WANSHIP, Summit County — Troy Vincent is one of the few who can brag he's stood up to a mountain lion and won the fight.
The cougar's teeth left dents in Vincent's shoes, but he came out on top — and the cougar has vanished.
"I was shaking for about three hours, nonstop," he said of the aftermath of his Saturday afternoon tangle with a mountain lion. "I couldn't even talk. It scared me pretty bad. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me."
It happened in a semi-rural residential area just below Wanship Dam. Vincent was kneeling in his driveway, working on a project. The cougar had apparently walked toward the driveway along a fence line without knowing the man was kneeling just around the corner of the fence.
"He didn't see me until he come around the corner," Vincent said. "But when he saw me, he made a little growl. I turned around, and the mountain lion was eye to eye with me, about 3 feet away. And I was scared."
As Vincent stood up, the animal swatted the calf of Vincent's leg with its paw. Vincent said it felt like a boxer had punched him, but the claws did no damage.
Instead of running away, a tactic that often encourages a big cat to pounce, Vincent stood his ground.
"And then I kicked him in the face real hard and hit his two canine teeth with my toe," he said. "It was pretty scary."
The animal's teeth left marks in Vincent's shoes but did not penetrate to the skin.
And the tough response apparently worked. The cougar ran away and hasn't been seen since. A team of dogs brought in by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources has been unable to locate the cougar.
"It's probably gone," said Phil Douglass, a spokesman for the division. "But if we do get another sighting, we'll be out there to try to track it."
If the animal is captured, division officials probably will kill it as a safety measure to protect the public, Douglass said.
"It is very likely that we would euthanize the animal because of the sightings that have taken place in that area," he said.
Several environmental groups voiced concern about the division's tough stance, saying the animal was not being aggressive.
"It seemed like the cougar was just in a bad place at a bad time. It took off when challenged and doesn't appear to be a threat," said Jake Schipaanboord, executive director of the Utah Environmental Congress.
Vincent said he will accept whatever decision the division makes, but he agrees that killing the animal is probably unnecessary. He calls the incident a chance encounter, not an attack.
"If he was in a full stalk after me, I think he would have got me," Vincent said. "He wouldn't have made any noise. He would have got me by the back of the neck. "
Still, as the animal ran away, Vincent himself grabbed an axe. That's because he saw his own children coming down the street "right when it happened," he said.
Vincent ran after the cougar with the axe to make sure it was gone.
"I would have killed it if I had to," he said.
E-mail: hollenhorst@desnews.com