Near homonymic confusion

[sawyl]

Embroiled in my current reading, I was amused by a description of one of the characters as a catamount:

catamount: a medium-sized or large wild cat, esp. a cougar. From cat of the mountain.

I suspect the word for which the author was striving was catamite, which certainly seems better suited to circumstances of the scene:

catamite: a boy kept for homosexual practices. From the latin, catamitus.

I suppose it's just possible that the actual word was the intended one, but somehow I doubt it. Maybe it was just that the author's dictionary was exceptionally prudish and failed to include the desired word — rather like the LJ dictionary, in fact...