And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth.

Genesis, chapter 8, verse 7

As dusk was falling on an early autumn day, a woman was working outside her home, in Boulder Canyon on the Colorado River. Yet she was finding it hard to focus on the task in hand. Close by, a large, black bird was uttering a constant chorus of loud, raucous cries.

The bird was a familiar one – a raven – but its behaviour that afternoon struck the woman as very odd. However much she tried to ignore it, the raven’s calls were getting louder and more persistent. As she later recalled, ‘It was putting on a fuss like crazy.’

In exasperation, she looked up, as the raven passed directly over her head. It landed on a nearby rock, just above where she was standing. Only then did she realise why the bird was behaving so strangely.

Among the rocks, barely twenty feet away, an animal was crouching: a cougar,* staring directly at her with its piercing yellow eyes. The beast – weighing over 50kg, more than the woman herself – was about to pounce. At less than five feet tall, she was about the size and weight of a deer, the cougar’s usual prey. So if it did attack, she would at the very least be badly wounded; at worst, she would die.

The woman rapidly backed away from the cougar, calling out in fear. Her husband heard her panicked cries and arrived on the scene, scaring the predator away.

After she had recovered from the shock,the woman spoke about her narrow escape. She was in no doubt about what had happened: ‘That raven saved my life.’ The news media declared her survival to be little short of a miracle.1