Ashley's Cat

This is a story of a granddaughter hunting with her grandpa. My granddaughter, Ashley, had been wanting to get her own lion every since she was old enough to buy a license, but something always seemed to come up and her chance to shoot a lion was put off until a later date.

In early March ’06 Ashley was home visiting and I asked her if she wanted to go with me the next morning to run the dogs on the ranch that lies northeast of our house. She had promised her mother that she would help with the horses, so I told her that if I saw fresh lion sign that I would call on my cell phone.

At sunup the next morning I loaded my hounds and drove to the private locked gate at the end of old 17. There was about two inches of snow on the ground and the air was crisp in the early morning sun. A few miles inside the ranch there is a small spring that collects in a concrete tank in the bottom of a canyon and I drove toward it to check for sign. At the time a female and her yearling kitten were living on the ranch. I had jumped the young tom a couple of times, treed him and called off the dogs. The young tom’s home range was not very big at that time and I had seen his tracks numerous times. I had not seen a mature tom on the ranch since the previous year when I had caught a really large cat at the request of the local game warden because the big tom was killing and eating people’s pet dogs.

I turned the hounds out to exercise as I drove up the road toward the spring. Right before I dropped down into the bottom of the canyon I spotted tracks in the snow. It was the track of a big tom traveling south. The dogs struck immediately. I did not particularly want the dogs to run the track south since the ranch is surrounded by a populated area. I imagined that the cat might go in that direction, cross the busy north 14 highway and head into the heavily forested Sandia Mountains.

I got out of my truck and called Ashley to tell her that the hounds were running a big tom and if he kept moving in that direction that she should walk out onto the ranch and listen for them. If they dropped off on the west side of the ranch I wanted her to catch them and call them off before they reached the highway. By the time I finished the phone call the dogs had made a circle and were headed east toward South Mountain, a high, barren round mountain that anchors the southeast boundary of the ranch.

I called Ashley again and told her to meet me at the back gate. By the time I reached the gate, Ashley, her brother Hank and her husband, Josh Boyd, were already there. We were in a hurry to return as the dogs were already out of earshot and we needed to reach a place where we could walk into the foothills around South Mountain. Josh stayed at the truck in case we needed to relocate it to a better area. Hank, Ashley and I followed the tracks through the snow, listening for the dogs.

The old mountain is rough and very steep. Ashley had not changed from her riding boots to a pair of hunting boots, so her feet were already wet. The snow was about three inches deep under the trees and had begun to melt. Hank has an old knee injury and he slipped and aggravated it. Hank made a crude crutch from an old dead limb and we decided the best thing would be for him to go back down the mountain and head for the old Horton homestead where Josh could drive around and pick him up.

By now the wind had kicked up and was blowing the snow around us in a blinding cloud. The temperature was dropping. I knew Ashley was beginning to tire and her feet were probably frozen. We had not heard the dogs since we began to climb up through the rocks, so I asked her if she wanted to go back down to the truck. She was stubborn about going on, so we turned north and began working our way around through the rock slides stopping every few minutes to listen for the hounds. We finally topped out after a tough climb. It had been thirty years since I had been on top of that mountain. At that time I had seen the sign of two toms headed north, and I thought that trail was the best guess to which direction the dogs had gone. As we braced ourselves to walk against the cold wind I spotted the tracks of the dogs and the lion heading north. At this point the truck was only about four miles west of us and I hoped that the lion had turned that direction.

As we reached a deep saddle, the tracks turned back east toward the ridges that overlook the village of Cedar Grove. Our cell phone service was spotty and the battery was beginning to run low. Ashley called Josh and Hank to let them know we were going to drop off the east slope and make our way down toward the home of some people that I knew. These were the same folks that had lost a Welsh pony to a lion the previous year. The wife was the daughter of a houndsman who lived in Arizona and she had called the game warden when the pony was attacked. She had been somewhat angry that the game warden had shot the cat when we caught up to him, but after I showed her the scrapes and lion sign near her home she was glad to be rid of him because of the children. Their two young daughters had often played in the same area where the lion had spent several days before he killed the pony inside their corral.

As we started down the mountain my eight month old pup, Yeager, came to us. He had crossed enough snow covered ground that we could back track him. This is a very wild looking piece of country and in an area where the ranch had recently lost several calves. The man who oversees the cattle had thought is might be the work of coyotes or a pack of wild dogs, but I wondered if this cat was killing livestock. Over the past few years I had been called in to assist the local game warden in catching five grown cougar that were killing everything from goats to dogs and cats. In every instance it was a big tom lion that was preying on domestic animals. How these full grown tom lions, all in their prime, were ending up in the same area was a mystery. The area was too populated and the mountain range too small to support that many cats. I had asked the local game warden if we could arrange to DNA the toms that had been caught to see if they were closely related, but funds were not available for this.

We kept dropping down following the tracks. The blowing snow and rising wind made it difficult to follow the pup down the mountain into a big canyon. As we reached the bottom we could hear the dogs barking treed and as we approached the area where they were gathered under a great, tall pine it was obvious that they had been treed for several hours.

The lion was perched as high up in the huge, ancient pine as I had ever seen one climb. All we could see of him was his head and neck. Ashley took a few photos that did not turn out too clear, but we were happy with them anyway. I told her to make sure that she took her time and placed her shot. The cat was dead long before he hit the ground.

We were at least three quarters of a mile away from the nearest dirt road. I told Ashley I was give out and that she was going to have to drag the cat out by herself. There was still enough snow on that side of the mountain that it was a bit easier for her to do the job. When we reached the road I sat down on a log while Ashley went up toward the house to see if Hank and Josh had made it around the mountain.
About forty five minutes later they drove up. The hounds and I were mighty glad to see them. Hank was driving his new Ford pickup. We put the lion in the back of the truck with three of the dogs and put the other six dogs in the back seat with Ashley. Everyone was very tired after a ten hour ordeal.

The game warden came by the house that afternoon and we examined the contents of the cat’s stomach. The warden thought it was deer, but I thought the hair looked a little too long although I could not give a guess at what it might be. The skull measured 15⅛” and would be good enough for the record book.

Several days later I ran into the local rancher and he wanted to show me something so I followed his truck around to where he stopped next to a brushy hillside. Underneath a mound of piled up leaves under a scrub oak were the remains of a long haired red dog that this cat had killed and partially eaten. So, the mystery of what type of hair was in the cat’s stomach was solved.