There was absolutely no Sound At All.
When we are still very young, we start to learn about the things around us and form opinions about them. The sudden silence probably scared the kid, and like the hiker, he decided that the best thing to do was to go back home. He didn’t think that the cougar would be a threat to him in any way.
Cougars have killed only twenty people in the last hundred years. Every year, more than 40,000 people say that they were bitten by someone else and needed medical help because of it. It’s more likely that someone you know will bite you than a cougar attacking you in the wild. I really don’t want to meet a cougar in the woods.