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Cold Sweat
Chasing mountain lions on foot through the Montana backcountry.
By Chris Kelley

Like a human chameleon, I begin to organically blend into my snowy surroundings. For the last two hours, since before first light, I’ve been hiking so hard that my black fleece jacket is now powdered white with a sweat that has soaked all the way through my three layers of clothing and crystallized in the still, subzero air. My equally gritty hunting partner, Korey Klingenmeyer, is ten miles away. He’s climbing just as vigorously up another drainage in southwestern Montana, likely creating his own Ghillie suit of hoarfrost and icicles.

It’s the third day of December and the second day of our do-it-yourself mountain lion hunt. With daylight hours getting so short I can now count them without even using all my fingers, Korey and I race to find a track early enough in the day that we’ll have a chance to catch up with the big cat before dark.

I’m told male cougars, called toms, occupy twenty square miles or more. I know they walk about eight miles a day in their quest to hunt, breed, and drive off or kill rival cats. Females travel much less. I’m told they occupy about five square miles.

Chasing lions with hounds is unlike almost any other big-game hunting. You don’t need camouflage, don’t have to whisper in the woods (although the habit is hard to break), and don’t need to worry that you’re busted every time the wind swirls. That’s because you’re not going to be sneaking up on an animal that doesn’t know you’re there. In fact, whenever you’re in the woods, lions almost always know you’re there, which is why hardly anyone ever sees one.

Rather, you’ll be working with a special breed of hounds that will help you follow the lion through miles of the most formidable country in which you’ll ever gasp for air. It doesn’t matter that the very same country seemed relatively gentle and accessible during elk season. Lions make you go where ungulates don’t. They punish you if you try to follow them. They take you over every rock and downfall, into every dark canyon and creek bed, across every ledge, slide, and abyss.

If you can handle those kinds of challenges without losing your heart or dogs, you’ll eventually come face to face with one of the most potent predators in North America—and one of the most thrilling moments of your life.

I met Korey the year before when I guided him on a Montana elk hunt. We hunted hard for a trophy bull all week and became fast friends. The last evening of that hunt, we spotted a herd of elk two thousand feet above us. Given the wind, we had to climb the steep side of the ascent. With the failing light, we had to do it fast. While we didn’t kill an elk (we couldn’t find the big bull we were looking for), we reached the spot in time. That night I offered to take Korey lion hunting if he ever wanted to get a license and come along.

I guide elk and deer hunters professionally, but I run lions only recreationally, mostly just to photograph them with my friend Keith Short, a fellow houndsman. I’ve been chasing cats since 1994, typically treeing between five and fifteen a year. Of all those cats, some of them truly massive, I’ve released all but seven.

Korey took me up on my offer. He flew from his home in Alaska with his five-year-old son, Kolby, and landed in Wisconsin where he hooked up with his lifelong hunting sidekick and free babysitting service, Grandpa Darrell. Together they drove to meet me in Montana.

Just minutes after the Klingenmeyer crew arrived, Korey and I treed our first lion. It was a big 120-pound female that had killed and cached a deer. I cut her track earlier that day while scouting the area and breaking trail so Korey would have a clear understanding of where to check for tracks on his own. My two hounds, Pongo and Blueberry, caught the cat not more than 100 yards away from the half eaten doe. After we tied the dogs and photographed the cat, we watched in awe as she leapt off the branch, sailed forty feet through the air and disappeared back into the forest. The whole chase lasted fifteen minutes.

On the Track

Today is different, though. I have already hiked five miles round-trip without cutting a track. Depending on what Korey sees; we might be hiking another five miles before noon to check the next set of drainages.

Luckily, we’re spared from having that much fun. Korey finds where a lion crossed in the night and stepped in my boot print from the day before. Before the hike, I had given Korey a tape measure and told him from my experience that any cat print 3½ inches or bigger is a tom. Anything smaller is likely a female. He tells me the pad measures 3¾ inches across.

We hurry back up the mountain, this time with the dogs. I strap on their radio collars in case they get lost overnight. I also fit them with bells and put Blueberry in his cut-resistant vest. It’s all to protect them from potential wolf attack, a real danger ever since the wolf reintroduction program, but the dogs know it means lion hunting. They enthusiastically pull me up the mountain like a canine-driven ski lift. Still I have no real advantage over Korey, who is hiking under his own power. The dogs constantly lunge off the trail to check the dozens of suspicious- looking tracks as I struggle to keep my footing and my course.

We’re about two miles up the mountain when I see the lion track out in front of us. It is large and evenly spaced, very much like a man walking. The dogs get a whiff and go berserk. I turn them loose and watch with a certain dismay as they run in full cry up the side of a painfully steep slope. As the dogs climb higher and their long bawling howls become more distant, my hopes for a short chase fade.

Our job now is to hike to the top of that ridge before the dogs get over the top of the next one and out of earshot. Once there, we stop to listen. We can’t hear a thing. The tracks turn north following the ridgeline to a whole new set of peaks and canyons. If we don’t hurry, I fear I won’t be able to hear which way the dogs are heading. In my haste, I run in front of Korey, jump a fallen log, and pull up short as my heart leaps.

Splayed out in front of me is an enormous bull elk. The cat tracks go right through the middle of its empty ribcage; the dogs’ tracks drift wide. Even though the elk’s bones are picked white by scavengers, it can’t have been dead long since the massive rack is completely un-weathered.

Korey comes over the fallen log and I watch as his eyes widen, the same way I knew mine just had. Now he swears in amazement, the same way I just did. If Mother Teresa were an elk hunter, she’d probably be wide-eyed and swearing too.

It took an extra year, but I’m elated that Korey and I have finally found a true trophy bull. And even thought Korey never fired a shot, we feel the same sense of pride and ownership after any more traditionally successful hunt.

“This means just as much to me as the lion we’re chasing,” Korey says when I forego a coin flip and tell him he can have the bull. “Even if we never see a tom, my trip is made.”

I pick up the head and volunteer to carry it. I’m not being helpful; I just need time with these horns, to fully experience their mass and heft. This is one of the top bulls I’ve seen in more than fifteen years of guiding trophy elk hunters.

But the fifty-pound-plus head is too heavy and unwieldy to carry in this kind of country. I’m forced to put the rack down and come back for it after the race. It’s like leaving behind a chest of gold.

Facing the Lion

Instead of walking the easy game trail north along the ridgeline, the lion has cut west and is now heading across an increasingly vertical face, dogs in tow. The first time I got into country like this, I was brand new to lion hunting. I was chasing with a friend whose two dogs had just split up. My friend followed one and sent me after the other. Looking up at the incredibly steep terrain, I asked him if a guy could follow a dog no matter where it went. He said if you see dog tracks, you can follow them. The hound ran into a series of 100-foot cliffs separated by steep slides of slick frozen dirt. Against my instincts, I followed the tracks across one of the slides. I got about a third of the way out when it got too steep to continue or even turn around. With a sudden violence, my feet came out from under me and I shot straight for the edge. I tried to slow my decent by digging in with my free hand and dragging my compound bow with the other, but the ground was too frozen and the grade too steep. Unbelievably, my bow caught between two rocks frozen in the ground and stopped me just in time. My feet were actually over the edge. I pulled myself back up but was still trapped on the lip of a cliff. I took an arrow from my quiver and used the broad head to chip a toehold in the frozen ground for my next step. A half hour later my legs and back were trembling with fatigue from holding a squat position for so long, but I got off that edge. From then on, I knew it wasn’t the lion part of a mountain lion that would hurt you; it was the mountain part.

I say nothing to Korey, but the memory of that experience leaves me uneasy as the ground under me continues to tip more and more. I’m just about to put in the extra effort to climb up and around this face when we intersect a trail that takes us to another ridgeline. Once there, I stop and listen. I can hear the dogs off in the distance. I know by their short, choppy bark they have the cat.

Re-energized, I descend the backside of the mountain so fast that each step takes me ten feet down. I begin grabbing onto trees to control my descent. God forbid this cat ever runs back up the mountain—it would take hours to regain the elevation I’m losing in just minutes. I have little to worry about though; cougars rarely run uphill. In fact, unless the dogs are closing in on them or they are making a kill, they rarely run at all. While they can cover short distances with amazing speed, they have virtually no long-distance endurance. The lungs of a mature tom are so small they will fit in the palm of your open hand.

Korey, who is shouldering his rifle, arrives at a lookout point moments after me. I can see the dogs far below, standing on the trunk of an old-growth tree, heads tipped back in classic hound-dog style. Thirty feet above them, through the branches, I can just see the tawny color of a cat.

When we get to the tree, I know the cat is a tom by the square shape of its head. But since this area is closed to females, I need to be positive. The only way to sex a cat with absolute certainty is to look between its hind legs. If there’s a black dot, about the size of a dime, it’s a tom. If not, it’s a female. Like their lungs, cats have extremely small external organs. (While it might sound like one, it’s no compliment if someone says you’re hung like a tomcat.) The first tom I ever shot was 165-pound record-book animal. I never did find its sex organs until we skinned it. A year later, another local houndsman shot a tom in an area closed to females. When he got it on the ground, he couldn’t find evidence of gender. Thinking he made a mistake, he drove to an area open to females and checked it in with Fish and Game there. Turns out the cat was indeed a tom.  Ironically, the wardens fined him and confiscated the cat since the new area was closed to toms.

Even with my 10x40 Zeiss binocular, I’m having trouble finding the black spot. The cat is straddling a branch and won’t move off its haunches. Finally it shifts and I see the mark.

The cat is only ten yards away, but Korey has to back up another seventy yards to get a clean shot through the branches. Shot well, lions die easy. Shot poorly, it’s usually the dogs that die.

To Pongo and Blue, this lion is just an overgrown housecat. Hounds don’t seem to realize how much lethal power they’re messing with. Weighing anywhere from 100 to 180 pounds, a mature lion can take down a 700-pound elk, never mind a 70-pound dog. Unless wounded, lions don’t seem to realize that either. Two years ago, my friend Keith and I caught a cat for another friend who shot the lion in the neck. Strong enough to run, but too weak to get up a tree, the cat turned on our dogs. All five hounds went to the hospital with thirty or more stitches.

Korey fires and the cat leaps from the tree, flips on its side, and is done.

By the time we get the dogs and cat out of the mountains, it’s just about dark. While still high on our own endorphins and adrenaline, we’re also exhausted, sore, and hungry. But that has no bearing on our next decision. We’re hiking back to get that elk head—exhausted, sore, and hungry. We also realize that by the time we’ll get off the mountain for good, we’ll have hiked a total of fifteen miles.

I can feel the temperature drop with the sun as the intense cold grabs at my sweat.  Near the top of mountain I get lightheaded and lean on a large log to steady myself. Korey seems to be catching a second wind and is eager to move around me and over the log. Then I see why. There, just beyond us, shining in the moonlight, lies the big bull. The night sky is so bright I can still see the lion track crossing through the rib cage and the dogs’ running wide. I see it still.

Epilogue

We took the lion and the elk to my friend Keith Short, an award-winning taxidermist who specializes in both species. Keith’s shop was full of huge racks from the recent elk season, but nothing compared to the bull we brought in.  It gross-scored 379 7/8, but with deductions missed the Boone and Crockett all-time record book requirement of 375 points. Yet it’s the mass that made this bull so special. Its beams measured 11 inches in circumference, more than an inch bigger than the world-record bull taken with a rifle. Keith later told us that a lion probably killed the elk. While removing bits of old hide from the elk head, Keith found a lion fang embedded in its skull.

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