The lion has extreme curiosity. He will follow travellers for hours if there is opportunity to keep out of sight while doing so. Often during long snowshoe trips I have returned over the route first travelled. Lion tracks in the snow showed that I was repeatedly followed for miles. In a number of places, where I had taken a long rest, the lion had crept up close, so that he could easily watch me; and on a few occasions he must have been within a few feet of me. While walking through a forest in the Medicine Bow Mountains I was startled and knocked down by a glancing blow of a tree limb. This limb had evidently broken off under the weight of a lion. The lion also came tumbling down but caught a claw on a limb and saved himself from striking the earth. Evidently in his curiosity to see me he had leaned out too far on a weak limb. He fled in confusion, perhaps even more frightened than myself. The mountain lion is not ferocious. Mr. Roosevelt, in summing up its characteristics, concluded that it would be no more dangerous to sleep in woods populated with mountain lions than if they were so many ordinary cats. In addition to years of camping in the wilds in all sorts of places and under all conditions of weather I have talked with careful frontiersmen, skillful hunters and trappers, and these people uniformly agreed with what I have found to be true--that the instances of mountain lions attacking human beings are exceedingly rare. In each of these cases the peculiar action of the lion and the comparative ineffectiveness of his attacks indicated that he was below normal mentally or nearly exhausted physically. Two other points of agreement are: Rarely does any one under ordinary conditions see a lion; and just as rarely does one hear its call. Of the dozen or more times I have heard the screech of the lion, on three occasions there was a definite cause for the cry--on one a mother frantically sought her young, which had been carried off by a trapper; and twice the cry was a wail, in each instance given by the lion calling for its mate, recently slain by a hunter. During the past thirty years I have investigated dozens of stories told of lions leaping upon travellers from cliffs or tree limbs, or of other stealthy attacks. When run down each of these proved to be an invention; in most cases not a lion or even lion track had been seen. Two instances of lion attacks are worth mentioning. One night in California a lion leaped from a cliff, struck a man, knocked him down, and then ran away. Out of this incident have come numerous stories of lion ferocity. The lion was tracked, however, and the following day the pursuing hunter saw it crossing an opening. It suddenly clawed and hit at a boulder. Then, going on, it apparently ran into a tree, and fought that. As it started on the hunter shot it. This beast was badly emaciated, had a swollen face from an ulcerated tooth, and was nearly, if not entirely, blind.