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CUSTER | Last week, a young mountain lion wreaked havoc on Lila Streff’s life, killing one of her goats, a duck, a house cat and, judging by the amount of feathers scattered in its deadly wake, a chicken. But thanks to her 14-year-old son, the mountain lion didn’t get away with it.

That Wednesday morning began with a gruesome discovery: a bloodied goat lie dead on the ground behind Streff’s house, 10 miles south of Custer near Pringle. The owner of Black Hills Goat Dairy, single mother of six, and grandmother to nine, soon discovered it was one of the young bucks she keeps pastured behind her home.

For better than a decade, Streff has milked 38 others, as well as eight dairy cows, making deliveries to Custer on Tuesdays and Rapid City on Fridays. But this was the first animal she had lost to a hungry mountain lion.

“We can see the goats right off the back porch, and we saw one lying on the ground back there,” she said on Tuesday. “We went right out and looked, and it was dead. We also saw a trail of destruction from the chicken coop with a dead cat, a dead duck and a bunch of chicken feathers.”

Streff said she feared the mountain lion would return for more.