Pet cat Calvin uses 1 of his 9 lives against big mountain lion

As I write this, my cat, Calvin, is hiding under the bed, a pillow for a barricade. He’s peering over the top, staring through the sliding glass door to the backyard. His yellow eyes are like a set of high-beam headlights. When I hold him, I can feel his little heart pounding through his chest.

You see, Calvin used up another one of his nine lives this past week in an encounter with a mountain lion in our backyard, which adjoins open space. A big raccoon, it turned out, was not so lucky.

As my cat looks out, I wonder if he remembered some of his other close calls. How, as a newborn kitten, someone abandoned him in a bush, and Erika Carpenter, on a bike ride, heard him crying, stopped, found him and brought him home to raise with a newborn litter.

Then, when Erika was on business out of the country, how Calvin survived being locked in a flooded house for weeks without food or heat, when a pipe broke during a winter freeze and a caretaker forgot to check on him.

When I moved into that house, that cat, something of an orange fluff ball, decided I was his, and he adopted me. I hadn’t had a cat before (or, as I have learned with cats, it’s actually the other way around).

Then a great horned owl tried to snatch him, got its talons into his back, but didn’t have a sure grip and dropped him. It took more than a month for the hair to grow over the wounds.

Another time, I saw two foxes tag-team to try to trap him, but he escaped. Two years ago, Calvin didn’t come in for the night, and at 3:41 a.m., under a full moon, while I searched and called for him, he rocketed out of the woods (and into the house) with a mountain lion on his tail. The next day, down the street at a fire station, the same lion was caught with a video cam trying (and failing) to get the firehouse cat.

Lots of predators

With so many predators in nearby open space, we keep our pets inside. But last year, Sherman, Cal’s best friend, figured out how to unlock what was supposed to be a locked, one-way cat door and then escaped outside. He would not respond to calls to return. That night, a bobcat, based on the scat we found, ambushed him.

Like many who have put up wildlife and video cams, we’ve captured photos and video of deer, coyotes, fox, the neighbor’s dog and the inevitable wild turkeys and squirrels. We confirmed that predators arrive most often at night during periods of waxing gibbous moons, that is, the nights when a moon is filling and bright.

Our pets are kept inside at night, and allowed outside only when attended. We know full moons are dangerous for pets. But Calvin, who was often on his own before he adopted me, wants to make his own rules. The other evening, as I walked in a side door, he shot outside before I knew what was happening. That night, he did not return.

Our other cat, a rescue named Roxy, a sweet tuxedo, spent the night looking out a window out back, agitated.

Come morning, there was still no sign of Calvin. At the window, Roxy remained fixated. Outside, there was a strange hissing noise, and from the garage, I opened a side door: Calvin darted out of a garden shed and into the garage, and then, continuing at warp speed, sprinted into the house to a window with a view to the backyard. I followed and looked out:

A big mountain lion, roughly 140 to 150 pounds, was in our backyard, about 40 yards off near the shed. It walked with an easy, deliberate pace, as if not a care in the world, from left to right. I shouted to my wife, who was able to sight the lion for a few seconds before it disappeared into some brush. This was my eighth lion sighting.

The kill site

The strange hiss, it turned out, was from a broken plastic irrigation pipe spewing water, located next to the shed where Cal had been hiding. A friend of mine, Darrell Scott, a pump master with plumber skills for a well company, said it looked as if something had jumped on the pipe and snapped it.

My wife, Denese, scanned the area, and 15 feet away found a mass of fur and a gnawed-on skull. Lions eat from the inside out and don’t leave much behind.

I sent photos of the kill site to several wildlife ecologists. Steve Bobzein, one of the Bay Area’s top wildlife authorities with the East Bay Regional Park District, did a forensic analysis of the teeth and jaw with others he has collected, and after several hours, determined it was a large, older raccoon.

At the site, we roughly guessed that Cal, who has had previous run-ins with raccoons, found himself getting hassled once again near the garden shed. With the raccoon’s attention diverted, the mountain lion sprang through the air, and in one swoop, landed on the plastic pipe, snapped it and grabbed the raccoon. Meanwhile, we figured, Cal hid a few feet away under the shed.

Regardless of how it went down, we were left with a petrified cat, the carcass of a large raccoon and the sight of a well-fed mountain lion, satisfied, walking into the woods.

Tom Stienstra is The San Francisco Chronicle’s outdoor writer. He will appear at the Bay Area Book Festival, sponsored by The Chronicle, at 1:30 p.m. Saturday in Berkeley, www.BayBookFest.org. Email: tstienstra@sfchronicle.com Twitter: StienstraTom