Sorry for the long write up- we had an eventful weekend in North Idaho and it couldn’t be described adequately in a few sentences. this story is in addition to Machias' story about the lion hunt.
Friday January 13th… Slept in. Sometime in the middle of the night I got a ‘bad feeling’ about hunting the next day and talked myself out of going. I was hunting alone and the temps were ~5 degrees. I’m not superstitious, but maybe it was the date that made the decision easier for me…?
Saturday January 14th- Up at 3:00am and out the door to run cats. The temps are up around 15 and we have a tiny skiff of snow, but it’s enough to determine a track age pretty easily. I snowmobiled a road that has a TON of deer during the winter and cut a smallish lion track. The cat was headed up the mountainside and I managed to cut it again about ½ mile up the hill. I turned Whisper loose at the lower crossing to give her a chance to do some cold tracking on the way up- then I went up the hill to see how she worked the track across the road near me.
While I was sitting waiting for her to get to the second crossing some wolf hunters came by and we visited- they let me know that a pack was using an area just north of where I was. Great…wolves will kill a hound given the opportunity so I was concerned about that. While we talked, Whisper moved the track through the area we were sitting/visiting and all of us got to watch her work the old track. It was a pleasure getting to see that as sometimes you can only hear a distant chase and guess what they’re doing and how they’re working. Whisper skunked around in a small canyon for a bit then really went wild. I figured she had it freshened up and I turned Tana loose to help her out.
The wolf hunters and I sat and listened to the chase for ~15-20 minutes and I heard Tana go ballistic. She will not bark on trail, so when I hear her I know they’re looking at game. I wished the wolf hunters good luck and they to me and I took off at a trot to get to the tree. I had Radar- my 5 month old pup- along on a lead to get him some exposure. The walk was pretty short but steep, slick and demanding. The GPS unit on the dogs tells me if they’re stationary (on tree) or moving and it kept giving me a moving signal, which was odd. I got to within ~150 yards and could hear them barking hard and I figured they had the cat treed- I let Radar go to join the hounds at the tree. At around 100 yards I could hear that there was a VERY SERIOUS fight going on- Radar was squalling and I heard Whisper yowling in pain. The lion let out one blood curdling scream during the fight and I was in high gear to get there and help the dogs. It was thick and steep and when I crested the ridge the lion was on the ground facing the dogs. She was maybe 10 yards from me and crouched looking at the dogs. Had a shot opportunity presented itself I would have killed her there, but she saw me a ran through the dogs and back down the hillside. Tana and Whisper were hot on his tail and they got her treed within a couple hundred yards. At the tree I got some pictures and let the dogs bark at her for a while. I took a quick look at the hounds and saw they were all cut up, but none of them seemed to be real bad. The pup got the worst of it and had a hole in his side with a lot of skin separation and bruising- no broken ribs though.
Monday January 16th- A few friends joined me today- including Machias (Fred) that has some experienced curs and has been running hounds for quite a while. We took off around 5:30 to look for a fresh track- Chris, Fred and I all split up to check 3 areas. I was the only one that found a track, and it happened to be in the same area as Saturday’s nasty cat. We decided to turn loose even though I was pretty sure this was the same cat that cut three dogs on Saturday. With Fred’s cur in the mix there would be a lot more noise and would be more likely to get this cat up a tree. I was hoping to make this cat a ‘trainer’- one that I could count on finding and treeing to get the young dogs experience.
We turned Whisper and Bo (Fred’s Leopard Cur) at the track and they took some time cold trailing. After maybe a ½ hour they started moving the track pretty quick and Whisper picked up the tempo to a really excited bark (more like a yodel!). I turned Tana loose and we waited to see what happened. The dogs moved out of earshot and we were relying on the GPS units to tell us the story which is way less fun than hearing it! After some time, the units showed all three dogs treed and we piled down the canyon and started up the other side. When we were ~600 yards away Whisper came running down hill to us. She was laid open on the shoulder and bleeding pretty badly. My heart sank. We could not hear the dogs and I knew this cat was up the hill making ribbons of them. There were five of us along on the hunt and Mike, Chris, Allison, Fred and I picked up the pace to a jog/run up the hill to help the curs.
I crested the hill and could hear the fight and the dogs baying. The lion was laid up under a fallen tree against the base of a big tree. She had a pretty good fortification in there was hooking any dog that dared get into reach. Whisper joined the bay again (with new courage from the people being close!) and I had my .357 at the ready to get rid of that cat should the opportunity arise. When she saw me she blew up and through the fallen tree and took off at breakneck speed. All three dogs were right on her tail and put her up within 150 yards. We had three pups with us (Chris had Patches-Mike had Willow-I had Nosey) and they stayed on the leads all the way to the tree. Fred shot it- it was good for them to see another cat come out of a tree and they all took a turn at chewing on it once it was dead.
Had Fred’s dog not been with Tana I think that cat would have killed her. As it was we had two dogs that needed stitches and one more with ~12-15 hook holes. I am glad to be rid of this cat and I’m relieved that no dogs got seriously hurt or killed. Generally lion hunting is pretty safe for hounds- cats almost always tree and lots of folks run only one or two dogs for lions. We would not usually kill a female cat, but this cat was a strange one and had an uneven temperament. She was otherwise healthy- weight 104 lbs, had all of her teeth, no young.
Freds Dogs saved the day and I'm really glad he got this cat. Bo treed and stayed in the fight like a champ despite a nasty cut to the head and some very serious bruising/trauma. I really do think that if either of the curs would have left the bay or been killed, the other dog would have been in big trouble. This cat wasn't going to back away from a fight. Whenever someone asks about that skull Fred will have a pretty good story to tell!
Let's go again as soon as these dogs are healed up!