Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Heart of a Lion: A Lone Cat's Walk Across America
    Heart of a Lion: A Lone Cat's Walk Across America
    Heart of a Lion: A Lone Cat's Walk Across America
    Audiobook7 hours

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

    Written by William Stolzenburg

    Narrated by Mike DelGaudio

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Late one June night in 2011, a large animal collided with an SUV cruising down a Connecticut parkway. The creature appeared as something out of New England’s forgotten past. Beside the road lay a 140-pound mountain lion.

    Speculations ran wild, the wildest of which figured him a ghostly survivor from a bygone century when lions last roamed the eastern United States. But a more fantastic scenario of facts soon unfolded. The lion was three years old, with a DNA trail embarking from the Black Hills of South Dakota on a cross-country odyssey eventually passing within thirty miles of New York City. It was the farthest landbound trek ever recorded for a wild animal in America, by a barely weaned teenager venturing solo through hostile terrain.

    William Stolzenburg retraces his two-year journey—from his embattled birthplace in the Black Hills, across the Great Plains and the Mississippi River, through Midwest metropolises and remote northern forests, to his tragic finale upon Connecticut’s Gold Coast. Along the way, the lion traverses lands with people gunning for his kind, as well as those championing his cause.

    Heart of a Lion is a story of one heroic creature pitting instinct against towering odds, coming home to a society deeply divided over his return. It is a testament to the resilience of nature, and a test of humanity’s willingness to live again beside the ultimate symbol of wildness.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateApr 12, 2016
    ISBN9781480532090
    Heart of a Lion: A Lone Cat's Walk Across America
    Author

    William Stolzenburg

    William Stolzenburg has written hundreds of magazine articles about the science and spirit of saving wild creatures. A 2010 Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellow, he is the author of the books Where the Wild Things Were and Rat Island. He is also the screenwriter of the documentaries Lords of Nature: Life in a Land of Great Predators and Ocean Frontiers: The Dawn of a New Era in Ocean Stewardship. He lives in Reno, Nevada.

    Related to Heart of a Lion

    Related audiobooks

    Nature For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Full Monty

      Mar 16, 2023

      If I knew I were to die in six months’ time, what would I do in the garden? Perhaps the notion of planting for a future I could not share would seem pointless. But I doubt it. Gardening transcends time. Gardens never exist in any one moment. They are

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Fire Starters

      Oct 2, 2023

      The Fire Starters
      14 min read

    • Article

      A Hostile Country

      Sep 1, 2021

      A Hostile Country
      21 min read

    • Article

      Backyard Beasts of Prey

      May 11, 2018

      Backyard Beasts of Prey
      9 min read

    • Article

      Please, Consider the Beaver

      Aug 1, 2018

      Please, Consider the Beaver
      8 min read

    • Article

      Good Neighbors

      Sep 1, 2021

      I’M WATCHING TWO MOUNTAIN LIONS slip down the trail, haunches swaying, their long, tufted tails slung low behind them. The sight elicits in me a certain electric excitement that I can’t quite place. They move with a kind of nonchalant ease, as if awa

      2 min read

    • Article

      Back To Where It All Began

      Jul 28, 2022

      Back To Where It All Began
      19 min read

    • Article

      Lionized

      Sep 1, 2023

      Lionized
      7 min read

    • Article

      What’s In The Water

      May 10, 2019

      What’s In The Water
      7 min read

    • Article

      Elect The Wolf?

      Jun 26, 2020

      Elect The Wolf?
      16 min read

    • Article

      A Swan Song

      Mar 5, 2018

      A Swan Song
      2 min read

    • Article

      Pan-American Migrants

      Aug 30, 2019

      Pan-American Migrants
      3 min read

    • Article

      Hook, Line, and Sinker

      Jul 12, 2022

      Hook, Line, and Sinker
      18 min read

    • Article

      Across Nevada on The loneliest Road

      Jul 6, 2021

      Across Nevada on The loneliest Road
      10 min read

    • Article

      Flight Of The Condors

      Apr 6, 2021

      Flight Of The Condors
      12 min read

    • Article

      Desolate, Forbidding Terrain At A Remote Border Crossing

      Jan 8, 2019

      ANTELOPE WELLS, N.M. - Antelope Wells is 170 miles southwest of El Paso, a three-hour drive through forbidding terrain, where stray dogs and deadly snakes roam and where even the water in wells can prove poisonous. It's at the southernmost tip of New

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Heart of a Lion

    4.5/5

    11 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      I'm from the East Coast where we don't have big cats, at least not for 100s of years. Heart of a Lion upturned everything I knew about mountain lions (cougars). I thought they were a deadly menace. They are not. More people are killed by porcupines. They have been persecuted nearly to the point of extinction based on primal fears. Like other top predators they have an important place, culling herds of deer and allowing forests and wetlands to reach full potential. The book does not sugar coat the occasional attack, they have happened, but it is rare and with special circumstances. Such is life alongside wild animals, given the alternative I'll take it. The book is particularly brutal on those western states that have no-tolerance laws seeking to eliminate the cougar entirely. Stunning that what identifies the west, bravery and fortitude, like in South Dakota which is a sort of nursing ground for cougars, elected officials have become ignorant pansies, ignoring experts, ignoring science, appealing to the worst and darkest fears. The cougar is struggling to survive, but the laws around this amazing animal need to change. May it one day find a foothold in the East again, if the South Dakotans and every mid-west state in between would stop shooting for a bit, they will migrate across. But the shooting gallery won't let them through, trapping them in trees with dogs, running them aground with officials unloading 100s of rounds in a spasm of fear and excitement. In California they get by just fine, they are protected with very few problems. Treat them well and amazingly they do the same in return.
    • 5/5
      This is superbly written, journalistic style non-fiction, rendering a mountain lion's journey from the Black Hills of South Dakota to the Connecticut coast, but that's only the glue that holds this exceptional work together. Avoiding sensationalistic and preachy writing, this book is an engrossing, fully researched, well-balanced presentation of facts, complemented with juxtaposition of perspectives relative to predators. In other words, beyond immersive reading, this book has the potential to broaden understanding. Oh, he details the ill-fated adventures of big cats and other predators, and addresses the reasons why they undertake such journeys, but additionally he shows rare insight into the minds of their adversaries such as:" From the first teetering steps to the inimitable cocky stride in humanity’s six-million-year journey— from tree-dwelling, knuckle-walking offshoot of an African ape, to bipedal globe-trotting pedestrian of the world— had come uncounted sidetracks and detours through the bellies of big cats. Being hunted was a fact of early life that forever shaped the growing brains and bodies of the people who would come to be."And their supporters such as:" Whether eastward from the Rockies or northward from the Florida swamps, the exiled eastern cougar would need help coming home. The rewilders’ pleas for civility and compassion obviously weren’t cutting it. But their cause had lately embraced yet a more ecological rationale for why the East so needed its big cat back. The murmur had been gathering from field sites and conference halls, formally surfacing in academic journals and publicized in mainstream media. Researchers from around the world were returning with disquieting reports of forests dying, coral reefs collapsing, pests and plagues irrupting. Beyond the bulldozers and the polluters and the usual cast of suspects, a more insidious factor had entered the equation. It was becoming ever more apparent that the extermination of the earth’s apex predators— the lions and wolves of the land, the great sharks and big fish of the sea, all so vehemently swept aside in humanity’s global swarming— had triggered a cascade of ecological consequences. Where the predators no longer hunted, their prey had run amok, amassing at freakish densities, crowding out competing species, denuding landscapes and seascapes as they went."This together with chronicled transitions in thinking by involved individuals, exemplifies the potential of critical thinking. One example being Aldo Leopold's journey from advocating well managed stark forestlands, to recognizing the vibrancy and greater productivity of forestlands with a naturally occurring full complement of biodiversity. This isn't a book a thoughtful person will soon forget. With the breadth of reasoning it encompasses, the reader will find themselves wondering how human potential will play out in a setting of self-destructive proclivities. In our haste to overcome Nature have we gone too far, or is this simply evolving ecology? The author makes a fair case for both, leaving the reader to exercise critical thinking. “The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” ~ Edwin Schlossberg