Humanity limps under the porch to die: Maria Anderson's "The Cougar"

If my goal was to give the stories in the 2018 Best American Short Stories collection the serious consideration they deserve, I picked a hard one to start with. The story is as full of symbols taking on a life of their own as the Montana woods of Maria Anderson's"The Cougar" are full of scary things.

I said "symbols," but that doesn't do justice to the images in "Cougar" that come to life, taking over the story the way the cancer "or some other disease" eats the Cherokee landlord Jenny up from the inside. Having absorbed the guts of the story, these images then set about devouring one another. There is so much going on in these fourteen pages, the marks I made to highlight key passages ended up taking over most of the text. The symbols start to acquire meaning, but the meanings are like waves, bouncing into each other, sometimes doubling each other and sometimes cancelling one another out.

The unnamed first-person narrator lives in a Montana where almost everyone important to him is destroying the Earth in some way. He lives near a dying logging town; dying because it has already taken down all the old forest that fueled its growth. The loss of old forest doomed the business of the narrator's father, a man who both loved the trees and also destroyed them, two facts he does not find contradictory: "Dad loved the woods, and, I think, for him, felling the oldest trees in the forests didn't mean he loved them any less." The narrator's friend works on an oil rig and encourages the narrator to join him. More disgustingly, there is the low-quality Chinese restaurant where the narrator washes dishes in a restaurant that serves food described in brutal terms that evoke the violence involved in meat: "Greasy piles of chicken or beef probably slaughtered years ago, thawed and slopped with sauce that left orange residue on the plates."

The meaning in the imagery is so thick, you could dive in anywhere and start swimming in it, but I'll start with two of the central images: the cat and the cougar. The cat here is one of those smiling, arm-swinging little statuettes: "The cat waved at you like it was waving away all the stuff you thought about. Like it was urging you not to think, not to worry about being able to buy food or pay rent or feel like you should try to make some friends or have sex again because that was what eighteen-year-olds did."

The cat represents one kind of reaction to living in the world where one must kill and destroy in order to survive. It's a jaded and cynical philosophy, best typified by the grandmother of the restaurant's owners. The owners, it turns out, are actually Korean, not Chinese, and they tried to first open the restaurant serving non-exotic Korean dishes that might appeal to Westerners. But nobody wanted it. As the grandmother put it, "They wanted shit. They wanted very cheap, big portion of shit...What I decide is, people want shit, you give them shit."

This is the philosophy of the ultra-pragmatist. You didn't make the world a place where you have to destroy to survive, but since it's like that, you might as well roll with it. The owner of the restaurant wants to destroy the cougar to have something go up on the wall that will bring in customers. It's a wholly cynical way of living. It's the way of the narrator's friend, Blake, who, when we first seem him, joins in the "big portion of shit": "I saw my friend Blake outside the gas station, holding a cup of shit coffee in a fancy portable mug."

I think these are actually Japanese in origin, although they're all over Asia now. 

It's a beguiling philosophy, one that holds out a promise of some wisdom for the narrator. He notes that the grandmother is from "a place called Soul," mistaking the capital of South Korea for something much deeper. He ascribes a spiritual wisdom to the owners of the restaurant they do not deserve. The cat seems to offer a sort of enlightened detachment from the world, but instead it encourages its adherents to exploit the world in a terrible way. The owners of the restaurant want the narrator to throw their trash in the river to save money.

The cougar, meanwhile, is the eponymous and powerful symbol of the story. While tracking the cougar after it attacks his dog, the narrator is looking for its scat, "which looks like cat shit, only bigger." Indeed, the cougar is in many ways similar to the cat, only far deeper. The cougar does not deny that to live in the world means having to destroy and kill. The cougar originally caught the narrator's interest when it killed a neighbor's horse, then came back for the remains before they could bury the thing. The cougar does not apologize for itself. The cougar is something like the narrator's father, not seeing a contradiction in loving and destroying.

After the father disappears, the boy narrator tries to find him. He also grows close to the father's dog. The dog seems to change how the narrator feels about life in a dying world. Before the dog, the boy seemed to seek a kind of spiritual detachment, one in which he is an island. The principal appeal of his job washing dishes is that "you could go the whole day without talking to anyone if you didn't feel like it." The entire tone of the narrator's voice suggests an interior monologue, with short, simple sentences prevailing. The boy is given to self-harm, perhaps as a deflection of sorts to take the place of the violence toward the world around him he does not want to carry out.

But the dog invades this space of the boy's world, literally, forcing the boy to turn on his side or spread his legs to make room for the dog on the bed. The boy begins to make plans to live in the world of his friend, working on the oil rig. He saves his money. He restricts his expenses. He steals food for the dog.

But the cougar has other plans. One day, the boy sees the cougar chase down and attack his dog. Although the boy chases the cougar off with a rifle shot, he hits the dog. The next day, the dog hobbles off into the woods to die. The boy loses all interest in heading off to the oil rig or having any kind of future at all.

The cougar is a symbol of a man living in the world as he needs to in order to survive and doing it without apologies. There is an irony in that kind of living, because the resources needed to sustain it are limited. By killing to survive, you reduce the resources needed to kill and eat again. The entire world of "The Cougar" is resource-starved. The town has lost its trees. The animals the narrator and his friend Jenny hunt are all thin and hungry-looking. But the cougar charges ahead anyway, because any philosophy that seems to offer a way out of this conundrum is a lie and a cheat.

It's possible to despise this kind of short-sightedness, but that doesn't seem to be the attitude of the story. Jenny, the narrator's landlord, whose prominent rat-tail gives him a sort of rodent-like link to nature, does not hate the cougar because it kills. Instead, he feeds it, even after it attacks the dog. When the narrator wants to hunt it, Jenny objects, saying "I'm not sure an animal deserves getting shot for being hungry...Nope, I'm not sure it does at all."

Both Jenny and the father seem to understand, like some animals do, when the end has come. They wander off, in different ways, to face their inevitable doom, a doom which is both private and universal, as the world cannot ultimately escape what it has begotten. But the cougar, the grim will to survive, to be part of the world in a non-cynical way, remains. The narrator sees it and can't believe it. "But there it was."

Notes on the writing

I've just scratched the surface of this wonderful story. I didn't even get to all the mother issues. "The Cougar" is a feast, and not a feast of shit buffet food. It makes me feel good to see that even with writing this tight, there are--I won't call them mistakes, but maybe places where I can see the technique the writer tried to hide.

One was after the narrator hits himself in the ankle with a rifle. In the next sentence, the narrator speaks of walking around in the woods on his "busted foot." Of course, it's his ankle, not his foot, that's hurt, but the writer had already said "ankle" once two sentences earlier and was about to say it again, so she opted for a near synonym that sounded just a quarter note off to me. It's not a mistake, of course. There's nothing wrong with it. But it's one of those things I'd write and spend an hour asking myself if I'm a complete fraud. Then, I'd realize I had nothing better and send it in for publication, expecting to fail. I'm glad this story didn't fail.

I also note that there really are no lines that are startlingly original on their own. It's not fireworks of verbal virtuosity. Rather, it's a slow accumulation of very simple descriptions, chosen judiciously, that together have an effect similar to one of those knock-you-down lines. I often chide myself for not being able to come up with many of those big-right-hook lines. But this story is an example of writing that works wonderfully without having those kinds of tricks up your sleeve.


FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE COME HERE FOR HELP INTERPRETING THIS STORY FOR SCHOOL OR SOMETHING SIMILAR, CHECK OUT KAREN CARLSON'S TAKE ON THIS STORY AS WELL.