Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) has confirmed

An unidentified man who was running on Horsetooth Mountain Open Space’s West Ridge Trail near Fort Collins, Colorado had a nasty encounter on with a juvenile cougar on Monday, which ended with the runner wounded and the animal strangled to death, the Coloradoan reported this week.

According to the Coloradoan, Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) has confirmed that a male cougar (Puma concolor couguar, also known as a mountain lion, puma, or catamount) weighing at least 80 pounds attacked the man and managed to inflict bite wounds to his face and wrist—before the tables turned and the man managed to suffocate it with his bare hands. The runner sustained “serious, but non-life threatening injuries” in the deeply unfortunate incident, CPW wrote in a statement, while wildlife officials took the corpse of the cougar for a necropsy.

Per the New York Times, a parks and wildlife spokesperson said that other animals had scavenged on the cougar’s corpse by the time they located it, though officials confirmed on Tuesday that it had indeed died from suffocation (and that it was, fortunately, not rabid).

the Larimer County Department of Natural Resources said that trails at the Horsetooth Mountain Open Space were closed on Tuesday due to rangers’ detection of “more mountain lion activity in the area.” They will reassess the situation on Friday, CNN wrote.

Though cougars were once hunted to near-extinction in the U.S., researchers believe their Western populations and those of other apex predators such as wolves and coyotes are beginning to rebound (though how much is still a matter of contention).

Scientists once categorized regional populations of the cats as distinct subspecies, though that view has diminished due to genetic research in 2000 that concluded all are the same subspecies. According to National Geographic, the Eastern variant has declined to the point of effective extirpation for at least the past 100 years, though Western cougars have been sighted moving into the Midwest, and a few males have been “found closer to the East Coast.”