Punkin's Story
The photo above was taken about 1965 as Punkin reclined on Orvel's suit jacket at their home in Carnuel Canyon, between Albuquerque and Tijeras. More photos follow the story.
All of us Fletcher kids; my old brother, myself and younger sister have spent part of our lives hunting with my Dad and his hounds. Even my sister’s two grown children hunted mountain lion with their Grandpa from the time they were old enough to sit a horse and follow the pack.
We have always had hounds. My niece can rattle off the pedigree to the fifth generation of every hound my Dad has hunted since the day she was born. Dad never raised many puppies, but the best prospect from a litter got named after a good dog that had died. Some of the more unusual mealtime arguments have been which Dan or Bull or Duke was alive when you were a kid. Having been raised with hounds has taught us a great deal about following the pack.
I will always remember the time I was hunting with my Dad in the San Mateo Mountains and he had walked off and left me (again) with the admonition that the trail was too dangerous and he needed to catch up with the hounds. After thirty minutes or so of waiting I decided that being left behind was much worse than climbing rocks.
I tracked him for several miles through the ascending terrain. It was a hot, dry summer afternoon with a shimmer of heat dancing in the air. After what seemed an endless scramble over rough going I reached a high point on the side of a ridge overlooking the deep canyon below. I could hear the faint sound of the hounds trailing. So I sat down on the edge of a jumble of rock to catch my breath.
Within a few minutes all sound stopped, except for an occasional bird call. I sat wondering if I should get up and move on or wait a few minutes more for the dogs to pick up the scent again. Suddenly, in the canyon below I could hear the dogs running a hot track. It was intermittent, as if they were having difficulty working their way up the mountainside. They were moving the track and they were climbing in my direction. So I sat, listened and enjoyed the chase.
I felt more than heard the noise behind me as the shadow past overhead. A whisper in the air as the cat landed a few feet from where I sat. We looked at each other warily, somewhat surprised by the few yards of rocky ground that separated us. He was not a huge tom cat, but long and finely muscled. His tail twitched. I sat quite still as the hounds ran toward us as the seconds slipped by. Finally, the cat blinked and frowned with ears twitching. He turned his head and studied the ridge below us before gliding away on silent paws.
Hounds boiled over the ledge above my head, landing pell-mell around me, confused by my sudden appearance. They stared at me as if I had the cat in my pocket. Duke was checking out the limbs of the nearby juniper tree to see if the cat had taken refuge there. It took a determined effort to make them pick up the trail and go on.
As the hound ran on from view my Dad came striding up the hill, out of breath and looking a little surprised too to find me already there. We walked out onto the cliff’s edge together where the dogs stood baying out over the slanting rocks, screaming their frustration that the cat had found a way down that they could not follow.
We never hunted that particular cat again, but I still remember the color of his eyes. I suppose given the recent attacks and fatality here in New Mexico that I should have been afraid. I wasn’t particularly concerned because by the time we chased this lion in the San Mateos we had already lived with a pet lion for a number of years. His name was Punkin and this is his story.
Punkin’s tale began during a hunt with Dr. Frank Hibben, famed anthropologist and winner of the 1964 Weatherby Award. Doctor Hibben often hunted with my father through the years between his work on excavations and trips with his wife, Brownie, to all continents of the world. He enjoyed taking photographs, writing stories for sports magazines, and was the author of many books about his studies and travels. He documented not only many of my dad’s hunts, but other hunters who hunted with dogs in the southwest.
On this particular hunt my father was out with Dr. Hibben and Larry Eastman. Larry was riding one of our first quarter horse purchases, Working Cowboy. Cowboy was a smallish, lazy chestnut with a tiny star on his forehead. He also had very small, pointed pin ears to match his heart. He was a strong horse for his size, fairly agile, but could wear out the best of riders by simply not cooperating about anything. That day Larry was in trouble because his mount was balking on the downhill slide toward the dead juniper tree where the hounds had treed a young female cougar.
My dad was already at the tree with Dr. Hibben when Larry hallooed loud enough to get his attention. So he left Frank taking photos and went back to get Larry. He and Larry returned to the tree to find the cat had been killed by the hounds. A big black and white hound named Duke had figured out a way to climb the dead branches high enough to get a grip on the cat and pull her down. My dad was not happy this had occurred. On principle, my dad rarely killed a female lion and never one that obviously had kittens.
They searched for two days, back-tracking the cat through the mountains, hoping that they would find the kittens traveling with her. The sign in the patchy snow was that one yearling and two small kittens had been with the female and were now hiding somewhere in the vast, rocky landscape.
On the third day Duke struck a trail and began baying a rabbit hole. Down the rabbit hole was a small, spotted kitten. My dad plucked him out of the hole and stuffed him inside his jacket. The dogs could find no sign of the other kitten. Calling off the dogs, they rode for camp.
Concerned that they had nothing to feed the kitten they stopped at the Kelly Ranch and asked Mrs. Kelly if she could spare a little milk. Forty-four years later my father would knock on the same ranch house door and when Mrs. Kelly opened it, she took one look at him and said, “I remember you. You and Hibben stopped by and asked for milk to feed a baby lion.”
Unfortunately, the baby lion did not want the dairy product and refused to suck it off my dad’s finger.
Finally, the kitten went to sleep and the hunters stopped for a bite to eat at a restaurant in Socorro. When they got back inside the cab of the truck my dad belched. The kitten woke up and let out a squeaky mew making sucking noises. Dad tried the milk again, belching repeatedly to get the kitten to take it a few drips at a time.
We did not keep pets in the house, so at first the kitten went home with Larry whose wife had housecats. The housecats did not take to the new addition and a few weeks later the kitten ended up in a basket in front of the fireplace in our house. He was wobbly, short legged and his spotted fur stuck out at odd angles as he waddled across the kitchen linoleum. Dr. Hibben dug up a baby formula recipe from the local zoo and Punkin started putting on weight.
By the time he was six months old and the spots were fading he was ransacking the house. It was not a big home, built with a central circular hallway that connected all the rooms of the house and the cat knew every inch of it. He was good at sports, both handball and hockey. He could play hide and seek, pounding down the hallway at break neck speed sounding like a train, then pulling sneak attacks on silent paws. Clever, he never tangled his chain when put out of doors in the front yard for a little fresh air while my mother rescued our scattered belongings.
We took home movies over the years as we grew older and Punkin developed from a young lion into a mature cat. When he was a kitten his eyes were a shade of violet, then blue and finally a light gray as he grew to maturity. Some people can live with claws, but Punkin had a quick, nasty temper and his claws were removed. He liked visiting the hounds, hugging around the neck any dog that he got close enough to play with. Some minded and some ignored it. He irritated a small mule named Festus by grabbing him by the tail and holding him in place. No matter how hard the mule pulled the lion could hold him in a feline tug of war. Punkin lost interest in this game rather quickly and the mule soon learned to stay out of reach.
The growing cat finally outgrew the house with a series of incidents that increasingly destroyed my mother’s furniture and finally ended up with him leaping into my dad’s lounge chair with dad in it. The cat’s momentum knocked the big chair over backwards into the wall. The whole side of the chair came off. After that day Punkin started spending his free time outside in a renovated stone building next to the barn. We had nicknamed the old stone building the chicken house, but hound puppies and chickens don’t coexist. We had litters of puppies alternating with flocks of laying hens throughout the years. The puppies won every round with my mother’s attempts to have chickens. So we converted the building into a nice, dry camp for the cat.
As we moved from Carnuel Canyon to Reserve to Monticello in search of new hunting grounds Punkin came with us. He hated cars and riding in them, so his trips were based on necessity. He once made the El Paso Times edition and spent a few minutes on live public television. He didn’t mind having his picture taken but never liked the sound of cameras rolling.
He was smart and funny and endlessly inventive. He impressed on me at an early age. I was the chief cage cleaner, scrubber and bone collector. We kept a freezer just for Punkin and loaded it with jackrabbits and carcasses from the neighboring ranches who knew to call us when a cow died. The rabbits were his favorite meal, but it was much easier to freeze the rabbits first instead of having to use flea powder on the lion. I have always been amazed at how many ticks can live on a jackrabbit. I skinned a porcupine one time after being told that they were a lion’s favorite game only to have him push it back over to me untouched. Once I gave him several live blue gill only to have him hold them down with his paws until they stopped breathing and walk away unconvinced that grown cats eat fish. He liked deer and elk season because he got all the liver and anything else we considered his part.
What I will always remember about Punkin is how you could tell what he was thinking, or going to do, by the way his eyes seemed to change color. Like most animals he responded to a certain amount of discipline, but his attentiveness was tempered by his curiosity. He was proof that cougar have plenty of little gray cells and the ability to use them.
He lived fifteen years before he grew old and feeble. He lived long enough to become a game animal, no longer just a predator. The local Game and Fish Department was in a slight quandary when the cougar status changed in New Mexico, but considering his age, they decided he should stay with us instead of a zoo. Finally, he began to decline slowly, then rapidly and I had him put to sleep. I would never want another wild animal. Caring for a wild puma no matter how domesticated he may act at any given moment is a never ending learning experience. Punkin was definitely one of a kind.
We have always had hounds. My niece can rattle off the pedigree to the fifth generation of every hound my Dad has hunted since the day she was born. Dad never raised many puppies, but the best prospect from a litter got named after a good dog that had died. Some of the more unusual mealtime arguments have been which Dan or Bull or Duke was alive when you were a kid. Having been raised with hounds has taught us a great deal about following the pack.
I will always remember the time I was hunting with my Dad in the San Mateo Mountains and he had walked off and left me (again) with the admonition that the trail was too dangerous and he needed to catch up with the hounds. After thirty minutes or so of waiting I decided that being left behind was much worse than climbing rocks.
I tracked him for several miles through the ascending terrain. It was a hot, dry summer afternoon with a shimmer of heat dancing in the air. After what seemed an endless scramble over rough going I reached a high point on the side of a ridge overlooking the deep canyon below. I could hear the faint sound of the hounds trailing. So I sat down on the edge of a jumble of rock to catch my breath.
Within a few minutes all sound stopped, except for an occasional bird call. I sat wondering if I should get up and move on or wait a few minutes more for the dogs to pick up the scent again. Suddenly, in the canyon below I could hear the dogs running a hot track. It was intermittent, as if they were having difficulty working their way up the mountainside. They were moving the track and they were climbing in my direction. So I sat, listened and enjoyed the chase.
I felt more than heard the noise behind me as the shadow past overhead. A whisper in the air as the cat landed a few feet from where I sat. We looked at each other warily, somewhat surprised by the few yards of rocky ground that separated us. He was not a huge tom cat, but long and finely muscled. His tail twitched. I sat quite still as the hounds ran toward us as the seconds slipped by. Finally, the cat blinked and frowned with ears twitching. He turned his head and studied the ridge below us before gliding away on silent paws.
Hounds boiled over the ledge above my head, landing pell-mell around me, confused by my sudden appearance. They stared at me as if I had the cat in my pocket. Duke was checking out the limbs of the nearby juniper tree to see if the cat had taken refuge there. It took a determined effort to make them pick up the trail and go on.
As the hound ran on from view my Dad came striding up the hill, out of breath and looking a little surprised too to find me already there. We walked out onto the cliff’s edge together where the dogs stood baying out over the slanting rocks, screaming their frustration that the cat had found a way down that they could not follow.
We never hunted that particular cat again, but I still remember the color of his eyes. I suppose given the recent attacks and fatality here in New Mexico that I should have been afraid. I wasn’t particularly concerned because by the time we chased this lion in the San Mateos we had already lived with a pet lion for a number of years. His name was Punkin and this is his story.
Punkin’s tale began during a hunt with Dr. Frank Hibben, famed anthropologist and winner of the 1964 Weatherby Award. Doctor Hibben often hunted with my father through the years between his work on excavations and trips with his wife, Brownie, to all continents of the world. He enjoyed taking photographs, writing stories for sports magazines, and was the author of many books about his studies and travels. He documented not only many of my dad’s hunts, but other hunters who hunted with dogs in the southwest.
On this particular hunt my father was out with Dr. Hibben and Larry Eastman. Larry was riding one of our first quarter horse purchases, Working Cowboy. Cowboy was a smallish, lazy chestnut with a tiny star on his forehead. He also had very small, pointed pin ears to match his heart. He was a strong horse for his size, fairly agile, but could wear out the best of riders by simply not cooperating about anything. That day Larry was in trouble because his mount was balking on the downhill slide toward the dead juniper tree where the hounds had treed a young female cougar.
My dad was already at the tree with Dr. Hibben when Larry hallooed loud enough to get his attention. So he left Frank taking photos and went back to get Larry. He and Larry returned to the tree to find the cat had been killed by the hounds. A big black and white hound named Duke had figured out a way to climb the dead branches high enough to get a grip on the cat and pull her down. My dad was not happy this had occurred. On principle, my dad rarely killed a female lion and never one that obviously had kittens.
They searched for two days, back-tracking the cat through the mountains, hoping that they would find the kittens traveling with her. The sign in the patchy snow was that one yearling and two small kittens had been with the female and were now hiding somewhere in the vast, rocky landscape.
On the third day Duke struck a trail and began baying a rabbit hole. Down the rabbit hole was a small, spotted kitten. My dad plucked him out of the hole and stuffed him inside his jacket. The dogs could find no sign of the other kitten. Calling off the dogs, they rode for camp.
Concerned that they had nothing to feed the kitten they stopped at the Kelly Ranch and asked Mrs. Kelly if she could spare a little milk. Forty-four years later my father would knock on the same ranch house door and when Mrs. Kelly opened it, she took one look at him and said, “I remember you. You and Hibben stopped by and asked for milk to feed a baby lion.”
Unfortunately, the baby lion did not want the dairy product and refused to suck it off my dad’s finger.
Finally, the kitten went to sleep and the hunters stopped for a bite to eat at a restaurant in Socorro. When they got back inside the cab of the truck my dad belched. The kitten woke up and let out a squeaky mew making sucking noises. Dad tried the milk again, belching repeatedly to get the kitten to take it a few drips at a time.
We did not keep pets in the house, so at first the kitten went home with Larry whose wife had housecats. The housecats did not take to the new addition and a few weeks later the kitten ended up in a basket in front of the fireplace in our house. He was wobbly, short legged and his spotted fur stuck out at odd angles as he waddled across the kitchen linoleum. Dr. Hibben dug up a baby formula recipe from the local zoo and Punkin started putting on weight.
By the time he was six months old and the spots were fading he was ransacking the house. It was not a big home, built with a central circular hallway that connected all the rooms of the house and the cat knew every inch of it. He was good at sports, both handball and hockey. He could play hide and seek, pounding down the hallway at break neck speed sounding like a train, then pulling sneak attacks on silent paws. Clever, he never tangled his chain when put out of doors in the front yard for a little fresh air while my mother rescued our scattered belongings.
We took home movies over the years as we grew older and Punkin developed from a young lion into a mature cat. When he was a kitten his eyes were a shade of violet, then blue and finally a light gray as he grew to maturity. Some people can live with claws, but Punkin had a quick, nasty temper and his claws were removed. He liked visiting the hounds, hugging around the neck any dog that he got close enough to play with. Some minded and some ignored it. He irritated a small mule named Festus by grabbing him by the tail and holding him in place. No matter how hard the mule pulled the lion could hold him in a feline tug of war. Punkin lost interest in this game rather quickly and the mule soon learned to stay out of reach.
The growing cat finally outgrew the house with a series of incidents that increasingly destroyed my mother’s furniture and finally ended up with him leaping into my dad’s lounge chair with dad in it. The cat’s momentum knocked the big chair over backwards into the wall. The whole side of the chair came off. After that day Punkin started spending his free time outside in a renovated stone building next to the barn. We had nicknamed the old stone building the chicken house, but hound puppies and chickens don’t coexist. We had litters of puppies alternating with flocks of laying hens throughout the years. The puppies won every round with my mother’s attempts to have chickens. So we converted the building into a nice, dry camp for the cat.
As we moved from Carnuel Canyon to Reserve to Monticello in search of new hunting grounds Punkin came with us. He hated cars and riding in them, so his trips were based on necessity. He once made the El Paso Times edition and spent a few minutes on live public television. He didn’t mind having his picture taken but never liked the sound of cameras rolling.
He was smart and funny and endlessly inventive. He impressed on me at an early age. I was the chief cage cleaner, scrubber and bone collector. We kept a freezer just for Punkin and loaded it with jackrabbits and carcasses from the neighboring ranches who knew to call us when a cow died. The rabbits were his favorite meal, but it was much easier to freeze the rabbits first instead of having to use flea powder on the lion. I have always been amazed at how many ticks can live on a jackrabbit. I skinned a porcupine one time after being told that they were a lion’s favorite game only to have him push it back over to me untouched. Once I gave him several live blue gill only to have him hold them down with his paws until they stopped breathing and walk away unconvinced that grown cats eat fish. He liked deer and elk season because he got all the liver and anything else we considered his part.
What I will always remember about Punkin is how you could tell what he was thinking, or going to do, by the way his eyes seemed to change color. Like most animals he responded to a certain amount of discipline, but his attentiveness was tempered by his curiosity. He was proof that cougar have plenty of little gray cells and the ability to use them.
He lived fifteen years before he grew old and feeble. He lived long enough to become a game animal, no longer just a predator. The local Game and Fish Department was in a slight quandary when the cougar status changed in New Mexico, but considering his age, they decided he should stay with us instead of a zoo. Finally, he began to decline slowly, then rapidly and I had him put to sleep. I would never want another wild animal. Caring for a wild puma no matter how domesticated he may act at any given moment is a never ending learning experience. Punkin was definitely one of a kind.
2 comments:
I remember Punkin!! Donna was my best friend in Reserve, New Mex. I'd help her with the chores before we could play which meant feeding the dogs. Punkin would be stealthy in the wire cage and would pounce as you went by, like a big kitty. Considerably more of a thrill, tho.
During the summer of 68 I was privileged at age 14 to stay with the Fletcher family during their first summer in Monticello. My dad, Herb Owens, was an outdoor writer and had known Orvel through writing a story about him. I was supposed to stay with the family that would transform me from a city slicker boy into a man. What great memories! Part of my chores were to go to the freezer, get a rabbit, and toss it over the fence to Punkin. I also helped feed the dogs, and remember holding a goat while Orvel removed its horns. I remember the zebra skin on the sofa that always pricked my rear end. I could go on and on, but mostly wanted to share a great memory! Thank you for that!
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