward into later years.