A man who went running on a Utah trail got his heart rate up in an unexpected way when he recorded a mountain lion stalking him for six minutes straight.
Kyle Burgess encountered the wild animal while running up Slate Canyon in Provo, Utah, on Saturday, Oct. 10. He saw small animals on the trail ahead and, assuming they were bobcats, pulled out his phone to film them, the Deseret News reports. Burgess’s intrigue turned to horror when he realized he had stumbled upon mountain lion cubs, and their mother started lurching toward him, determined to protect her babies.
Burgess uploaded the encounter to Instagram TV on Monday, where it has been viewed nearly 1 million times. He swears, roars, and pleads with the mountain lion in an unintentionally hilarious attempt to get her to leave him alone.
“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!” Burgess yells at the mountain lion as she approaches him. “Go away. I’m big and scary.”
Burgess slowly makes his way backward up the trail for several minutes, keeping his eyes and camera firmly on the mountain lion as she intermittently lunges toward him.
“Gosh, fuck, where’s my gun?” he asks at one point, and shortly thereafter, he says despairingly, “OK, this is when I fucking die.”
Eventually, Burgess lobs a rock at the mountain lion, and she turns tail and runs back to her cubs. Shellshocked, he turns the camera toward himself and shows his hand still trembling.
“Holy cow. Yeah, not going back that way,” he says.
Burgess’s video has received over 7,000 comments. Many users praised him for keeping his cool, asserting himself loudly, and not charging the mountain lion. Others insisted that she clearly did not intend to harm him, only to scare him away and protect her cubs.
That’s a nice thought, but one in which Burgess probably took little solace during his terrifying encounter. Thankfully, he lived to tell the tale, and his viral brush with nature serves as a solemn reminder: Always go running with a partner.
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