A cougar attacked them. They fought back for 45 harrowing minutes

Editor's note: This story contains graphic photographs and descriptions of an animal attack.

It was a beautiful Pacific Northwest day. Sunny, puffy clouds on the horizon.

Five competitive cyclists – women in their 50s and 60s – met at the Tokul Creek trail north of Snoqualmie.

At the yellow gate before riding into the deep forest, the women took a group selfie. They had no premonition that 19 miles in, a young male cougar would attack one of them, and that they’d spend 45 minutes in a battle for their lives.

Cougars, wild cats also known as mountain lions or pumas, are reclusive and tend to stay away from humans. In the Northwest, people who spend time in the mountains know these apex predators may be lurking nearby, but sightings are rare.

Even more unusual is an attack on a human. There have been 20 cougar attacks recorded in Washington state in the last century, two of which were fatal.

The prevailing advice for a cougar encounter is to make yourself big – and loud. So when two cougars ambled across the gravel trail where the cyclists were riding, Auna Tietz started shouting.

“Cougar! Cougar!”

The first cougar, presumably the mother or a sibling, ran off. But the younger one paused … and then lunged at Keri Bergere, 60, who was biking a few paces ahead of him.

“Looking to my right, I saw the cougar’s face,” Bergere said. “It was just a split second, and he tackled me off my bike.”

Bergere and the cougar tumbled into a shallow ditch to the side of the trail. The animal sunk his teeth into Bergere’s jaw and pinned her face into the dirt.

“I thought my teeth were coming loose, and I was gonna swallow my teeth,” she said. “I could feel the bones crushing, and I could feel it tearing back.”

The cougar ripped an earring out of her ear, while maintaining a vice grip on her.

“I felt like it was suffocating me,” she said. “I could taste the blood in my mouth.”

Bergere, who is short with silver hair, is a self-described extreme athlete. Her friends, teammates from the co-ed racing team, Recycled Cycles Racing, add that she’s warm, optimistic, and badass. She has biked across Washington state twice, and once rode a 200-mile race in one day. On this particular day, she had just recovered from a two-week bout of Covid, and was back in the saddle for the first time since getting sick.

As Bergere inhaled the ground, she could hear her friends mobilize around her with rocks and sticks. They screamed, expletives unfurling.

“These ladies are not big, and they were killing this cougar,” Bergere said. “They were not going to let it get me.”

Fight, flight, or freeze, they say, and these women fought. One had a two-inch knife and used it to stab the wild cat – to little avail.

Cyclist Annie Bilotta, 64, tried to choke the cat.

“That was like choking a rock,” she said. “It did absolutely nothing.”

Bilotta also dug her hand into the cougar’s mouth, trying to pry his jaws off her friend.

“I felt it shifting its teeth like it wanted to try to bite me too,” she said. “I said no, you're not gonna get both of us.”

Auna Tietz, 59, grabbed the cat’s leg.

“The cougar had his claws pretty much around her, in attack mode,” Tietz said. “Like, ‘I will have my prey now, and within a couple of minutes I will eat her.’”

Tietz noticed something else, too: “It had this beautiful amber-colored stare at me.”

As the others hit the cougar with rocks and sticks, Tietz tried to grasp the situation.

“In my head, it was okay, what would be the most drastic measure?” she said. “I need to find the biggest rock I can lift.”

She found a 25-pound boulder, the size of a large melon.

“I had to pretty much lift it in a squat position with both of my hands, and then let it fall from about a foot and a half up,” Tietz said.

The cougar’s head was close to Bergere’s, which made this a risky endeavor. Tietz conferred with Bergere.

“This is what I want to do now,” she told her friend. “I hope it goes as planned.”

Bergere gave her a thumbs up.

Tietz dropped the boulder on the cougar’s head four or five times before nearly giving up.

“I was sitting down, and I actually said, ‘I can't do this anymore,’” Tietz said. “But then I saw all the other girls doing their thing and helping, and I of course regained strength, and I said, ‘Okay, I can do this.’”

Bergere was also losing steam after having shoved her fingers into the cougar’s nostrils, and trying to jab his eyes.

“I was swallowing so much blood,” she said. “I just thought it was done. But then I got another little surge, you know, live to ride one more day.”

After 15 minutes, Annie Bilotta noticed the cougar falter.

“Go, go, go, get away,” she screamed to Bergere.

The cougar released her, and Bergere scrambled away on her hands and knees to rest in the middle of the trail.

“I just laid there, and they continued the battle,” Bergere said.

Tisch Williams, 59, another cyclist, thought to grab one of their bikes, a $6,000 cyclocross belonging to Erica Wolf, 51, to pin down the young cougar.

But the cougar kept fighting too – at one point, lifting the bike with the women standing on it.

Unable to tend to Bergere, they called to her, “How ya doin’?”

“She would just raise a bloody thumb,” Tisch Williams said.

With the cougar seemingly subdued, the women called 911.

As luck would have it, an officer with the Fish & Wildlife Police was nearby. It took him 30 minutes to reach the women.

A

t 12:52 p.m., Officer Chris Moszeter arrived.

Moszeter instructed some of the women to stay on the bike to keep the cat down. Then he shot the cougar between the shoulder blades.

The women would later say it was a heartbreaking moment. They are animal lovers; Erica Wolf, whose bike pinned down the cougar, is on the board of PAWS, an animal rescue. But it was a choice between the cougar’s life, and Bergere’s. There was never any question what needed to be done.

After the cougar died, Tietz rushed to Bergere.

“It was a relief,” Tietz said. “Getting off the bike finally freed me to be with Keri and say to her, ‘You are safe now. You will be in good hands. You will be in the hospital soon.”

I

t’s been nearly a month since the cougar attack.

An necropsy of the wild cat revealed it was between nine months to a year old. It was healthy, and its body showed no signs of physical distress. It did not have rabies.

Why the wild cat attacked Bergere will remain unknown.

The necropsy solved one mystery, however: Where Bergere's earring disappeared to.

Sgt. Carlo Pace of Washington Fish & Wildlife Police asked Bergere if she was missing an earring. They had found one in the cougar's belly.

Did she want it back? Sgt. Pace asked.

“Absolutely,” she said. Bergere said she would hang it, as a souvenir of sorts, and a testament to her friends’ courage.

“All these ladies came up with superhuman strength,” she said. “They’re teeny ladies, and I know that the Fish & Wildlife shot the final shot to kill it. But these ladies killed that cougar with their bare hands and no weapons. I’m eternally grateful to each one of them.”

Written for the web by Isolde Raftery.

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