Mountain Lion Lady: Chapter 12

Chapter 12: Feast and Famine

The next morning I sang “Happy Birthday” to Gray to awaken him.

A special gift was a new layer of snow on the ground. We were on a roll and Chuck was anxious to cover as much ground as we could.  The son of the ranch owner where we were staying, Jay, was in high school but his father allowed him to cut classes and accompany Chuck in one truck while Gray and I took the other. Chuck allotted us Jake and his son Banjo, both good hounds, but with a similar flaw. Both of them were silent trailers when they were following a track.

We crossed the cattle guard onto Shoemaker’s land and a few miles in we cut a nice, large, fresh lion track at 7:15 in the morning! Only a bit of snow had fallen since the track had been made so we knew the lion was not far away. The hounds happily took off on a run with nary a sound following that hot scent. We took off, too, running after them as fast as we could while laden with backpack, vest and gun. Since we couldn’t hear them we had to follow the tracks. We followed and followed. By 10 the snow had started to melt making it harder and harder to find the tracks on the south-facing slopes, so we climbed the ridge to see if we could hear anything.

Fat Albert retreed

At about 11 am we could faintly hear the hounds baying treed and headed in that direction. I stayed high and Gray dropped down into the gulch. We could only hear the hounds intermittently. Early in the afternoon I came over a ridge and saw them. The lion had a red collar and tag, so I figured it must be Fat Albert. We had captured him a month earlier one ranch away. The situation was tense. Jake looked at me and Fat Albert bailed off the outcropping of rocks he was squatted on. He hadn’t gone far when Jake caught up with him. Fat Albert swatted him with his powerful front paw causing him to fall back. Jake was a little more circumspect then and followed him at a distance until he was joined by Banjo and they pushed Fat Albert out on a ledge just below me. With a snarl he leaped over the hounds and pretty soon climbed a nearby tree where he seemed to be content for a bit. The tree he had chosen was on a steep hill. I sat on some rocks about 15 feet from him taking photographs while I radioed Chuck and waited for Gray to join me. Just before Gray arrived Fat Albert started nervously looking around and gathering his legs under him. He could easily cover the distance between him and me in one leap, so I brought Jake over to where I was sitting. I had cleaned Jake’s slash wound and it didn’t seem to be bothering him. In fact he seemed to be delighted to be closer to Fat Albert.

Gray found us which made Fat Albert more nervous. After a bit he leaped out of the tree on the downward side and took off. The hounds were tied up and couldn’t follow him, but there was really no need since we had recorded the location and his number.

Chuck and Jay had made it to the right ranch but gotten onto the wrong road and couldn’t find us. Gray and I figured out where they must be and walked to that road. We tried radioing them but got no answer because their batteries were too weak to send, but they could hear us and found us further up the road they were already on. They picked us up at about 5:30 pm and took us back to our truck.  We drove on back to the trailer for supper. That lovely stew had been simmering all day in the Crock Pot and tasted mighty good! I had made a cake in a coffee can with water around it in the Crock Pot the night before. Chuck and I sang Happy Birthday to Gray and we ate the cake. It had been a long day!

The weather deteriorated for tracking lions. The next day the hounds worked a track for quite a while but nothing came of it. We didn’t even try to hunt the following day. I spent the day doing laundry and reading. Bobcat offered to show us some new country and invited the three of us to dinner. He thought he had a sure-fire place to show us the next day, but again we found nothing.

The next day we checked out the dump. Nada. Took two trucks the next day and left one at the bottom of the ridge and took the other a few miles up so we could walk the area. Zip. It was beginning to feel like our first season. After ten days of nothing we decided to take a week off and meet back on February 23, ready to hunt the next day.

Chuck did things on his own schedule and had decided to work on the hub of his truck. He hadn’t finished it yet, so he called the Lovelady’s whose property our trailers were on and said he wouldn’t be arriving until the next day, or maybe the day after that, so Gray and I drove around an area called Spruce Basin, then I read while Gray fished. Chuck arrived in the evening.

The next day we feasted. We stopped to check a track in Parkdale that Chuck thought was probably a rabbit at 6:45 am but to our gratified surprise was a lion track. We pointed the hounds in the right direction and turned them loose. They just burned the track up the hill and then seemed to lose it. While they worked the other, south-facing side of the hill Chuck dropped down to the stream bed, hoping to pick up the track down there. All the hounds but Pup had more faith in Chuck than themselves and followed him down.

Pup in Parkdale Petoutie's face

Pup diligently kept working the area where she had lost the scent. She was working around an outcropping of rock just over the rim when she started barking oddly, neither a trailing bark nor a treed bark. I rushed around the rocks and found her face to face with a lion. Chuck and the other hounds rushed up the hill. I climbed up on the rocks above the ruckus to dart her. The lion and the hounds kept shifting and were all in close proximity so I had to be careful not to dart a hound. When I got a chance I darted her. She swatted at the hounds and took off, practically running into me.

Pup and the other hounds took off and Chuck dashed to follow them. He had taken the snap off the holster with my father’s pistol in it, maybe because he thought he might have to use it. Somewhere along the chase it fell out, but he didn’t notice until after we had processed the lion. I decided to name her Parkdale Petoutie because she had led us on quite a chase. We spent more time looking for the gun that we had looking for the lion that morning, but wefound it and were still finished by 11 am giving Gray and Chuck plenty of time for fishing. I went grocery shopping.

We spent the next three days driving and hiking around. We found some old tracks but nothing the hounds could follow. The next day we found six different sets of mountain lion tracks but nothing that was productive. We tried not to get discouraged.