Maurice Hornocker

IN A PLEASANT JUNE AFTERNOON IN 1990, Lynda Walters, a medical student at the Denver campus of the University of Colorado, took a study break and headed for her favorite trail in Four-Mile Canyon, just west of Boulder. It was near 5 o'clock when she rounded a bend in the trail and came face-to-face with a crouched mountain lion. Walters yelled and slowly backed away from the animal--sound defensive tactics. But the lion began to stalk her, homing in with incredible concentration.

IN A PLEASANT JUNE AFTERNOON IN 1990, Lynda Walters, a medical student at the Denver campus of the University of Colorado, took a study break and headed for her favorite trail in Four-Mile Canyon, just west of Boulder. It was near 5 o'clock when she rounded a bend in the trail and came face-to-face with a crouched mountain lion. Walters yelled and slowly backed away from the animal--sound defensive tactics. But the lion began to stalk her, homing in with incredible concentration.

I am responding to the Jan. 10 letter from Robert M. Miller, who wants cougars "managed" by Department of Fish and Game "experts." The voter-approved Proposition 117 specifically provides Fish and Game with management and public-safety authority. That measure restricts only cruel, one-sided, high-tech cougar trophy hunting. It should also be noted that wildlife management policy is made by the Fish and Game Commission, not by the department. Commission members are political appointees of the governor.

When all else fails, ask for further study. That is the approach being taken now by the Sacramento-based Mountain Lion Preservation Foundation to the proposed resumption, after a 15-year moratorium, of the sport hunting of cougars in California. More study often is a cop-out, but it is justified in this instance. Existing data on the number of lions in the state--and their chances of surviving as a species, with or without hunting--are conflicting and incomplete.

It's James Joyce, back from the dead! The very fast mind, the pleading with humanity, the hate-filled humor, the love-filled humor, the chaotic honesty that you can't trust (because Dave Eggers makes fun of every non-authentic thing down to the copyright page). But it doesn't matter if you trust him or not, or does it? "Based on a True Story" says the fine print on the cover of this memoir. I mean, did his parents really both die of cancer within five weeks of one another?

Mountain lion preservationists and hunting proponents hauled out the heavy artillery Thursday in back-to-back press conferences aimed at influencing a California Fish and Game Commission decision today on whether to end a 16-year ban on lion hunting. Proponents of the hunting season held a news conference featuring Donald and Susan Small, whose daughter, Laura, was mauled by a mountain lion in Orange County last year.

Sunday "Scams, Schemes & Scoundrels" / 5 and 9 p.m. A&E Have you ever been the victim of a con man? Costly as that experience may have been, there are other people throughout history who have been taken for a ride, as it were, and this two-hour show introduces them. To wit: In the 1920s, a fellow passed himself off as a French official who sold the Eiffel Tower to scrap metal dealers. And before World War II, a Dutch painter exacted revenge on his critics by forging the works of Vermeer.

Siberian tigers, the greatest and most mysterious of the great cats, may vanish from their snowy home in the next few decades. U.S. and Soviet scientists are about to embark on an unprecedented project to keep that from happening. It will blend the divergent expertise of the two superpowers in their first joint study of Siberian tigers in the wild. The Soviets are unparalleled in their ability to track the huge beasts in the deep snows of the Soviet Far East.

As the elusive mountain lion--the once-hunted ghost of North America--makes an amazing comeback in the Western United States, the problem of peaceful coexistence with people becomes critical. Maurice G. Hornocker, who has studied the big cats since 1963, dispels two myths long used to justify eradicating the animals: that mountain lions will overrun the countryside and are a danger to big-game herds.

Mike Davis isn't so bad. Los Angeles' most provocative social critic has stretched, bent and broken more than a few facts in "Ecology of Fear," his latest, darkly themed work on the urban area he claims to love. But if there were such a thing as a court of literary crimes, Davis probably would be convicted only of minor ones. Most of his stretchers appear to be the result of haste, wishful thinking and a taste for entertaining hyperbole rather than malice.