Some obsessions may have unfathomable origins, but I can pinpoint the exact hour that my most demanding obsession raised its seductive head, hooking me into a quest that has been tantalizing me ever since. I was in southern Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park, riding down a dirt road in a light drizzle, with a very hung-over park ranger who had promised to take my friends and me to a recent puma kill. Our plans had changed when we met our guide, who was still sound asleep from too many glasses (or bottles!) of wine. Once shaken awake, he informed us that he had cancelled our hike to the kill. Instead, we’d drive the roads to look for puma—a futile, time-wasting exercise in my mind.

	The llama-like guanaco is the largest and most conspicuous of the puma’s prey items in southern Chile.

Just before dawn we stopped at an overlook and the ranger stepped out to listen for the alarm whistles of guanacos, a distant New World relative of the camel that resembles a slender, tawny llama. Guanacos are the puma’s largest and most conspicuous prey. Like many prey animals, guanacos will broadcast an alarm whenever a predator is spotted.

Incredibly, while he listened a puma materialized in the predawn gloom, close by and approaching nearer and obviously causing the ranger some concern for he began barking like a dog and waving his arms frantically. The puma moved off. This puzzled me, for earlier the ranger had told us stories about how approachable a puma can be.

I was inside our vehicle and, truth be told, I now can’t remember whether or not I even saw the cat. But I wanted to, so I took the man at his word and jumped out of the car, binoculars in hand, hoping I might get a decent view of the puma before it disappeared.

I found the cat, less than one hundred yards away, and over the next half hour I followed it, taking side trails that slowly drew me closer, eventually to within 25 yards of the unconcerned animal. I could have remained with the puma throughout the day, if only my companions had known where I had gone, but they didn’t. Their last glimpse of me was as I ran through the van’s headlight beam and disappeared into the brush.

Eventually the puma’s trail meandered up a steep hillside. At that point, 30 minutes into our encounter, I stopped, worried that the puma might feel pressured being trailed and that my friends might be concerned. I shouldn’t have worried about the latter. “Do you think we’ll ever see the gringo again?” our driver casually asked, shortly before I reappeared over the horizon.

Afterwards, I learned that a mother puma with young cubs lived in this area, and it is entirely possible that the cat was returning to its den on some rocky ledge or outcrop. Exactly one year later one of my friends videoed a mother puma with three 18 month old cubs within a half mile of where I had my encounter, and I am fairly certain it was the same cat. I was in the park, but the weather turned sour and Mary Ann and I headed back to the hotel to call it a day. As it was almost completely dark when he found and videoed the cat, I consoled myself that I didn’t miss a photographic opportunity. But I almost did again the next year.

We’d been in the park eight days, photographing everything Torres del Paine had to offer for the first six, and had planned to spend our last two exclusively on our puma quest. This, our last day, began with another disappointing repetition of our other predawn drives and we saw nothing but the glowing eyes of the introduced European hare and the gold shine of a Patagonian gray fox in our headlights.

At first light we split up to broaden our search on foot, with the four members of our party all taking different routes. My Chilean friend advised us to travel without gear, believing our chances of finding a puma were so slim that the effort involved carrying equipment wasn’t worth it. We carried small handset radios and our plan, if one of us spotted a cat, was to radio the others who would then return to the car for the gear. Stupidly, I agreed.

I’ve been photographing wildlife as a full-time professional since 1983, and as a serious amateur or semi-pro since 1968, and I do know better. With wildlife, if you miss a chance because you’re without gear, you rarely get another. Nevertheless, I had agreed, perhaps because I too harbored secret doubts. Besides, we were assured that a puma would sit tight if we did happen to find one.

Well, I did find one, and the puma did stay put for the entire hour and one half required for Mary to hike to our rendezvous point and return with my friend and his assistant. During that time the puma, no more than 50 yards away, calmly sat and watched me. It was a sunny, beautiful day, and I was despondent, watching this spectacular show without my gear. Time never went so slow.

Eventually they appeared, and as my friend scrambled up the ridge to join me I hustled down the rocks to grab my gear. ‘Where’s my tripod? Where’s my pack?” I whispered frantically.

“I don’t have it. He does,” nodding towards the tiny figure at the bottom of the ridge. ”Where’s the cat?”

	The puma stopped for a moment and looked back just seconds before it disappeared over the ridge.

“There,” I said, turning and pointing at … an empty rock. The cat had slipped off its perch and was gone. Even now, as I write this, I still tense up with the frustration I felt, the sheer exasperation of having been so close and having blown a spectacular opportunity.

A few long minutes later our assistant, sweating heavily and limping, joined us. He was a bit annoyed, as my camera, loosely secured in a long lens pack, had continually banged his head as he hiked, and, shortly after starting, he had tripped and strained his ankle. I grabbed my gear and directed my two companions to look for the cat. Mary, burdened by her heavy pack and at this point near exhaustion, was still a few hundred yards behind. I headed straight to the rock where the cat had been, hoping to trace the route it may have taken.

I stopped abruptly less than a minute later. The puma hadn’t left; it merely slipped off the rock to lie down in an adjacent hollow, just 20 yards from where I stood. I swung my equipment off my shoulder and set up.

	The puma hadn’t disappeared; it was merely lying in a hollow next to the rock.

This time, the puma didn’t stay long, and after I’d taken a few shots the cat moved uphill, sat again for a few seconds, and then glided across an open rock face as it made its way to the top of the ridge. It paused once to look back, and then disappeared over the rise. Mary, who’d done the most work of all of us, was rewarded by a brief glimpse just before the cat ducked out of sight.

We had another chance again just a few months ago, as Mary and I added a few extra days for a puma hunt after the Joseph Van Os Ultimate Antarctica trip, where we participated as two of the leaders. This time we had four days for hunting, and we were fairly confident we’d have some luck as we had allotted more time than the other two seasons combined. We fantasized that we’d get the cat twice, on the second and on the fourth day, and, buoyed by that belief, we set to work.

Our puma hunts started long before dawn. Because of last-minute bookings we were staying at a hotel nearly twice the distance to our usual search area, so nearly 40 minutes each "morning" was wasted in a fast drive on winding mountain roads just to reach our site. Pumas, of course, can be found anywhere within the park and, in fact, we’d considered two other areas before deciding to concentrate our search on the location where we’d had all of our previous activity. That was a difficult decision, because a very calm puma and large cubs had been seen repeatedly near one of the park's lodges, but we felt the shooting conditions there were too difficult to risk the time.

Our first day proved uneventful. We drove, hiked and watched, found some old kills, and discovered a surprising number of guanacos in hidden little valleys. As we would on each of the following days, we marked our photographic success by shooting something—a family of Patagonian gray foxes on this day.

Day Two started in a cold drizzle, and our predawn drive was truly an endurance contest, as the drizzle intensified into a steady rain. Spotting anything through our rain and mud-streaked windshield was difficult, so we stopped at a likely looking puma-crossing and I stepped out of the car to listen for guanacos. Nothing. Returning to the car a few minutes later I found Mary and my friend asleep. That seemed like a good idea and I did the same.

About a half hour later I awoke, and in the brighter light of a dreary dawn I walked out to a nearby ridge for another look. Guanacos were whistling like the devil, and in the dull light I could see their distant shapes, all pointing towards the still hidden puma. My friend had awakened as well, and hearing the whistles, ran to a different overlook. He spotted the cat, slinking low almost a quarter mile away, but it disappeared moments later. We spent until midday searching the area, looking for a resting puma in knee-high grasslands, without success. Another fox family saved the day, photographically.

Day Three started with a promise. Venus, the morning star, was shining so brightly on the eastern horizon that Mary and I mistook it for a large spotlight. As we drove east a light rain began, and by the time we’d completed our predawn drive and began our foot search the weather had turned into a soaking gale. We aborted that effort, and filled the day with drives and hikes in likely-looking country.

	Andean condor

Great weather returned for our last morning, and after another fruitless predawn drive the three of us headed out on foot for a final search. Two hours later I rendezvoused with Mary and we headed back to where I’d parked the car. En route, we kicked up a dozen Andean condors and half that many crested caracaras, all taking flight when we crested a nearby ridge. We discovered a guanaco, picked nearly clean by the scavengers, with the distinguishing puncture wounds of a puma at the guanaco’s throat. The kill was fresh, for the blood inside the body cavity was still liquid, and we know from our time in Africa that carrion-eating birds can reduce a carcass this size to mere bones in less than an hour. We had just missed the cat.

We learned by how little when we continued to the car, and discovered that I’d parked the vehicle within a quarter mile of the carcass! At the car I tried retracing the route I’d taken initially, and found that my path led me right through the grasses where the guanaco lay.

	My fingers are straddling the two punctures of the puma’s incisors.

Most likely, the puma was lying in wait—we discovered a hollowed-out bush later that was the perfect ambush site—as I passed by.

We certainly had mixed emotions, for in one way our understandable disappointment was tempered by the fact that in this very large park we’d almost found a needle in a haystack. Still, close only counts in horseshoes, so we spent the rest of the day checking every likely-looking area where a well-fed puma might retreat. We hiked at least ten miles, carrying our gear of course, and were completely exhausted by the end of the day.

In truth, I hoped that I’d find the puma on this trip and be free at last to put this obsession behind me. It is an expensive one, with flights to Chile, 4x4 car rentals, and premium lodging in a costly park. But it wasn’t long after we returned home that I began planning for the next attempt.

This time, we’ll devote a full ten or twelve days, and we’re looking into renting a camper instead of staying at a lodge. We’ll carry GPS radios so that if anyone finds the cat we can broadcast the coordinates to the others. Via a Google search I learned that Garmin’s Rino 530 GPS has a 14-mile talk radius, and a two-mile peer-to-peer positioning feature for tracking another Rino user, so we can separate with the confidence that we could rendezvous when necessary.

Interestingly, however, my Chilean friend, after seeing a collection of "wildlife model" puma shots on my laptop, asked Mary and me why we bothered to go to all this trouble for these wild pumas. Did I have a magazine assignment or a book contract? Would these images sell better than the spectacular captive puma images I showed him? Was there more worth, commercially, in wild puma shots? Would we ever recoup the money involved?

The answer to all his questions is a likely "no." While there certainly is more stock placed in a photograph of a wild animal over a captive, many markets simply don’t care and will use the best shot they can find. Those that do care, particularly magazines, don’t pay enough or publish enough shots to make the expense worthwhile. So why do we bother?

	Joe and Mary Ann McDonald

Well, to paraphrase the mountaineer, because it’s there. Most of the subjects we photograph, on safari or in North American parks, aren’t too difficult to capture. Sure, there’s luck, skill and patience involved in getting a great leopard image, for example, but I’d be really surprised not to shoot one on any given safari. That’s certainly not the case with a wild puma. Bbut it is possible and, sometimes, regardless of the personal cost and time involved, it’s fun and rewarding to put all one’s fieldcraft together to seek a very difficult goal. To us, this quest is a puzzle—but what a fun puzzle! We employ our field knowledge, using what we’ve learned from the big cats of Africa and apply this data to another cat in a different hemisphere. Will we have success?

Time will only tell—but if you’re a betting person, you can lay odds on it.

All images Copyright © Joe and Mary Ann McDonald