Two Toms for Jan

[bearcat_outfitters]

Hunter Jan Divis of the Czech Republic had an extremely successful hunt with my guiding company in February. He had originally booked the hunt in January, but due to very poor snow conditions we re-booked the hunt for mid-February. Fortunately Jan had the flexibility in his schedule to re-book the hunt and this proved to be a very good decision by all. The hunt started with extremely cold temperatures of -30 Celsius, but we all made the best of it and persevered. The first two days were spent covering large areas on the snowmobiles, but no big tom tracks were cut. We cut one tom track, but it appeared to be small- to medium-size and we didn't release the hounds on it. On day three, the local trapper told us of a cat that had been destroying his trap sets, so we located the fresh tracks and let the hounds go to see if we could help him out a bit. The hounds treed the cat in fairly short order, but when we got to the tree we looked the cat over closely and it was a female that appeared to be pregnant. It was a legal cat to harvest, but as a group we made the call to let it go. We kept scouting for a good tom track and later that afternoon, I cut the track of a large tom and we spent the remainder of that day and the morning of day 4 unsuccessfully trying to 'box' this cat in. The afternoon of day 4, though, we tried getting ahead of the cat by scouting some new areas and my guide Shane Brady cut the tom's track. It appeared to have hooked-up with a female cougar, so we knew where we would be on the morning of day 5! The next morning we converged where we last saw the tom track and walked the hounds in on leashes to see if we could freshen the track up. Sure enough, we only went about 500 yards and found where the tom and the female had killed a mule deer and had bedded nearby. We sorted out the tracks to make sure we were on the tom's track and released the hounds. They went about 1 km. and treed the large tom. Jan made a great shot and the cat was in the bag. The tom has a huge skull and looks like it may well qualify for the Boone & Crocket record book. We then went on to hunt bobcat on day 6. We let the hounds go on a bobcat track that looked smoking-fresh, but after about 2 or 3 hours we caught up to the hounds as they were slowly working on the track and the track didn't look any fresher than when we first let the dogs go on it. We had to admit defeat and surmised that it was a tom bobcat that was 'lining out' simply looking for a receptive female. Oh well, we still had one last day of hunting to try and close the deal on a bobcat. On day 7, I cut a big bobcat track in fresh snow and again the hounds were released. The hounds trailed the cat for only about 1 hour and then we heard them baying 'treed.' We hiked into the dogs, but could not locate the bobcat in the tree. We spent at least an hour carefully glassing the trees with binoculars to see if we could see the cat. Finally, Shane saw something out of place at the very top of a huge Douglas-fir. We put the binoculars on it and sure enough, there was the bobcat laying out on a limb about 20 feet from the stem of the tree! Jan made a difficult shot and hit it perfectly and we had a very large tom bobcat to add to Jan's trophy collection. This ended our cat hunt with two great toms for Jan.

[Rainier10]

That is a stud of a cat.  Congrats to the hunter.  I would love to take a cat one day with my bow.

[jamesjett]

Great story Neil!  Thanks for sharing.  I hope to hunt with you again soon!

[MtnMuley]

   Two great cats.  That's a real dandy bob! Weight?

[bowhunterforever]

  Two great cats.  That's a real dandy bob! Weight?

[pd]

Thanks for the report.  That cougar is huge!

[bearcat_outfitters]

  Two great cats.  That's a real dandy bob! Weight?

Bobcat was about 32 pounds. Have gotten them bigger, but he was a pig nonetheless. Kind of short and stocky build.

[bearpaw]

both look like great animals...big head on that lion.... 

[seth30]

Those are some dandy cats