MOUNTAIN LION LADY: Chapter 8 (second half)

Mickey Mouse asleep in the tree

This lion had earned the name Mickey Mouse. We followed the hounds who were following the lion up Long Gulch over a couple or ridges and down a side gulch before he finally treed again. This time he picked a taller tree and climbed way up to the top. I darted him in the flank with a reduced dose since I figured he must have gotten some of the first one. We tied up the hounds and started throwing snowballs at him to try to get him to come down. He must have figured bailing out didn't help the first time so he wasn't going to try it again. He fell asleep high in the branches. Chuck volunteered to climb up and fetch him down. We didn't have the heavy tree climbers so with the rope looped over his shoulder Chuck had to make the most of each little branch and rough place on the trunk. The plan was to get the rope around the lion's chest and lower him to the ground but his chest was the part of his anatomy that was farthest away from Chuck. Another problem was that the branch didn't look like it could hold both a big lion and a big man and the big lion had first dibs. Chuck decided to try to lasso the rope around a hind leg while he stayed as close to the trunk as possible. Gray climbed up the hill to get a better vantage point to take a picture while I watched and fretted.

Chuck maneuvering the rope

Chuck successfully got the rope around the Mickey Mouse's foot and tried to ease him off the branch without the branch and both of them coming down. It was with a sigh of relief as I watched the lion descend toward the ground. Unfortunately my sigh was premature. The rope broke part way down and he tumbled the rest of the way like a sack of potatoes. No bones seemed to be broken but he was probably pretty bruised from the fall. The first dart was still hanging from his foreleg. The carbon dioxide charge that is supposed to go off on impact to shove the plunger down hadn't fired so Mickey Mouse had only gotten a wee dribble of the drug. 

He started to come out of the anesthesia before we were quite done. We had made our measurements and hurriedly took our samples then backed off to make sure he recovered. In a short while he got up and wove off down the hill. He moved like a drunk but not an injured one.

By this time it was quite dark so we hiked about 6 miles to the nearest rancher and called the local game warden for a ride back to camp. We returned the next day to get the truck.

Two days later we went hunting in a nearby area with two local guide-and-outfitters. It had snowed the day before so tracking conditions were pretty good. We found a track crossing the road and turned some of the hounds loose. After a short half-hour chase we heard them baying treed. When I peered up into the tree I could see a red nylon collar on the cat. Mickey Mouse stared defiantly down at us! He had traveled some 15 miles in the last couple of days so we knew he was going to be all right.

Mickey Mouse re-treed

MOUNTAIN LION LADY: Chapter 8 (first half)

New Season, New Strategy

"Failure is nothing more than a chance to revise your strategy."
                                                                - anonymous

 We revised several things before the start of the second season. We increased the study area size and shifted it south to lower elevations up and down the Arkansas River basin. We moved the two trailers to west of Canon City where we had access to a real toilet and shower. We changed houndsmen. We hunted for tracks from a truck rather than horseback. I had a new Cap-chur gun. We kept two essentials: checking the same parameters of the mountain lions and a woman leading the study.

I took necessary classes at C.S.U. during the fall semester but was ready to go hunting the day after New Year's Day. Tracking conditions didn't look good when we arrived in an almost snowless Canon City. 

The next day my advisor Ken and I drove in one truck and our new houndsman, Chuck, in another. Fortunately conditions improved somewhat as we drove up the Arkansas. After maneuvering around some twisty ranch roads Chuck walked down a gulch where some lion tracks had been seen before Christmas. He wanted to catch a lion! Alas there was no lion sign. We had coffee with the rancher and Don the houndsman who had helped us the previous year. We decided to give another area a try and drove east. We cut a fairly large  track crossing the road. Chuck turned a few of his hounds loose on the track and Don set some of his on the track too. While following the hounds we came across a kill but the track the hounds followed away from the kill were smaller than the ones they'd followed going in. They were probably fresher than the larger ones.

Lion kill

We were lucky that the area was well-riddled with ranch roads because Ken and I were able to drive to within about a quarter of a mile from where we could hear the hounds baying "treed". We hustled to help Chuck tie up the hounds nearby. I loaded the dart and aimed. I had neglected to sight in the new Cap-chur gun so the first shot immobilized the branch under the lion.

Darting Pinon Penny

The second shot flew true and the lion bailed out with no urging. Chuck put a leash on Pup, his black-and-tan hound with the most intelligence and followed the fast-disappearing lion. About 250 yards from the tree the drug took effect and the lion collapsed. 

The lion turned out to be a 95-pound female with beautiful adolescent eyes. I didn't know it at the time but mountain lion's eyes usually go from blue at birth to kind of a muddy brown color to golden at adulthood. I named this lion Pinon Penny. Her eyes had a ring of chocolate color around the pupils then a band of turquoise flecked with gold followed by an outer band of gold. Gorgeous! She probably had become independent not long before and was not yet the superb hunter she would later develop into. Her hunger may have driven her to investigate the old kill on her unlucky day.

Pinon Penny after processing

At one point Pup who was tied nearby started chewing on her tail but no damage was done. Jake, a scrappy old Walker with a kink in his tail where a bear bit him and a missing eye thanks to another bear, got loose but he ignored the immobilized lion. She was slow to recover after we had finished with all of her measurements and samples so Ken and I stayed with her for a couple more hours to make sure she was OK.

Wow! Two days into the season and we already had a lion under our belt! That evening Gray arrived on the bus and I recounted our hunt in great detail. I could just tell this was going to be a good season!

The next morning with Ken and Chuck in one truck and Gray and me in another we drove up Shelf Road towards Cripple Creek. The drive is beautiful but rugged in the summertime. In the winter it is still beautiful but treacherous in the snow. I cut my teeth driving it in four-wheel-drive in the winter. It must be approached with confidence, something Chuck had in abundance but something I had to learn quickly. It was good that there wasn't a lot of snow my first time.

We met Don and his wife Amy on the High Park Road. Gray and Ken took one truck and went east while Chuck and I followed by Don and his wife went toward Scratch Hill. Neither Ken nor Gray were as experienced as Chuck so it was no wonder that we found the first track. Chuck turned his hounds loose. He was our expert in all things to do with the hounds so when he told Don he couldn't use his hounds we had to go with it. Don was miffed. 

Pretty soon the confusion began. The hounds went up the draw around the hill and to the road from where we had chased Pinon Penny the day before. "Ah, fresh track" the hounds probably thought and took off with glee. We finally were able to contact Gray and Ken. They had been trying to use only Don's radio which wasn't compatible with the one we had and Don didn't have his turned on. They figured that out and switched. We left them with hurried instructions and took off after the hounds. We didn't want to tree Pinon Penny again so there was a mad scramble to round up the hounds. We couldn't find Boone, one of Chuck's brindle Plott hounds. Don and Amy had gone home when we had started rounding up the hounds. Ken, Gray and I went back to camp while Chuck hung around waiting for Boone. We hadn't gotten a lion but the day had still been exciting!

The next day we didn't have such a large entourage. Ken had gone back to C.S.U. and Amy had to go to work so she and Don weren't around. Gray and I took one truck and Chuck and the hounds the other. Near Gooseberry Creek off the Tarryall Road we found a deer kill. There were large mountain lion tracks all over the place! We circled the area with the hounds on leashes trying to find where the lion had left the kill. Chuck thought he had found it and turned three of his hounds loose. They soon scattered in different directions. Chuck and I tried to stay with Pup. Gray took off after a different hound. He soon lost the hound and went back to the truck. He drove up and down the road listening unsuccessfully for baying then decided to follow our tracks. 

Dixie baying "treed"

The hounds had paid attention to each other and when the going got rough on one track they would go to the hound that was still baying. Chuck and I finally caught up with them when they were milling around in a bit of a rough patch. 
"This lion is really Micky-Mousing around" Chuck complained.
We circled the area and found where the track left the vicinity and turned them loose again. Down we all went into Long Gulch then up over the ridge again. I was getting pretty tired when we heard the hounds baying "treed". 

He looked big and felt pretty secure in the branches surveying the yapping nuisances below. I had sighted the gun in after the mishap two days before so I took careful aim. The preferred site, the hind leg, was obscured by branches so I aimed for the foreleg. The dart struck him right on target! We waited a couple of minutes and then backed the hounds away so he would be encouraged to leave the tree. The tree wasn't feeling like such a secure place anymore so he literally leaped at the chance and took off down the hill. Chuck followed with Pup on the leash. I came along a bit later with the rest of the leashed hounds (quite a hand full!). After about 300 yards when he still hadn't succumbed to the drug we decided he wasn't going to so we turned the hounds loose again. We were in for another chase. The result wasn't going to be as smooth as the first and Gray had yet to find us.

MOUNTAIN LION LADY: Chapter 7 (second half)

The idea for a zoo in Salt Lake City started out in 1911 as a display in Liberty Park of a cageful of monkeys to which a deer was added a bit later. A year later the Salt Lake Parks Department decided a zoo would be a good idea and with an investment of $153 purchased five pairs of exotic birds, a pair of foxes, a pair of squirrels and a pair of white-faced ring-tailed monkeys. The collection was expanded and a new building built, the "Happy Family Building" that housed lots of birds but also about 100 rabbits. Admission was free. 

By 1916 the zoo entered the big time with a purchase from a travelling circus of Princess Alice (named after Teddy Roosevelt's daughter), a 31- or 32-year-old Asian elephant. The $3250 cost was mostly raised from small donations by schoolchildren. By now there were more than 275 animals, mostly from North America, 26 of which were donated. Princess Alice may have been pregnant when she arrived because gestation in elephants is almost two years and she gave birth in 1918 to a son later named Prince Utah. He was almost a year old when Princess Alice rolled over on top of him and killed him. The newspapers reported that she mourned his loss with tears and trumpeting. Periodically in the next twelve years she would make a break for it and amble through back yards in the neighborhood breaking fences and clotheslines. Mr. and Mrs. James Hogle in response to the outpouring of community concern donated the parcel of land where Hogle Zoo is presently located in 1931 largely so Princess Alice would have a more secure cage. In August of that year Hogle Zoo reportedly opened its doors to a crowd of 14,000 (I think it more likely that 14,000 was the number of people that visited it in a year). For a while Alice was secure.

People are nothing if not fickle and by 1934 the water supply was cut off to the zoo due to nonpayment of their $195 bill. The zoo director threatened to turn all of the animals loose if the water wasn't turned back on, which it was. By 1941 the zoo was in terrible shape. One article in the Salt Lake newspaper published June 19, 1941 was headlined "Bad Odor, Old Cages, Garbage - That's Salt Lake City's Zoo". Mr. and Mrs. Hogle requested the return of their land. It must have improved because the next year the newspaper reported that the zoo's oldest lion had died "due to the shock of living in new, clean, comfortable quarters."

Some visitors to the park looked upon the animals as fair game. A boy killed one of the zoo's deer with an arrow in 1943 and a polar bear received a non-fatal gunshot to the head in 1946. Thereafter the director said guns on the grounds would be confiscated and people harassing the animals would be punished.

Left entrance sculpture

Right entrance sculpture

In 1947 the two beautiful sculptures of mountain lions by Dr. Avard Fairbanks that adorned the entrance when we visited the zoo (now no longer there) were erected. That was also the year Princess Alice forced open the doors of her building and charged through the neighborhood, uprooting a tree and destroying a drinking fountain. After her romp (rather impressive for a 62-year-old!) she calmly returned to her quarters. Six years later she became ill and was put to sleep.

A new mountain lion exhibit was constructed in 1960 and by the time we visited in 1975 they had nine mountain lions, an overpopulation in my opinion. Now they don't have any. An underpopulation I would say!

In 1969 the 37-year-old zoo director was fatally bitten by an African puff adder. Antivenom serum was flown in from San Diego and given as soon as possible but it didn't save him. He was replaced by the director we met at the time we visited Hogle. 

When we visited Hogle Zoo in 1975 we had several zookeepers helping us so everything moved rather quickly. It was sort of like an assembly line. We were stationed in an area behind the exhibit and the comatose lions were brought to us one by one. Or sometimes two at a time. The first three females then a couple males passed through our hands complete with recorded measurements and blood samples. As soon as all the lions were out of the big cage they started putting the recovering ones back in. It all went smoothly until the last male was put back in before he was fully recovered. He must have fallen or one of the other males must have decided to take advantage of the state he was in and knocked him off the rocks, killing him. I was numb with shock when I heard about it. That wasn't supposed to happen! I was reminded that haste indeed makes waste because this tragedy could have been prevented. It was with heavy hearts as we packed up and left the zoo.

Weighing an Albuquerque lion

We drove directly to Albuquerque and worked with their mountain lions two days later. Although there were only six lions there were fewer zoo keepers as well and the scene was much calmer. We had more time to contemplate each animal!

With a sigh of relief we returned to Fort Collins so I could analyze all of the data we'd gathered. We'd made it through the first year!

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At the Davidson Fruit Company

The title of this post is an example of a rebus: a combination of letters, words or doodles that says something familiar in a new way. Can you guess what it is? It's a beeline. When a worker bee (always a female) has gathered a full load of nectar and pollen she goes straight back to the hive even if she wandered all over looking for flowers. A bee is a paragon of all work and no play, hence "busy as a bee". Unfortunately for us and European honey bees their numbers are declining. Our linden tree is usually literally humming with bees when it is in flower. This year I could see some but there were not enough to make their wonderful music. This post is about animal words and phrases having to do with work except for a digression later into some money words and one more rebus although neither has anything to do with animals.

Another animal admired by a boss is the eager beaver. This animal works from dawn to dusk cutting down trees and building dams. He doesn't seem to be playful like his fellow water-lover the otter, but is usually hard at work whenever anyone sees him. He seems to only take time out to slap a warning on the water when a person gets too near.

Have you ever heard a car salesman say "Let's talk turkey!" This phrase originated in America just like the bird and was in use by the mid-nineteenth century. Some folks speculate that it arose in colonial days when the Pilgrim fathers offered the Indians many things in return for turkeys. The Indians would greet them with "You come to talk turkey?". Others suggest it originally meant pleasant conversation or sweet nothings so a young man would try to talk turkey to his girl. Some time in the ensuing 60 or so years the turkey's gobble became sterner and the phrase came to mean to talk about basics or about cold, hard cash.

Cash, from the Latin word for box, capsa, originally referred to a money-box and later became synonymous with the money itself. Money comes from Moneta, the name of a Roman temple dedicated to Juno, the queen of the gods. Romans often had cash-flow problems (conquering is expensive) so they asked for Juno's aid. Her priests evidently helped and the grateful Romans built the temple to show their gratitude and gave it the Latin name for advisor. 

Our main unit of money, the dollar, has a round-about history too. Silver was discovered in the valley of Joachim near Prague in 1516. The Count of Schlick, owner of this mine, minted his own coins (a common practice of the time for anyone who had access to gold or silver). His coins bore the picture of St. Joachim and became known as Joachimsthaler, literally "of the valley of Joachim". Later the name was shortened to thaler. The English either not knowing or not caring that the term just meant "valley" used it to refer to Spanish pieces of eight (so named for the large "8" on one side of the coin which meant it could be cut into eight pieces or bits for smaller coins). The Fathers of our country based their new currency on the Spanish pieces of eight and called them dollars.  One quarter of a dollar is two bits.

Irish sixpence

Bartering was first done with animals and food. Later pieces of metal took the place of the actual objects. Until converting to the Euro Irish money still had pictures of animals of various values on one side of their coins. Now transactions often just use computer transfers via credit cards and banks. Have we come a long way babe?

This brings me to my final rebus. A boss pays a worker a salary. Can you guess what PAY PAY is? A toupee! Enough said!

MOUNTAIN LION LADY: Chapter 7 (first half)

Zoo Time

The first winter season was behind me. It had not been at all what I had anticipated. I did not approach the summer with the same degree of confidence that I had gone forth in the fall. I would be working with captive mountain lions of known ages to develop a method to determine the ages of wild lions. It sounded pretty easy, but I had thought chasing wild ones would be physically taxing but straightforward. It was not. What surprises did I have in store for the summer?

A Cap-chur gun was used to immobilize all of the wild mountain lions because they were usually more than 20 feet away and up a tree.  We needed closer-up methods for the captive ones. Some of the zoos had squeeze cages. The zookeepers would urge the lion into the cage then narrow it down with a lever so the animal couldn't turn around and was pressed against the side bars. It was easy to inject the immobilizing drug directly into a hind leg muscle and let the lion back out into the big cage before the drug took effect.

Blow gun and dart 

Another method involved a blow gun. Lots of lung power was needed for this one since the same kind of dart was used as with the Cap-chur gun and the dart was heavy. Sometimes if a squeeze cage wasn't available a jab stick would be used for an animal confined in a small cage. This one was the trickiest of all since the operator had to give the lion a jab in the hind leg and pull back quicker than the lion could turn around and swat the stick. I was fortunate the zookeepers were familiar with whatever method we had to use and would usually do the immobilizing.

My tour of zoos which had expressed a willingness to let me work with their known-age mountain lions started with the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs. They had two female lions, a 13-year old and another one of unknown age. I had worked on one captive lion in Denver and two wild ones. I sort of knew what I was doing. I was lucky that everything went smoothly. 

One of the first things I noticed was the difference in the teeth. The wild lions' teeth had no tartar buildup but the captive ones usually had a great deal. This made measuring gumline recession difficult and not very accurate. The tartar had to be scraped off, sometimes leaving the gums bleeding. When I thought about it, it was pretty easy to understand why there was more buildup in zoo lions. Most of the felids in zoos were fed a soft meat product. Wild mountain lions used a natural toothbrush: rib bones. One of the markers of a deer killed by a lion was the ribs would be chewed off often almost all the way to the spine. The broken bone edges would scrape any tarter off the teeth before it even had a chance to coat the tooth.

Wild male footprint

Captive female footprint

Another difference was in the ink prints I made from the hind foot. The wild lions' feet were furry and the pads were cracked, sort of like the callouses my feet got when I went barefoot in the summer. Zoo lions' pads were as smooth as if they had been given a pedicure.

After my positive experience with Cheyenne Mountain Zoo I was feeling more confident when we reached the Brit Spaugh Zoo in Kansas. I shouldn't have been. The two animals we worked on first were females and everything went as planned.

The trouble started with the next one, a fat old male. Fat lions look the same as skinny lions from above because they carry their extra weight in a sagging belly. This old boy's belly was really sagging! Several people from the zoo were watching me so I did the easy things first. The body measurements went okay. Weighing him was strenuous but doable. A whisker was easy to snip off. Then the hard part. I got disoriented when I went to take the blood. I mistook the ankle vein for the knee vein because his belly hung below the knee vein. Ankle veins aren't very big on mountain lions. I went through the vein in one leg causing a big hematoma to form (blood seeped from the vein into the tissue surrounding it). I collapsed the ankle vein in the other leg by trying to draw the blood too quickly. The veins were too deep on the forelegs so I tried to take blood from the tongue veins. I was getting desperate! I switched to a smaller needle and my advisor Ken held the lion's tongue. I carefully slid the needle into the vein and slowly, slowly drew back the plunger. The lion had been under for quite a while and was starting to come out. His tongue was not made to spend much time out of his mouth and was drying out. To correct his discomfort he tried to pull it in. Ken hung on with determination but asked me to hurry. I didn't want to collapse this vein as well but understood the need.  I hurried and the vein collapsed with only about half the amount of blood I needed. We let the lion moisten his tongue then tried the vein on the other side. By the time he tried to pull it in I figured I'd stop when I was almost ahead. I had almost enough blood. 

Taking a blood sample from a zoo mountain lion

On to the Topeka Zoo! We were in for a delightful surprise. The young male mountain lion snarled at us from the small enclosure behind the exhibit cage. I thought I was imagining things because his canine gleamed! Teeth, even very clean teeth, usually don't gleam. The zookeeper was watching for my reaction.

"Does he have a silver tooth?" I asked incredulously. He beamed and told me the story. The lion's canine had been broken when he fell on his face after a routine immobilization and the nearby dental school had come to the rescue. The students had fitted him with a stainless steel crown. Good experience and p.r. for the students and great p.r. for the zoo! It wasn't actually necessary because a lion eating soft food really doesn't need his canines. 

Even some wild lions are able to make do without, sometimes to the detriment of ranchers. A lion was killed in Utah that had broken all of his canines and was gumming his dinner (sheep) to death with the stubs. Pretty hard work I imagine. Sheep were probably easier to hold onto during the process than deer. Another lion with a disability was killing sheep and shot by a rancher. He noticed the fur was worn off on the inside of the lion's front legs. Further examination revealed stiff wrists from arthritis on its forelegs making it difficult to grab its prey with its claws. It could hold a woolly sheep with its forelegs just fine while it delivered the fatal bite. A deer could probably have just slipped away. 

A stainless steel canine didn't make any difference in the parameters I was measuring. I just measured the gumline recession on the other side. Everything else for the two lions was routine and we thanked the zookeepers and headed back to Fort Collins to get ready for our next zoo visits.

The only real zoo tragedy happened when we visited the zoo in Salt Lake City.

A Horse is a Horse!

Because a new justice will soon be chosen and before we get to horse words I'd like to share a delightful quote that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in one of his decisions: "A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging, it is the skin of living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used." English is a living, changing language unlike the languages that are no longer spoken (remember the students' lament, "Latin is a dead language as dead as dead can be. It killed off all the Romans and now it's killing me!"). Seeking the origin of phrases is like searching the DNA for the ancestry of an organism.

"Recalcitrant" is a word that originally meant to kick back such as a stubborn horse would sometimes do to his traces. Most of us now don't even know what traces are, but we understand the word means stubbornly defiant. When we say that something is curtailed we mean that it is cut short. Four hundred years ago this meant a bobtailed or curtal-tailed horse. A child who is out-of-sorts may be called sulky. He may just want to be left alone. The single-seated racing cart is known as a sulky for the same reason - the driver is of necessity left by himself.

"A horse canters lifting its fetlocks high. The rider gently draws back on the reins of the hackamore and brings the horse to a stop next to the field where the farmer is spreading manure." 

After Thomas à Becket was murdered in the Canterbury Cathedral  in 1170 many people made pilgrimages to pray at his shrine (remember Chaucer's Canterbury Tales?). It was believed that if you prayed at a shrine you would either be cured of a disease or get into heaven more easily. Some people rode horseback on these pilgrimages but few were in a hurry. The sight of these leisurely travellers was very common and their style of riding became known as the Canterbury pace later shortened to the Canterbury and finally to canter.

A small bunch of hair is sometimes called a lock (many a mother saves a lock of her baby's hair). Some people believe "fetlock" was originally "footlock" or the tuft of hair at the horse's foot.

A hackamore is a bitless bridle used by some western riders. Its name comes from the Americanization of the Spanish term for halter or headstall, jaquima. 

"Manure" was originally a verb which came from the French word "manouvre". It meant to work by hand and later came to mean the stuff that is worked into the soil to make it fertile.

Several racing terms have come into our every day language. If a horse is excited and prancing when a race starts it will take off much more quickly than one standing with all four feet on the ground, hence to be caught flat-footed means to be slow on the uptake. A dark horse was originally a race horse about which nothing is known and everyone was kept in the dark. Harness races at county fairs years ago were difficult to get started because the jostling  horses with inexperienced drivers would frequently get out of line. "Hold your horses!" the judges would cry to call a driver back. The idea behind the phrase was used even earlier in Homer's Iliad. A translation is "Antilochus - you drive like a maniac! Hold your horses!" 

"Don't look a gift horse in the mouth" means to not examine a gift for defects (i.e. to see how old the horse is). Similar expressions can be found in French, Italian and Spanish. "Straight from the horse's mouth" means the person heard something from the best authority. When deciding to buy a horse the most reliable way to know the horse's age is to look in the horse's mouth at the tooth wear and not take the owner's word for it.

An mildly poisonous nut known as a horse chestnut has the botanical name Castanea equina, a direct translation. A sixteenth century writer tried to explain that the people in the Far East used the nut to cure a horse's cough.  Another explanation is that "horse" merely indicates a large nut (like "horseradish" means a large member of the radish family) that looks like a chestnut. I don't think this holds much water either because a chestnut and a horse chestnut are about the same size. I don't think it has to do with what is called a chestnut on a horse's leg which is a callosed formation above the knee. That chestnut might be what is left of a vestigial toe or a vestigial scent gland. It is also called a night eye. Heaven only knows from where that term comes!

"Horse play" probably comes from the same meaning of "horse" as in horseradish. It means rough, rowdy play where someone is liable to get hurt.

I was talking with a friend about a relative who was ignoring a symptom that could lead to something serious and the phrase "You can lead a horse to water but cannot make him drink" came up. This expression was first written down in a sermon from 1175 and is pretty self-explanatory.

A little settlement in Shasta County, California was originally called Clear Creek Diggings in 1849. A gold miner might have felt that calling it a town was pretentious and referred to it as a "one horse town" meaning insignificant. The name stuck but was later shortened to Horsetown before it became a ghost town.

In the 1850's a lame race horse was called a Charley, so when a person is temporarily lamed by a muscle spasm in his calf (why are those muscles called a baby cow?), he is said to have a Charley horse.

In the 1780's working horses were not used for riding but rather were to pull plows or carts. The aristocracy used their leggy, high-strung horses for riding. If someone tells you to get off your high horse it means to quit behaving in such a superior manner.

Horses often raise their tails when they run away, so now I'm going to hightail it out of here!

MOUNTAIN LION LADY: Chapter 6 (second half)

Word had gone out that we were not catching many lions. Suddenly the world was full of experts. Reports of mountain lion sign and tracks started coming in. One old boy swore he had a lion kill in the middle of his cow pasture. Since lions don't like to dine in exposed places and are quite capable of carrying their meal elsewhere, leaving a carcass in the middle of a field didn't sound very likely but we decided we'd better check it out. This was the first time he had volunteered an opinion of anything that could be verified. 

This rancher was one of a dying breed of country cowboys. He stood about 6'2" and was as skinny as the rifle he had mounted in his truck. One finger was missing on his left hand from some mishap years earlier in a bar room altercation. 

"He was a sparky 'un!" his wife later confided when she told me the story with a shake of her head and a proud, tight smile.

He heard our truck coming across the meadow and sauntered out with his shifty-eyed dingo dog to meet us. We got out of the truck and he stuck his hand out to Joe. 

"Howdy," he solemnly greeted us with a little nod. He didn't offer me his hand. Then he hunkered down on the dirty road.

"Well," he started with slow deliberation. All talk was then suspended while he drew a packet of cigarette papers from his front shirt pocket. He carefully removed the top sheet and tucked the remaining packet back down into his pocket. Fascinated by his studied concentration we watched him take a pouch of tobacco from his hip pocket, tap a little row of flakes across the waiting paper, roll it up into a skinny sausage and seal the edge with a careless swipe of his tongue. The ritual was not complete until he'd placed the sagging bundle into the corner of his mouth, casually flicked the wooden match into fire with his thumbnail and lit the nether end of his creation.

Joe and I felt rather formal towering over him so we hunkered down too. We wanted to get a look at the supposed lion kill but knew the old boy would take his own sweet time before bringing it up. Skirting the subject was a western art form and it was considered cheating to jump right to facts. We waited.

The peculiar weather, abysmal cattle prices and foolhardy politicians were all torn apart bit by bit. We wandered nearer to the subject of lions when we got to the serious business of dog training for cow dogs then on to hounds. At last we reached the eating habits of eagles, coyotes and lions but that was too close to the subject of wolves and he had an opinion about them too. We veered off and had a discussion about the possibility of reintroduction of wolves into Colorado. He swore they'd already been released and no gentle reassurance on my part would convince him otherwise. Instead of entering into the wolf discussion Joe tried to steer him back to lions. My right foot started tingling. I shifted to the left. My left leg muscles became cramped so I shifted back. It didn't help. I just wasn't used to hunkering.

Finally after several lengthy, silent pauses to roll a new cigarette we sidled up to the real point of interest.

"Yup, just last night a lion killed a deer in my pasture."

"You sure it was a lion kill?" Joe asked skeptically.

"Yup. Lion kill."

I was relieved to think we were moving on and gratefully lifted my body to a standing position. It felt good to stretch. The old boy stayed hunkered down. I was too hasty. With a mental sigh I eased back to a hunker. We still had to get through deer eating haystacks, lions eating cattle and lion hunters cutting fences to talk about. We had to reassure him that we would never cut fences or leave gates open. 

I had learned silent rule number one: act and talk like the locals because they hold the trump cards by owning the land we needed to hunt on. I stressed that even though we didn't kill the lions (his preference), without our fact-gathering lion hunting might be stopped by "them tree-huggers".

Satisfied the old boy rose. Again I tottered to a stand and leaned against the truck while my legs woke up. The kill it turned out was no more than 50 yards from us. We passed it on the way in.

Typical lion kill

Four things usually indicate a deer killed by a mountain lion. The lion doesn't harry the animal so it is a clean kill with no hair pulled out during the chase. The lion kills the deer by breaking its neck. The third is not always present but a lion usually chews the ribs down as in the photo. The fourth thing I already mentioned: it doesn't eat its kill in the open. Long before we got to the carcass we saw a scattered trail of deer hair leading up to it. Coyotes bite at the deer's hindquarters pulling hair out during the chase but lions don't. The most obvious thing about the carcass when we reached it was its throat was torn out and its hind quarters lacerated. The final fact was it was in the middle of a pasture and no attempt had been made to conceal it. It was a very typical coyote kill just as we had suspected when we heard about it.

Joe, gentle, nice man that he was, did not want to offend the old boy by contradicting him so he brought his hounds over to check the scent. That was the wrong decision; an arrogant assertion that it was a coyote kill would have been better. The old boy's feelings and opinions were iron-clad. Bringing the hounds over didn't change his mind when they snuffled around and didn't give voice to the scent because they knew they weren't supposed to chase coyotes. The stubborn old goat decided the hounds were worthless as lion hounds and spread his "knowledge" far and wide in the community. It piled on adversity to what was already a difficult season.