Related

The book names this the Big Winds Moon, keeps it in the north under Waboose, and gives it the Frog clan — water, among the book's four elemental clans. Plant: plantain. Mineral: turquoise. Colour: blue and green. As always, those are the book's assignments and not a nation's.

The best-documented tradition here is Zuni, and it is specific enough to be worth setting out carefully. In the account Frank Hamilton Cushing gave the Bureau of Ethnology in 1881, the Zuni divide the world into six regions, each with a colour, a sacred mountain and a guardian animal — a Prey God:

Direction	Colour	Guardian
North	yellow	mountain lion
West	blue	black bear
South	red	badger
East	white	wolf
Above	multicoloured	eagle
Below	black	shrew

The mountain lion is not simply the north's guardian. Cushing records it as "the elder brother of all animals and the master and guardian of all regions" — first among the six. Two further sets exist alongside this one: the Prey Gods of the Hunt, in which coyote replaces bear and wildcat replaces badger, and the Prey Gods of the Priesthood of the Bow.

Two cautions. First, this is the Zuni scheme, reported by one nineteenth-century ethnographer. Carving is shared more widely — Hopi, Navajo and other Pueblo peoples, particularly at Kewa Pueblo, also carved and used fetishes — but the directional assignments above should not be described as pan-Puebloan, and they are not the same as any other nation's four-directions teaching. Second, a fetish is not a curio: true Zuni fetishes do not leave the village. They are blessed, kept by the carver or a designated recipient, given ceremonial feedings of ground cornmeal and pulverised turquoise, and held by medicine-order priests as mediators with the animals they represent. Carvings made for sale are produced without religious intent, and some Zuni carvers prefer to call those simply "carvings."

Beyond Zuni the record thins quickly, and this page will not stretch it. Cougar traditions are attributed in general reference works to the Hocąk, Cheyenne, Apache, Walapai and Cherokee, but the sourcing behind those attributions is weak enough that naming them here would give a false impression of solidity. The Stone Lions shrine near Cochiti, often cited in this connection, is not documented in the works this page draws on.

Date	Event
c. 3200 BCE	The Majorville cairn and medicine wheel, Alberta — 28 spokes, dated by artefact stratification
pre-contact	The Bighorn wheel, Wyoming — 28 spokes, seven cairns, no established construction date
1881 / 1883	Cushing reports the Zuni six directions and their Prey Gods to the Bureau of Ethnology; republished as Zuni Fetishes, 1966
1883	The US Code of Indian Offenses outlaws the Sun Dance and "the usual practices of the medicine man"
1884–95	Canada's Indian Act amendments ban the potlatch, then ceremonies involving "wounding or mutilation"
1903	S. C. Simms surveys Bighorn — American Anthropologist 5: 107–110
1930s	The eastern cougar is effectively gone; the US Fish and Wildlife Service later concludes extinction dates from this decade
1951	Canada's ceremonial prohibitions are repealed
c. 1970	Sun Bear forms the Bear Tribe (date widely repeated, not firmly sourced)
1974	Eddy's Science paper on Bighorn; Schaefer (1986) finds no statistical support for the stellar alignments
11 Aug 1978	The American Indian Religious Freedom Act is signed
1980	Sun Bear and Wabun Wind, The Medicine Wheel: Earth Astrology — where this placement comes from
1984	The AIM Southwest chapter resolution names Sun Bear and the Bear Tribe
1992 / 10 Jun 1993	Sun Bear dies; the Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality follows. It names no individuals
2011 / 2018	The eastern cougar is declared extinct, then formally de-listed

Late February into March is the end of winter across the cougar's range, and the animal's habits do not change much with the season: it is solitary year-round, only mothers and kittens living in groups, and adults meet rarely. There is no rut to mark the month — cougars can breed at any time of year.

What the span does match is range and endurance rather than event. The cougar has the largest range of any wild land animal in the Americas, 110 degrees of latitude from the Yukon to the southern Andes, and it holds the Guinness record for the animal with the most names — over forty in English alone. Cougar came through French from Portuguese and ultimately Tupi; puma is Quechua, first recorded in English in 1777; mountain lion appears in writing in 1858; catamount is a contraction of "cat of the mountain," in use since at least 1664.

It was extirpated from eastern North America apart from Florida, and may now be recolonising, with confirmed animals turning up east of the current range.

The moon names of the northern nations catch the snow the site's tooltip mentions rather better than the cougar does. Anishinaabemowin gives March as Onaabani-giizis, the snowcrust moon, from onaabanad, "there is a crust on the snow"; Lakȟótiyapi gives Ištáwičhayazaŋ Wí, the moon when their eyes hurt — snow blindness, off the late-winter glare. These are lunar months, only approximately aligned to Gregorian ones, and the names vary between communities.

• Medicine Wheel Totems — the system, the 1980 book, and the objections to it.
• Otter — the span before.
• Red Hawk — the span after.
• Brown Bear — the west guardian in the same Zuni scheme.
• World Zodiacs · Religion · Calendar