I think I might be a little crazy! When my friend, Mitch, from Imperial Taxidermy in Idaho called me and said, “You need to hurry. Randy has cut a big cat track and wants you up there right now,” I grabbed my wife, Monica, and we hit the road. We were five hours away, but we had our bags packed and were anticipating the call, so we drove as fast as we could. As luck would have it, we couldn’t make it there in time to hunt that night, but the anticipation for the morning hunt was extremely high!
This was going to be Monica’s first mountain lion hunt, and we were excited about having a track to pursue first thing in the morning, and on top of it a HUGE tom track!
We started out cold trailing the track on foot. Randy and his friend, Chris, went separate directions, and Monica and I stayed in the Ranger. About an hour later, Chris radioed that the track was getting fresher and looked like we could put some dogs on it. Randy was walking down the ridgelines and had determined that the cat had not crossed either of them. Randy came and got two dogs, Deude and Jingle, and they slid down the hill to meet up with Chris who was following the track back up to where Monica and I were anxiously waiting. Not long after Randy started to slide down the hill, he cut the track and saw how fresh it was. He released both dogs, and they took off in a mad dash running straight up the hill. They covered over 1,000 yards in about five minutes. The track was smoking hot!
Randy and Chris came back to the Ranger, and soon we were devising a plan to get Monica in on the action. We worked our way around trying to get closer to the dogs, but we couldn’t hear them barking. The night before while we were having some dinner and talking about past cat hunts, I told Randy that some day I’d like to catch a cat in a cave and see if I was brave enough to go in after it. You can imagine how I felt when Randy looked at me and said, “I think this cat is heading towards a bear den!”
We continued to make our way to where the dogs were, and sure enough, we could not hear them barking because the cat had gone into a cave and the dogs where 15 feet inside it. I looked at Monica and asked if she was okay with me going after it. She simply said, “I’m not going in there!”
It was time to see how crazy I really was and if I had enough courage to get the job done. As we got closer to the cave, Chris had the dogs wrangled up and was holding them back about 15 feet from the mouth of the cave. There was a large rock that was just outside the cave opening, so it was hard for us to see inside the cave. The mouth of the cave was shaped like a triangle, and the deeper I looked in the cave the smaller and narrower it became. At the deepest point of the cave, which we called the pinch point, the cave turned to the right and went up into a cavern. This was protected by large rocks that were pointed and went vertical to the top of it. There was about 10 inches of clearance between these large rocks and the top of the cave.
From our rock outside the cave, we could see over these large pointed rocks, and as we shined the flashlight into the cave, we could see the cat’s eyes glowing back at us. His head was huge, and he was in a place where he was very protected. Randy asked me if thought I could shoot the cat right where he was, and I said, "Yeah, I can get a shot in there." I aimed right between his eyes and squeezed the trigger. Boom! I hit the cat right in the bridge of his nose. Needless to say, he was not happy and was slashing around, growling and hissing.
I crawled into the cave five feet to see if I could get another shot at him, but all I heard was silence. I told Randy I thought the cat was dead. He said, “Okay, let’s send a dog in and we’ll see.” Chris let Deude go, and he ran right into the pinch point and the cat started hissing and growling. I knew that the cat was not dead, just really, really mad! I went back into the cave and tried to get a better position to get another shot, but I couldn’t get in far enough without leaving myself completely vulnerable and not able to move my arms. Randy explained to me that he wanted me to get to where the dog was because the dog could see the cat. If I could get to that point in the cave, I could see the cat and then I could shoot him. This sounded easy, but I couldn’t get the courage to get in that laid out position. For the next half hour or so, I went in and out of that cave at least five times. Each time, I would use the large pointed rocks as a way to partially stand up in the cave. As I crouched over the rocks, I found myself in a large crack between these rocks and could see through the 10-inch opening between the top of the rocks and the top of the cave, but I couldn’t see the cat. The area of the cave the cat was in was guarded by another layer of rocks and he was hiding on the other side, out of sight from me.
I came out of the cave and sat with Randy, explaining to him my predicament. He looked around and found a stick about five feet long. He cleaned off the smaller twigs so the stick was smooth and handed it to me. He said, “Okay, this is what you’re going to do. Go back in the cave and get into your position and then use the stick to smack on the rock. This will piss the cat off and he will stand up and then you can shoot him.” For some reason, this sounded like a good idea and off I went.
I had a brief conversation with myself before entering the cave this last time and I told myself it was okay, I wasn't going to die today. I may go to the hospital, but I was not going to die. The cat, on the other hand, was going to die.
With my stick and flashlight in my left hand and my pistol in my right hand, I went back in the cave. I got myself into my position and started smacking that stick on the rock. At about the sixth time I smacked it, the cat made a loud hiss and swatted that stick right out of my hand like it was a popsicle stick. I focused my eyes on where I thought he would be standing and there he was three feet away, looking right at me, growling and snarling, mouth wide open. It was so loud that I will never be able to erase that sound from my memory. Without even aiming, I fired a shot and then the real rodeo started.
After the shot, the cat decided he had had enough of hiding and was coming out of the cave. He came slinking around the pinch point as I was making a mad exit out of the cave, shooting at him at least three more times until my gun jammed. At one point, he was crawling out and looking right at me as I was crawling backwards out of the cave. We were only three feet apart from each other! As I got to where I could stand up fully, I was able to clear my gun and shoot at him again. He had made it through the pinch point and turned back around to go back into the cavern. My pistol was out of ammo, and I was handed the rifle and put two more in him. He died right there with his head in the middle of the pinch point.
After I stopped shaking, I had the realization of what I had just accomplished and how lucky I was to get out this situation without a really bad altercation with this cat. I climbed back into the cave about 15 feet to retrieve my cat and was able to drag him out with the shear adrenaline I had racing through my body. He was truly a cat-of-a-lifetime, a true 200 pounder, and an absolute great experience that I will never forget. I was so happy to have experienced this with Monica watching from outside of the cave and hearing her tell the story of the cat coming out of the cave after I shot him the first time. She said, “He was coming to get you. I could see it in his eyes. It was scary.”
I could not have been able to make this dream of mine come true without the expertise of Randy. He is a true “GI Joe” on the mountain, and he knows cats better than anyone I have ever hunted with. We have told this story over and over now and have had many laughs about all the crazy things that happened. However, the one thing that really stands out to Randy is that the night before I was telling him how much I wanted to catch a cat in a cave and after 30 years of hunting mountain lions this was the first time he had caught one in a cave. I also want to say thanks to Chris for helping us with the tracking and for all the laughs along the way. I can’t wait until winter so we can get back out and get Monica her cat.
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