Ray woke up at 12:30 am short of breath and with chest pains. Ken pounded on my door until I was awake and fairly lucid then left me with Ray while he went to Ed's to phone the doctor. I tried to keep Ray calm and talked all manner of nonsense to try to keep his mind occupied but it's about as possible to not be worried about a heart attack as it is to not be worried when you're swimming in the ocean and see a triangular fin coming your way! All of us made it through the night and at first light headed down the canyon to the nearest hospital.
After extensive testing the doctors decided it had not been a typical heart attack but Ray would have to take it easy for a while. Wrestling snow mobiles and lions was not in the cards for him any time soon.
Although we were happy that Ray was not in as bad shape as we feared, we were bummed that we would have to find another houndsman pretty late in the season. Most of them were already booked up with hunters. We headed back to Fort Collins and Ken started calling men that Ray had suggested. We thought our luck had changed when we found one of his friends was available. We arranged to meet Joe at camp the following Sunday.
A nicer guy than Joe didn't exist. He never had a bad word to say about anyone even when we met with further hardships.
The first day out we broke through a four-inch crust of iced snow and high-centered in the foot or so of soft snow underneath. It took us about three hours with two shovels going continuously to heave the wretched stuff away enough to back out. My muscles complained for days afterwards.
While Ray had been waiting for his brakes to be fixed on his truck he had struck up a conversation with a young fellow who offered to show us some good lion country and supply us with horses. He gave Ray his phone number which Ray had left with us. We called him up and made arrangements to meet. With that one phone call we landed ourselves in the middle of an old-fashioned, no-holds-barred family feud. We didn't realize it for a while but wondered why Lee's aunt wasn't more cordial. Most of the folks in the area were friendly and nice. We later contacted Lee's cousin about looking for lion sign on his land which was next to Lee's. He screwed up his face into a scowl and snarled. "You can but if you bring one of those #*&#!*&* horses I'll shoot it!"
We never found out what the feud was about but the lines were certainly drawn.
Four days later Specks, Joe's best dry-ground dog (the dog with the best sense of smell) got too close to a horse's heels and was kicked for her efforts. Her femur was neatly snapped in two. The vet set it but Specks like Ray was out for the season.
Birds were plentiful. We saw a pair of golden eagles almost daily and spotted a great horned owl, several spruce grouse and quite a few wild turkeys. Lion tracks were not as plentiful. We hunted for six days. The hounds got some lion scent from a couple of old tracks but not enough to follow very far. We heard via the grapevine that some people didn't think we were working very hard. If getting up at 5 am and riding until late afternoon but finding only a few unproductive tracks isn't working, I'd hate to really work! One of the accusers was an arm-chair expert to whom his coffee break was the most important part of his day. Or maybe lunch was - he was developing quite a paunch! I think he was jealous that I, a mere woman, was getting to scout for lions.
After an abortive two weeks I returned to the welcoming arms of my husband for five days then prepared to brave the mountains once more.
Six days after we returned we had a lion, albeit not in an orthodox way. We had hunted all day without success and had just settled down to the crock pot dinner I had left cooking. Our neighbor John was late in arriving and came running over shouting that we had a phone call. It was the local game warden and he said a lion was caught in a leg-hold trap set for bobcat west of Canon City and asked us to come immobilize it. We skipped supper, grabbed our gear and the three of us headed down the canyon. We met the game warden Dwayne in town and he directed us to a little box canyon just off the Arkansas River. The road ran across a bridge quite a ways above the floor of the ravine. Dwayne had a spot light that he aimed down the draw. We could barely detect the glow of the lion's eyes in some bushes but we could hear it thrash around. I asked Dwayne how big it was.
"Oh it's a whopper - 140 pounds at least!" he answered. I loaded the dart with enough drug for a big animal.
We asked Dwayne to accompany us down the faint trail to the canyon floor but he demurred.
"I'll stay up here and shine the light on him so you can find him." he volunteered.
Joe, John and I scrambled down the little trail and cautiously crept forward, losing sight of the cat until we almost stumbled over it. It was scared and hurting.
The first shot immobilized a nearby rock, but the second shot was a good one in the shoulder. The lion was down in five minutes. We gently removed the trap and discovered it was a female, not a whopping big male. We doctored her toes with an antiseptic salve. When we weighed her we discovered she was only 80 pounds! She had gotten almost twice the dose that she should have!
I named her Francois since names are easier to remember than numbers, but officially she had #1 tattooed in her ear. I was afraid my first lion would be a mortality and there were plenty of folks around for a wake. Quite a crowd had gathered on the bridge, including a newspaper reporter and photographer.
Dwayne left his post by the light and helpfully brought the newspaper reporter and photographer down, but not before he had posed for a few pictures ("local hero radioing for help", "local hero holding the spotlight". etc.)
We had made most of the easy measurements we needed but I had left the blood draw for the last. I had only drawn blood from one zoo lion and was not feeling very confident. I trimmed the hair away from inside her knee, tied a rubber tube around her leg and miraculously a vein popped up! I surprised myself further by my lack of difficulty in drawing the blood even with five people peering over my shoulder. We put a red nylon rope collar with a plastic numbered tag around her neck, tattooed her ear, gave her a shot of penicillin and stood back, unsure of what would happen next. Would she die?
I was loathe to leave her. The night was chilly so I covered her with my coat then we sat back and I prayed. Most of the crowd dispersed. After an hour and a half she lurched forward, wearing my coat rakishly over her shoulder, and headed for the river. Dwayne and John headed in the opposite direction. Joe and I dashed after her and aimed her back uphill then walked with her until she collapsed. After two and a half hours she could negotiate pretty well so we left her.
Francois wasn't the only one staggering. It was after midnight and our last meal had been more than 12 hours earlier. It had been a meager lunch at that. We stopped at an all-night restaurant on the way home. After an hour of making blood slides and centrifuging samples I stumbled into bed.
Joe and I returned to the box canyon the next day. I was half afraid we would find her lifeless corpse. Sure enough, right next to the boulder where we'd left her lay Francois. Joe headed down the path to retrieve the body. But the corpse wasn't lifeless! As soon as she heard the rattle of the stones dislodged by Joe's descent she was up and behind the boulder. Joe, the intrepid, gentle man, just kept walking toward her talking softly. When she realized she wasn't hidden Francois with the grace of a bird in flight leapt up to a crack in the canyon wall that couldn't have been more than two inches wide, faltered once, then disappeared over the rim. I have never seen anything so breath-takingly beautiful! She was liquid motion like a wave flowing over the canyon wall. I couldn't even tell which foot had been caught in the trap. I was sad when she was killed by a hunter three years later.
Great description of Francois in motion!
ReplyDeleteThanks Elaine! I was awe-struck watching her!
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