American poachers with Far East connections can make hefty sums from body parts alone. Wealthy European hunters lust after his pelt and will pay thousands of dollars for a chance to shoot him. Despite some conservationist efforts, the puma, as the Peterson ``Field Guide to Mammals'' puts it, ``is fast disappearing from the scene.''īorn with a pure white coat, our hero is doubly rare and therefore doubly attractive. Now, thanks to trophy hunters, poachers, and stockmen, its numbers are vastly diminished. It is gripping without being artificially scary, touching without being maudlin, and it bears its important environmental and political message nearly as lightly as its 200-pound protagonist pads a game trail.Īlso known as the cougar or mountain lion, the puma once ranged widely over North and South America. It is a novel told largely from the point of view of a puma in the wilds of British Columbia. ``The White Puma'' by Canadian naturalist R. WHILE there are many fine examples of nonfiction nature writing, wild animals in fiction tend to be of three types: ``People in fur coats'' (to use the extreme preservationist phrase), dumb killing machines, or literary symbolic devices: Bambi, or Jaws, or Moby Dick.
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