Professional mountain lion hunter Rob Pedretti stood at the fork in the trail.
"I know where that goes," he told me as he pointed down the side of the mountain. "But I don't know where we go if we go up. What do you want to do?"
"Let's go up," I said.
He and his six lion hounds started uphill. A good scramble later we were on top. Walking on the ridge was easy, and the view was incredible. We found a shed mule deer antler and a recent lion dig. But no lion tracks.
At the end of the ridge we started back down. Rob said he knew there was a trail on the back side of the mountain, and that going down would be easy.
At first, it was. Then we found a few rocks in the trail. Then a few more. When we got around on the "nose" of the ridge, things got complicated. A rocky ledge on an overhang went around a corner and ran out; we had to backtrack and keep working down. We climbed down several rock faces, and finally down a rocky gully.
Then the real fun began. From the rocks we were on, the only way down was a steep, narrow crevice. The left wall was vertical and the right one sloped away from us. Between them was a crack just wide enough for my backside. We couldn't see the entire length of it--maybe 30 yards--but there was a big rock fall at the bottom.
The dogs didn't like it any more than I did. Finally Rob tied one of them to a leash and plunged down the crevice, taking her with him. All but one of them followed. I told the straggler, Slick, to go on, but all he would do was sit behind me and whine.
Finally I settled my fanny in the crack and started sliding down. I braced my hands and my feet and sort of crabbed my way along. As soon as I started, Slick decided he wanted to come too, and got right behind me. He stayed behind me until I got to a spot where the crevice widened a little, then went around me and slid the rest of the way down to the rockfall.
A long slither later, I got there myself. From there it was a scramble over boulders the size of washtubs. After that, we hiked another hundred yards down a rocky gully until we reached the original trail we had left that morning. I was dirty, scraped, bruised, and hungry.
If this sounds like the hunt from hell, it wasn't. It was a demanding, exhausting hunt, one that required more of me physically than any hunt I'd ever taken before, or any one I've been on since. But every time someone asks me which hunt I have enjoyed the most, I tell them, "The time I walked after a mountain lion; I would go again in a heartbeat." Never mind that I didn't get one; just the experience was enough to make it a hunt I will never forget.
At a time when many forms of hunting are coming under fire from animal rights groups, mountain lion hunting is criticized even within the ranks of hunters. It is often regarding as "easy" or "unsporting" because many hunters use hounds to trail the big cats.
While it is true that now and then a hunter gets lucky and kills a cat 30 yards off the road 10 minutes after he or she begins hunting, it is also just as true that sometimes a lion hunter goes home empty-handed.
Cat hunting is like any other hunting: even a tyro can have a good day and get an animal right out of the gate. At other times, even in front of the most experienced hunter with the best pack of hounds, the cat slips away. And it's one of the few hunts in this country where, especially in the case of an aggressive or wounded animal, the hunter can quickly become the hunted.
For whatever reason, a number of myths have been perpetuated about mountain lions and mountain lion hunting. Although they have little basis in fact, they have contributed to the negative stereotype of the sport.
Myth Number 1
Mountain lion hunting is easy; you just drive around until you cut a track, let the hounds tree the cat (usually just off the road), walk in, and shoot it.
Fact
I can tell you from my own experience that lion hunting can be an incredibly hard hunt. I came back more bruised, more sore, and more scraped up from my lion hunt than I ever have from any other hunt, including four trips into the African bush.
"It's as challenging as anything," Rob Pedretti says. "If you come and hunt one day in the snow it may seem like a very easy hunt. But I also outfit deer, elk and bear, and lion hunting is the hardest hunt, and takes more of a toll on me, than anything else. I travel way more miles between animals; they're very solitary animals, and they're hard to find."
He covers those miles on foot, on horseback, on four-wheelers, in vehicles, to look for tracks he can put the hounds onto.
"You also have to have a good pack of dogs," he says. "It takes years to get that pack built up. The preparation behind mountain lion hunting is incredible, and I guess sometimes that makes it look easy."
Myth Number 2
Hunting mountain lions with dogs isn't fair chase.
Fact
Hunting lions without dogs is almost impossible. In fresh snow, a hunter can see tracks easily. But under dry conditions, there's simply no way to track a cat.
"Dry ground is pretty much the ultimate challenge when you're lion hunting with hounds," Pedretti says. "You have to strike the lion in the dirt, often without seeing a track. You have a 50y percent chance of running the lion backwards unless you do find a track and get the dogs running the right way."
For some reason, he says, dogs can run a cat track as easily backward as forward; when that happens, the hunter may chase dogs literally for days until he catches up with them.
Snow makes tracking a cat easier, but it's still no job for a human hunter without a good nose.
"A good dog can really track them in the snow," Pedretti says. "But they can still outfox the dog, or go through country that's really mean and the dogs can't cross."
Kathi Green is a regional wildlife biologist with the Colorado Division of Wildlife in the Denver foothills area. She calls the idea that hunting with hounds is not fair chase a value judgment.
"Most people who have used dogs to chase lions for research will tell you they don't think it's an unfair advantage," she says. "I think where the general public gets into this 'unfair advantage' bit, is that they don't like the part where the lion is up the tree and can't get down. What I've heard the most is 'But they get it up a tree and they shoot it out of a tree. How sportsmanlike is that?'"
After hunting a lion, my answer to that would have to be: it depends on how hard you had to work to get him there!
Even when the dogs tree the lion, the hunt doesn't always end with a dead cat. The lion is very capable of inflicting a great deal of damage to a pack of dogs, and sometimes does. Pedretti carries a well-equipped first-aid kit in his pack, complete with needles and sutures--and they're not for him. More than once he's had to stitch up a dog that's gotten too close to those teeth and claws, or bury one so badly injured he couldn't pull it through.
And lions will jump to get away.
"We chased one a couple years ago, where the field officer was right there and ready to shoot it and it jumped about 15 feet out of the tree and the chase was on again," Green says.
Tomorrow we'll look at some additional myths about mountain lion hunting in Part Two.
Copyright (c) 1997 Carolee Boyles-Sprenkel. All rights reserved.
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