Here is a creature whose fellow lions we are shooting by the thousands every year, so often on the presumption that it's either us or them. But what he revealed about ourselves along the way, is every bit as big a story. That he survived as far as he did is no small miracle. And all the while he was threading his way through a culture that hadn't tolerated his kind for a century or more. He fed himself on the fly in a foreign land. He swam great rivers, he crossed some of the busiest superhighways in America.
Know that what this lion accomplished amounts to far more than simply walking a long way. It is a testament to the resilience of nature, and a test of humanity's willingness to live again beside the ultimate symbol of wildness. Heart of a Lion is a story of one heroic creature pitting instinct against towering odds, coming home to a society deeply divided over his return. Along the way, the lion traverses lands with people gunning for his kind, as well as those championing his cause.
William Stolzenburg retraces his two-year journey-from his embattled birthplace in the Black Hills, across the Great Plains and the Mississippi River, through Midwest metropolises and remote northern forests, to his tragic finale upon Connecticut's Gold Coast. It was the farthest landbound trek ever recorded for a wild animal in America, by a barely weaned teenager venturing solo through hostile terrain. The lion was three years old, with a DNA trail embarking from the Black Hills of South Dakota on a cross-country odyssey eventually passing within thirty miles of New York City. But a more fantastic scenario of facts soon unfolded. Speculations ran wild, the wildest of which figured him a ghostly survivor from a bygone century when lions last roamed the eastern United States. Beside the road lay a 140-pound mountain lion. The creature appeared as something out of New England's forgotten past. Late one June night in 2011, a large animal collided with an SUV cruising down a Connecticut parkway.
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