Tuesday Teaser/Opening ~ Beast in the Garden

Like my obsession with reading about fighting fires, I've gotten hooked on books about cougars. The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature by David Baron doesn't disappoint. It has all the drama and tension of any novel. I think I may have a fetish for what one might call Natural Disaster porn.

Blurb:
The true tale of an Edenic Rocky Mountain town and what transpired when a predatory species returned to its ancestral home.

When, in the late 1980s, residents of Boulder, Colorado, suddenly began to see mountain lions in their yards, it became clear that the cats had repopulated the land after decades of persecution. Here, in a riveting environmental fable that recalls Peter Benchley's thriller Jaws, journalist David Baron traces the history of the mountain lion and chronicles Boulder's effort to coexist with its new neighbors. A parable for our times, The Beast in the Garden is a scientific detective story and a real-life drama, a tragic tale of the struggle between two highly evolved predators: man and beast.

Opening: (Prologue)
January 16, 1991
The Colorado sun burned through a mantle of winter gloom, dappling the rocks, the trees, the snow with a warm glow, giving an air of spring to the January hillside. Ponderosa pines, their needles carpeting the ground, shimmered in the silvery light beside a town that owed its existence to gold. The forest lay open, trees interspersed with grasses and shrubs that could tolerate the heat and low moisture of the south-facing slope, vegetation that provided excellent cover for a creature in hiding.

Teaser: (Just for perspective, the woman has been chased up a tree by two mountain lions.)
She snapped a dead limb from the trunk and broke off its smaller branches, fashioning a primitive spear, then thrust the weapon downward with both hands as if harpooning the cat. "F*ck you!" she screamed as she jabbed her tormentor. The cat hissed and batted the stick with its paws. "F*ck you!" she yelled again. The lion backed down.

Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following: Grab your current readOpen to a random pageShare two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page. BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers! To see what others are sharing on the Teaser Tuesdays, check the comments at:: http://shouldbereading.wordpress.com/ 






Share the first paragraph (or a few) from a book you are reading. Here's the link: Bibliophile By The Sea