Man catches his breath when he sees who is staring at him from a bush
Copperopolis (California) - He's a real outdoorsman: Chris Bashaw (39) from Modesto, California, has been hiking and fishing for years. Although the father of three is very familiar with the wild nature of his home state, you can still lure him out of his shell. This was the case recently when he had an encounter that took his breath away.

In Bashaw's TikTok video (see below), the scary moment is clearly visible. In it, he points his camera directly at a cougar staring at him from a bush.
"Go away," says the Californian in the clip in the direction of the predator. But the cougar doesn't even bat an eyelid at the request. Quite the opposite: after a few seconds, it moves towards Bashaw, whereupon the video ends abruptly.
Fortunately, the angler escaped with a scare. But in the video's subtitle, he admits: "This cougar chased me all morning all the way to my car."
But why was the man able to encounter the wild animal in the first place - is this normal in California?
Viral TikTok video shows scary encounter

It is unusual, but not impossible. After all, Californian scientists believe that between 3200 and 4500 cougars live in the US state.
Anyone who nevertheless encounters one of these predators should behave as they would with a wolf in Germany: maintain eye contact, appear as intimidating as possible and slowly but surely move away.
Incidentally, a look at his TikTok video shows that Bashaw wasn't the only one who had a lot of respect for the cougar at that moment. More than 3.3 million clicks and around 230,000 likes have been accumulated since last month.
In an interview with Newsweek , the 39-year-old revealed that this encounter was not his first.
However, he qualified: "Although I've seen cougars from a distance a few times, I've never had an encounter this close up."
For this reason, he has since taken bear spray and a gun with him when fishing.