MOUNTAIN LION LADY Chapter 6 (first half)

Winter of Our Discontent

Word had gone out to the guide-and-outfitters and ranchers in the area that we were doing a mountain lion study. Most of them were all for it but one old goat said we could hunt on his land but he would follow us and kill every lion we caught. We didn't think he meant it but avoided his land anyway. Several outfitters volunteered to show us good lion country when they weren't guiding paying customers. 

Ray, me and Ray's favorite hound

Although I heard an urban legend-type story (country legend doesn't have the same connotations!) that a woman many years ago used a pack of dachshunds in the area to tree lions, most outfitters use Walkers, blueticks, redbones, black and tans, Plott hounds or mixed breed hounds. The houndsmen I met tended to breed for traits rather than for the breed purity that's important in the show dogs. Our first houndsman, Ray, had a favorite bluetick/redbone cross. Joe had some Walker mixes and a Plott hound. Chuck, our houndsman for the last two seasons had some Walker mixes, a black and tan and a couple of Plott mixes. What they looked like wasn't nearly as important as what their noses could do coupled with a high degree of stick-to-it-iveness. Brains were also a big plus.

The daily routine we followed while we were on the study area was pretty much the same. My alarm clock would ring at 5 am. I would get up, have a bowl of cereal for breakfast (gone were the days of camp coffee and Ray's breakfast cooking!) and make a sandwich for lunch which, along with a canteen of water, an apple or orange and maybe some cookies, would go in a saddlebag. Then I would fix stew or something in the Crock-Pot. I used a plug-in timer set so dinner would be ready at 6 pm and would turn off if we hadn't made it back by then. The Crock-Pot was a very handy item. Since the oven in the trailer drew too much power I even made a birthday cake in the Crock-Pot for Gray when he was visiting for his birthday! The cake was kind of heavy but tasted fine. 

Joe would get his own breakfast and load the horses in the trailer. We kept the saddles in the truck so we could drive to a promising area and start hunting at about day break. 

We thought our luck had changed when four days after Francois was caught in the trap we caught another lion. An area houndsman named Don had made arrangements to meet us at a local ranch where we'd been given permission to hunt. Joe and I had our rented horses saddled and were waiting when the rancher came out and said Don had just called. He had cut a very fresh lion track on the way to meet us. We unsaddled the horses, left them at the ranch, and followed Don's directions to meet him. 

It was thrilling to see a beautiful, big, fresh track in the snow! The weather and conditions were just perfect. We turned Joe's three hounds loose and took off on foot behind them. Joe had one walkie-talkie and I had the other just in case we got separated. Which we did. We chased the cat for about two and a half hours but the lion wouldn't tree. Don and I could see the chase taking place on the hill opposite us as we came over the top of a ridge. The hounds would corner the lion on a rocky outcropping, he would stand there snarling and catch his breath then he would make a massive swipe with his paw and continue running. There were plenty of trees around for him to climb but he didn't want to and the hounds couldn't make him.

Dart and Cap-Chur gun

Occasionally we would hear a pain-filled, drawn-out yelp from a hound. Don was sure one of them was dead. The snow was deep in places but we hurried as fast as we could. I was grateful for my sturdy high-topped pack boots because the country was pretty rough. Just as Don and I were getting close Joe came over another ridge and we zeroed in on the chase. There was blood all over the snow but no dead bodies. The scene was a mad house. The lion trotted past Joe two times and approached Don once. He never seemed to be in much of a hurry although the hounds were always right on his tail. They had developed a certain respect for his claws. During one of his passes I darted him for 100 pounds which only slowed him down a bit so I tried to dose him again for another 80. The dart wasn't balanced and after it left the gun tumbled and bumped him with the yarn end. I don't think he even noticed it. The third one, also dosed for 80 more pounds, hit him in the neck and made him loose control. 

The hounds were delighted to be on the winning side this time and tried to pile on top of him. Bugle grabbed him by the throat before Joe could pull him off. We each grabbed a frantic hound and pulled them over to a tree to tie them up. We got blood all over us. Bugle and Prince were both pretty badly sliced up. Joe took them back to his truck and off the mountain to the vet that had patched up Speck's broken leg. Bugle ended up with ten stitches and Prince three.  

Weighing a lion

Meanwhile Don helped me gather data. The lion didn't seem to have suffered any ill effects from the mouths of the dogs, so we strung up the scales and weighed him: one hundred forty pounds! I had modified a fishing vest to hold most of the equipment for the rest of the body measurements and blood and hair collection.

My doctoral project was to determine blood normals for mountain lions and to develop a method to estimate the ages of wild-caught lions.  I had researched morphological and physiological things that change with age. Have you heard the expression "long in the tooth" to describe someone who is old? Your teeth don't actually grow during your lifetime but your gums recede so they look longer. I decided to measure gum line recession using a dental probe. I had read that humans' hairs get more brittle as they age because the protein chains get shorter so I decided to collect hair and whisker samples to test for tensile strength. Another thing that appears to change with age is the percentage of neutrophils in the blood. All these things seemed pretty easy to measure although testing tensile strength of hairs and whiskers in an engineering materials lab raised quite a few chuckles from the engineers.

Measuring the skull arch

We made five body measurements in addition to the weight: total body length, tail length, girth, rear tarsal length and skull arch.  

I snipped off a few whiskers and taped them into a paper straw (I later distributed the unused whiskers when I gave mountain lion talks to kids). I trimmed the hair samples from the area above the lion's knee which needed to be trimmed anyway for blood collection. That was easy. The blood collection was not. Mountain lions' forelegs are massively muscled so they can bring down their prey. The vein in the hind leg is easier to find. But not always easy. Don blocked off the blood vessel above the clipped area on the lion's leg. I was delighted to see the vein pop up so I could stabilize it with my left hand and poke the needle into the vein (without going through it!) with my right. With a sigh of relief I watched the dark blood flow into the syringe as I pulled slowly back on the plunger (the blood cells can burst and the vein collapse if you pull back too quickly). I collected about 10 cc's of blood which I divided into a test tube to be allowed to clot for a serum sample, a test tube with heparin for a plasma sample, and the remaining few drops to make several slides of blood smears for white blood cell differentiation. All of these I packed carefully back into my vest and back pack. I made an ink print (red for females and blue for males) of the lion's hind foot (the print you are most likely to see in the snow) then measured gum line recession, put a red numbered nylon collar on the lion and tattooed the same number in his ear, and the lion was ready to be left alone to recover. He was stirring about three hours later so we left him.

Contents of my vest

Don took me back to the ranch where we had left the horses. We explained the situation to the rancher and asked if we could leave them there overnight. He found the situation amusing and granted us permission. Then Don took me back to camp. I thanked him and spun the serum and plasma samples down in my centrifuge while I waited anxiously until Joe got back with his two rather subdued and probably aching pups. We were down to one hound with a pretty good nose but not as committed to the hunt as we would like her to be and an inexperienced youngster. Joe had more hounds at home, so we took a break for a week to enable him to fetch them.

The rest of the season was miserable. Day after day we saddled up and rode, looking for tracks. Nature had dumped 2 1/2 times the normal amount of snow on the area in December which had probably driven the deer further down the mountains earlier than usual so the lions had most likely followed them. We just didn't find many tracks and the tracks that we did find weren't productive. Gray was still in school so he wasn't able to join us often, but my sister Julie flew a small plane up from Albuquerque to the Fremont County Airport east of Canon City to hunt with us for a couple of days. We saddled up and had a very pleasant though fruitless ride. Julie was surprised and amused at the hounds reaction to our lunch break. They had been very serious while we were looking for tracks but when we dismounted and sat down to eat our sandwiches they flopped down next to us with friendly, silly grins, happy to have their ears scratched. It was fun having her with us but it didn't bring us luck. We actively hunted on 54 days that season and treed a lion on only one.

Things were also discouraging at home during one break. I always looked forward to a long hot shower and a soft bed. Gray had decided to fix the shower just before I got home and had it in pieces and the water turned off. We went to a motel.

The Division of Wildlife was a major sponsor of the study and there was grumbling in that august organization that the reason we weren't capturing more lions was because a woman was in charge. The next year I delighted in pointing out to them that we had the best record of catching lions in all of the seven lion studies going on in the western states and a woman was in charge! But that first year I couldn't refute their assertion and had to ignore it. I was learning quickly that I was in a man's field where women weren't always welcomed. I wouldn't have been able to buck the whole system without the reassuring support and encouragement of my adviser, Ken.