A quick-thinking teenage girl in Washington used a bow and arrow to save her 6-year-old brother from being attacked by a cougar earlier this month.
The incident took place on Sept. 8 when 16-year-old Amaya Simpson, a member of the Arrow Lakes/Sinixt band of the Colville Confederated Tribes, was out practicing elk calls with her brother Cole Seymour in Inchelium, Washington, the Tri-City Herald reported.
Simpson said she turned around and saw the cougar mere feet away, stalking her brother, and told him to run.
“I just smiled at her for a second, thought she was joking around on me again,” Cole Seymour said, according to KHQ, but when he realized the danger, he dashed towards his older sister.
Simpson meanwhile had drawn her bow and arrow and taken aim at the cougar. She said the arrows struck the cougar’s ear and then it’s back.
“My adrenaline was pumping, and in that situation, it was probably record time,” she told the Tri-City Herald.
The wounded animal retreated and the siblings ran back home, but their family decided it was best to track the animal and put it down before it attacked someone else.
They did not have to look very far, their mother Francesca Seymour said in a post to Facebook.
The cougar was lurking in the brush near their driveway and the family used a rifle to shoot it.
Francesca Seymour said things could have turned out differently if it were not for her daughter, who maintained a level head in the stressful situation.
Simpson told Tri-City Herald that her father had taken the cougar to a taxidermist to turn the pelt into a wall hanging.
There has been a string of cougar attacks in and around the state in recent months.
Last week authorities said they believed a missing Oregon hiker was likely killed by a cougar after the woman's body was recovered and in May a cougar killed a mountain biker and mauled another in Washington state when they rode into its territory
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