New Mexico—Originally published in 1928 in Country Gentlemen magazine, this account of cougar hunting captures the nostalgia of technology-free lion pursuit, a rarity in modern-day hunting.
Way high up in the Mogollons,
Among the mountain tops,
A lion cleaned a yearling’s bones
And licked his thankful chops.
That is where Paul Bransom and I went to hunt the mountain lion—the American lion, the Mexican lion, the panther, the painter, the puma, or whatever other name one wished to bestow upon the cougar species of the cat family. Westerners generally refer to him as mountain lion, or simply as lion. Texans nearly always call him panther, and panther is the word, with its corruption painter, that connotes the great hunters of old days, like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. Some people call him catamount, but the catamount proper is the wildcat, or lynx. I propose to use whatever name sounds best in the place and at the time it is used.
Eighty-five miles by automobile from Magdalena, New Mexico, across the winter-browned Plains of San Agustín, then to the road’s end in the Black Range, and we were at the Evans brothers’ Slash Ranch at Beaverhead. Twenty miles with pack mules over a trail of Datil National Forest, and we were at the Horse Camp on the Middle Prong of the Gila River, perhaps the best mountain lion country left in the United States.
Formerly the panther ranged over entire North america, but a lion country nowadays must be inaccessible. Inaccessibility means brush and rocks and a country that is rough. The forks of the Gila, with their intersecting canyons, are as rough as a million years of ice and snow and rain and wind and sun and volcanoes—ages ago extinct—can make and unmake, scar and weather the rocks.
It is the malpais, “bad country.” Here are mountains covered with pine, spruce, and fir and fringed with manzanita and stubborn shinnery. Here are slopes and plains dotted with alligator junipers and sweet-nut-bearing piñons. Here are wide mesas of grama grass, and moating the mesas are canyons that cut down a sheer thousand feet—Jordan, Cassidy, House Log, brother West, indian, Panther, butcher knife, and many a lesser.
Finally, a lion country must be prolific of lion food. The lion’s staff of life is deer meat. He likes turkeys, and there are plenty of turkeys in the Mogollons. He licks his chops over antelope and beaver, both of which survive in numbers along the Gila. Frequently, other food being scarce, he kills calves and yearlings, but seldom does he bother cattle in the Datil National Forest.
He grows fatter on colts and mules than on anything else, but horse raising is pretty much an obsolete business now. All he asks is venison, and anywhere on the upper forks of the Gila venison may be had for the asking. Every day we rode i saw forty or fifty deer.
But even in the best lion country rigid requirements are necessary for catching a lion. The requirements are trained hunters, trained dogs, and, generally, persistence and endurance. Lions are shy and wily creatures. Men who have hunted them a lifetime and have killed scores of them have told me that they never saw one until after he had been jumped by dogs.
The Evans brothers, Dub and Joe, are certainly experienced hunters. Seventy-five years ago their grandfather was ranching and hunting in southwest Texas. Nearly fifty years ago their father pioneered into the Davis Mountains, on the western edge of Texas, where the lion and the Apache had for ages held possession.
By the time Joe and Dub were ten years old they were running ladino (“wild”) Longhorns and following the hounds. In a single year they helped catch fifteen lions out of the canyon on which the Evans home ranch was established—Panther Canyon, it is called. Altogether they have caught hundreds of lions. In the few years they have ranched in New Mexico they have caught thirty-three. They’re what the Mexicans call hombres del campo—“men of the camp.”
As for their dogs, there is not a better pack in Texas and New Mexico. The family of hounds of which they are the latest generation has been with the Evans men for thirty-nine years. When a year old, the original pair of pups, Belle and Brownie, began hunting lion and bear and soon developed into remarkable dogs. By line breeding, with an occasional cross with bloodhound and Redbone hound, the characteristics of old Brownie and Belle have been strictly preserved.
The original names pass down from generation to generation. Today the leader of the pack is Brownie, mighty of foot and mouth and muscle, as confident of himself in the field as Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. As good and more energetic is Belle, beautifully spotted and amiable of disposition. Then there are Short Brownie, Little brownie, Francis, Trumm, and Lee Wilson.
The older dogs never notice the tracks of deer, coons, coyotes, foxes, and the like. They will take a wildcat’s track, but are easily called off it. The only animals they really hunt—and, once they have struck the trail of, follow despite hell and high water—are lions and bears. Our hunt was at a time when most bears have gone to sleep for the winter.
The moon was yet shining, the thermometer was at zero, and the dogs were comfortably filled with the flesh of a slaughtered mare when we struck out across black Mountain the first day of our hunt. About noon, as we were riding down in the very bottom of a deep canyon, the dogs opened up, but the trail soon proved old. After much searching Dub Evans made out two lion tracks, one of a full-grown lion going down the canyon, the other of a young lion going up; neither track fresh enough to follow.
We went on, the dogs smelling at the foot of trees and nosing along the base of boulders and palisades. The lion likes to walk on a narrow bench under bluffs. He likes to cross rough saddles, or dips, between highlands. He likes to prowl the length of narrow hogbacks that look down into chasms on either side. He likes to meander along projections and indentations of a naked rimrock, following the ragged edge sometimes for miles.
Brownie and Belle and their followers knew all this. They never failed to examine any log so fallen that there was space between it and the ground. The lion likes to walk under such logs, bow up his back and rub it like a cat. If a twig bent over the trail, the dogs sniffed it, for the lion often leaves the scent of his body or tail on weeds and bushes.
We were topping out of Brother West Canyon when the dogs opened cry with immense energy.
“Sounds good but not very fresh,” remarked Dub.
The trail followed over a malpais ridge. Once in a while the dogs would lose it for several minutes at a time. Then Brownie or Belle would pick it up. There was no soil for the track to show in. It was the kind of country that a lion feels safe in traversing, for the lion depends on sight more than on any other sense. He sees everything, and he thinks that if he leaves no visible impressions, he is safe from pursuers. Sometimes while prowling over the country he winds about in all sorts of ways, apparently for no other reason than to keep rocks under his feet.
How dogs can smell where a padded foot stepped on a rock perhaps forty-eight hours before is truly marvelous.
“Over yonder is the canyon of indian Creek,” Dub said.
Beyond the blue vacancy I saw a line of cliffs. Suddenly the dogs stiffened their tails, stretched out their heads, worked their noses, let out a long and peculiar bay, and were gone. “They have smelled a kill!” said Evans.
We followed at hot speed. Presently we came upon the dogs tearing at barren deer bones over which no lion would ever again lick his “thankful chops.” The ribs were still red with dried blood, but they had been picked several days before.
The kill was under a gnarled juniper tree on a shelf of rocks overlooking the junction of Indian and the Middle Prong of the Gila. The bark of the juniper was scratched with lion claws.
Spread out below us, like the ruins of some incomprehensible and fantastic mammoth, was a skeleton world over which the hounds of the elements had gnawed and snarled for dizzy aeons. The dried and scattered ribs of the skeleton were cones of rock, red and yellow and gray. The twisted and broken legs were ridges of wrecked boulders. The grave of the skeleton was walled in with cliffs that only an eagle could surmount. If it was not the Grand Canyon, it was a grand canyon. On the point of an escarpment i saw a blotch of red. It was possible to work one’s way out to it. The blotch proved to be a bone of the lion-killed deer.
“The raven we just saw put it there, I guess,” said Dub. “Always watch for ravens. They locate the kills every time.”
We had trailed a lion either to or from the kill, we did not know which. It was entirely possible that we had back trailed. Certainly it was an old track to an old kill. The dogs seemed unable to work away.
“Lead my horse around to yonder point,” said Dub, “and i will take the dogs and skirt over some of those ridges below us.”
He pointed to a saddle half a mile around the head of a side canyon.
When, an hour later, he came up without having discovered a sign, the sun was far down. Camp was six or eight miles away. Before we headed for it i looked back. It was a magnificent, an ideal lion country, and we had little doubt that a lion was in it within finding distance. During the night he might, out of idle curiosity, pass the abandoned kill. We would come back in the morning.
Dawn found us, indian file, rimming out of the deep canyon in which we were camped.
As we topped out onto a mesa the dogs took an east-by-north course instead of our intended east-by-south direction. But the Evans boys refused to change them. Luck, destiny, providence, something might be directing them. We were outward-bound, bound to get a lion. The fact had as well be told. We did not strike even an old trail that day. We cut for sign over some of the ground we had traversed the day before, but the dogs were too intelligent to take up again a trail they had worked on and abandoned.
The next day bore the same lack of luck and the next and the next. We scouted east and west, north and south. It snowed, rained a little, and the southern slopes melted. It snowed again, and the northern slopes were as slick and hard as glass. We slid down those slopes into warm, deep canyons and somehow wound and climbed out of them.
Often we were afoot leading our horses. I discovered that by grasping the tail of the horse in front of me as we plodded upward I could get my wind and my footing with much less heaviness.
Those mountain horses climb like Rocky Mountain sheep and are as fearless as rock squirrels. They went up desolate steeps that would literally pen in to death and starvation a trainload of plains horses. I would not have traded my mount, insect, for the finest stabled steed in Newport.
One day we saw an eagle maneuvering to catch a fawn. Another day we let the dogs tree a wildcat. On the iciest, shadiest, roughest slope in Catron County we found where a huge black bear had spent a week not long before. Flocks of piñon jays jeered at us. Tassel-eared squirrels played bopeep from the branches of great pines. We saw more deer than cattle, mule deer and white- tails both. Often we looked eagerly at ravens, but the fact that ravens locate a panther kill does not mean that every raven denotes one.
Up at four o’clock in the morning. Before dawn a hot and meaty breakfast, saddles, and the clear bugling of a hunting horn. Some raisins and nuts in the pocket to munch on for lunch. Hours and hours of riding and hoping and looking. Such was the order of the day for three, four, five, six days. On one of those days, Sunday, it was snowing, and we rested ourselves and the dogs. The Evans boys don’t hunt on Sunday anyhow.
And the shadows of evening always found us back at the Horse Camp, ravenous, tired, every fiber in the body yearning for hot food and a roaring fire.
How much hot beefsteak one man can eat i do not know, but had a weigher been present at the Horse Camp any night we were there, he might have found out. Plenty of meat, plenty of tobacco, gallons of coffee, forests of pitch pine to burn, a snug cabin, company immensely congenial, grain for horses and mare meat for the dogs—what better camp could a man ask for?
The two log rooms and open hall of the cabin, unfurnished though they might appear to some eyes, contain a hundred details that cry out stories and character.
Where the puncheons, countertops, about the stove in the kitchen have decayed from water, heat, and salty grease, they are carpeted with cowhides. The chuck box—ponderous, iron-braced, the lid lined with copper—used to be the combination box and seat of the Silver City–Magdalena stage. The hooks on the walls are old horseshoes and eagle talons. On one log a bear’s foot is tacked. On another place a pair of eagle wings are stretched. Ancient elk horns are hung and thrown here and there.
Out in the hall, brass cartridge shells stud the ends of logs. The door into the bunk room shows a storied bullet hole. The logs about the same door and next to the great fireplace are burned and carved with cattle brands.
Never was there a better camp for the spinning of yarns than the Horse Camp. The winter nights in New Mexico are long, long nights, and Joe Evans is one of the best storytellers west of the Pecos. In the lore of american animals the bear has no doubt figured as the subject for more tall tales than any other beast, but the panther, particularly in the Southwest, has provoked more strange stories.
So when the talk turned to panthers, as it did hour after hour, night after night, we could all help Joe along. How lions kill, how they cover their kills, their strength, their size, their disposition to travel, their scream, their fear of man, their ferocity, their playfulness, their patience, their markers—every phase of lion nature we discussed and yarned over.
We must have talked more about panther kills than about any other feature of the great cat. We were hunting all the time for kills. If we could find a fresh kill, we were reasonably certain of jumping the killer. He might stay away from it for a night, but the chances were ninety to ten that he would return the next night, eat, leave a fresh trail, and be lying up somewhere near when the dogs were turned loose in the vicinity at dawn.
The lion is more prodigal of meat than any other predatory animal. Sometimes he slays merely for exercise or nothing more than a drink of blood from the jugular of his victim. At the same time, in the care of his meat he is probably the most intelligent and meticulous animal in the world. He likes his meat fresh and clean.
As soon as he makes a kill, he removes the entrails from his prey. Unlike the wolf, he begins eating on the foreparts of an animal. If the place at which he has slain a buck or other game does not suit him, he carries it to a proper place. Then he carefully covers it with leaves and twigs.
And so the nights passed, with talking on many things really, but never long off the subject of lions and lion dogs and lion hunts. One night we settled the mooted business of panther screams. They do scream, although seldom, and sometimes in a blood-curdling note, the testimony of certain hunters to the contrary. And the days passed with hunting. It was the morning of the seventh day and we called it good.
We were down in House Log Canyon. About ten o’clock Brownie let out a bellow, Belle sent up a cry, and the other dogs turned loose a varied and stirring noise that sent the blood tingling to the roots of our hair.
“Lion sign and no fooling,” said Dub as i rode up to where he had already dismounted at the root of a pine. The dogs were slowly working away up the canyon.
“I’ve been telling you about lion markers,” Dub went on. “I never saw one in Texas, but New Mexico and arizona lions make them all the time. Here they are. Some hunters call ’em scratches.”
What we were looking at were parallel scrapes on the ground about eight inches long, at the base of them a little mound of pine needles. They had evidently been made by the lion with his claws hooded. Double up your fists, dig them down into leaf mold or pine needles, draw them back to you at one stroke about eight inches long, and the result will be something very much like a lion’s marker. The little ridge between where the lion’s hooded paws have scraped in parallel lines always shows.
As the lion rakes back toward his body, a marker always indicates in what direction he is going, whether any tracks are visible or not. Of course the markers remain for weeks after tracks have vanished. Only males make them.
For an hour or more we worked up the canyon, so slowly that most of the time we were on foot, trying to help the dogs with the trail.
“Look here,” called Dub, who had followed the dogs to a bench fifty feet above our heads.
He had found another marker made in gravel against the bluff.
The trail finally climbed out of the canyon and struck across a lava mesa. It came to a kind of barren place with not a twig or a blade of grass to hold the lion smell. It took us an hour to go less than half a mile.
“Just as well pull for the top of that mountain,” said Dub. “once a lion starts up a mountain, he is going to the top.”
When we struck the southern slope, where the snow had all melted and run over the tracks, we were absolutely stalled. We were a day too late, and the day’s work was about over. People don’t hunt mountain lions at night as they do coons. According to the course he was taking, the lion was making for the very broken country along the Middle Fork between Indian and Butcher knife canyons. We had not yet been in that territory. We headed for camp, determined on the morrow to hunt out the promise.
On the trail in, Dub told me a remarkable story about lion markers. A year or more ago a government hunter in the Middle Gila country got on the trail of two lions, a male and a female. He followed them for two days, camping out both nights without food. On the third day he caught the female lion; then, seeing nothing of the male, he went on into camp.
Two weeks later while riding after cattle Dub struck a fresh kill made by a male lion. He knew the lion was a male from the markers right at the kill. It was in the country the government man had hunted over.
Dub went to the ranch, got his dogs, and was at the kill early next morning. He had no trouble in striking a good trail, but the lion was not lying up to digest food. He was roving, day as well as night.
Over black Mountain and down into the canyon country, Dub followed the trail at a good gait all day long. And every little distance he found a lion marker. He is sure that he found a hundred markers, all made in one day’s time. The lion was putting out sign for his mate. He was searching the country for her.
Late in the evening the dogs jumped him, and even after he was jumped he made a marker—a very, very unusual act. After Dub killed him he cut him open. There was not a bit of food inside him. He had been too desolate to eat.
When the morning of the eighth day dawned the world was white with fresh snow.
Hardly a quarter of a mile from the camp the dogs opened up on a hot trail. Joe and Dub called them off without even looking at the trail. What the dogs said to them was “wildcat.”
Well, the day closed, the magazines of our saddle guns were as full of cartridges and our hands were as empty as they had been for a week. We were thoroughly disgusted with the Middle Fork and all its eastern tributaries. The lions might be on the other side of Gila. They were not on our side, for certain. They might be ten miles away, and ten miles of canyons that include the Gila River in the Mogollon Mountains is as far as two hundred on pavement.
Our plan was to leave very early the next morning without packs, but carrying on our saddles a ration of grain for the horses, some mare meat for the dogs, and coffee, bread, and meat for ourselves. We would cross the Gila and let luck direct us.
We wound headlong down Meadow Trail, worked around cold bluffs for an hour, and then headed up Fiddler Trail for the land of luck.
It must have been about two o’clock when we struck a fresh kill. It was a ten-point white-tailed buck. One forequarter was gone and the tongue eaten out.
There were two or three markers under the trees about it.
“We’ve got a check and all we have to do is cash it,” I yelled.
“Wait,” said Dub.
“Just wait,” said Joe.
It happened that the kill was on a mountainside where very little snow had fallen, but there were plenty of rocks and timber. Before we had time to do anything the dogs were coursing off at a lively rate. If a lion has smeared blood, the contents of a deer’s entrails, or other fresh animal matter on his paws, he leaves a trail that can for many hours be scented at a long run. The way our dogs were making tracks indicated that they were on an outgoing trail made by lion feet well smeared.
Still, there is only one sure way for a man to know whether his dogs are going with tracks or are back trailing. That is to see the tracks. The blindness of dogs to tracks is as remarkable as their acuteness in smelling them. Some hunters say that if dogs go faster uphill than downhill over a trail, the chances are that they are back trailing, the explanation being that lions in going downhill put more weight on their feet and therefore leave a stronger impression than when climbing. However that may be, the only sure way of telling an out-trail from an in-trail is to look at the tracks. Our dogs were going fast enough downhill.
We followed them, now galloping, now pausing, looking all the while for tracks. Joe discovered a track, but the impression was so light that it was impossible to tell which way it was pointed. Unless the ground is soft the knobs on a lion’s heel sometimes look almost like toes.
When we came to where the dogs had crossed a gulch in the bottom of which was sand, the tracks were plain. We were back trailing.
There was nothing to do but call the dogs off and return to the kill for a fresh start. Quickly the eager dogs found another track that we made sure was outgoing.
It went down into rough country, and it was as tortuous as a corkscrew. The dogs came to bluffs over which they had to be lifted. Even if a lion were jumped there, he stood a good chance of getting away. With night about to close down it was folly to trail farther.
“It’s only about a mile from here to a spring in Little bear Canyon,” said Dub. “I packed some deer hunters into that place a month ago. A quarter of a mile above the spring I saw a cave. We’ll spend the night there.”
Dogs, horses, and men were all glad when we struck the soft bottom of Little bear. At the camp we found a side of deer ribs that the hunters had left and that a month of cold weather had not injured.
When i fed the dogs i noticed for the first time that their noses were bloody raw. No wonder! Those noses had been without let, grazing over malpais rocks by the tens of thousands and poking under acres of snow, snuffing, snuffing for lion sight. Galley slaves never worked harder than those dogs worked for us. They were used to sleeping out, but when we found a place for them in one corner of the long cave before which we built two fires, they were very grateful. The pleasure in seeing them warm was about the only pleasure i realized that night.
We discussed an Indian proverb, then each man made himself a wallow. The Indian, according to tradition, said: “White man heap fool. Build big fire and have to stay long way off. Burn and freeze. Indian wise man. Build little fire. Stay close to it. Warm.” We had a saddle blanket apiece, we kept on our overcoats, we replenished the big fires at least every forty minutes. I am inclined to think that the Indian was right.
With the first light we saddled. A short hour’s ride and we were at the kill. The lion had been there during the night, although it was apparent that he had not eaten more meat than he could well carry. He might be lying down within a hundred yards, or he might be off at some distance. We took his trail at a gallop. It made for the rough canyon we had quitted the evening before.
As the dogs struck the canyon rim they all at once hushed, apparently nonplused. Dub and Joe were down on their knees, working like dogs themselves.
It took ten minutes to discover that the lion had leaped from the rim into a juniper tree which grew out of the canyon wall, had climbed out on a limb of the tree, and then dropped off under the rimrock. A lion does not often play fox tricks.
As the dogs with a joyful bound again took off, we remained on top where we could hear and see and come as near being with the dogs as we could be anywhere.
They followed down the canyon under the rimrock on our side, crossed, and began working back up the canyon on the other side. Above them towered an uneven wall of rock that could be scaled only at intervals.
“Look at old brownie in that grass over yonder,” said Joe. “acts as if he were hunting rabbits.”
A tolerant grunt at the joke was all the response that Dub gave.
All of us could see Brownie, though nobody had seen him climb out. The other dogs were still under the bluffs. Brownie was at least two hundred yards out from the canyon rim on a smooth mesa. Between him and the canyon was growth of scattered cedar.
“Look! Look!”
It was the first time I had seen Dub excited.
“I caught a glimpse of a panther in that cedar. I’ll swear I did.”
Nobody else saw a panther in the cedar, but what we all saw a minute later was a long, tawny form gliding through the grass away from the canyon of barking dogs and toward silent Brownie.
With the corner of my eye I saw Belle about to climb out.
The tawny form was gliding, drifting, moving like an effortless ghost straight toward Brownie. And Brownie had turned and was coming in a long run back toward the canyon and the lion.
In mid-prairie they met.
It is a mystery of nature why such a powerful and lethal fighter as the mountain lion will run from a dog. But run he will invariably.
The lion we saw wheeled like a released bowstring. I would not attempt to say how high or how far he jumped. As he whirled and leaped the slant morning sun showed his breast dazzling white.
When he reached the canyon rim he was at the climax of his speed and he never checked a second but spread himself flat like a flying squirrel for the awful leap. It was a hundred and twenty-five or a hundred and fifty feet to the first bench below, but the space was not altogether clear. Some rocky spires jagged up part of the way.
With outstretched paws the lion caught one spire, swinging himself a quarter around and slightly breaking his fall. A second rock he barely scraped.
While he was making that leap I do not think that one of us drew breath. By the time he hit, Brownie and Belle on the rim above were simply having fits.
It was a lucky thing that the younger dogs had not topped out. One of them must have seen the lion leap. In a minute’s time they were in full blast behind him. The race could not last much longer now. With long tail straight up over his back, the lion was doing his best but was plainly flagging.
Directly he came to a series of rocks that ran out at right angles to the main canyon wall and sloped sharply up. He ran out on them, leaping over a little gap that the dogs could negotiate. On a pillar-like abutment he halted. Far above him Brownie and Belle, who had kept up with the race, hung their heads over and cried. Below him the other dogs gave the cry of conquerors. He was bayed.
When we got down to him he was still panting hard. He lashed his tail and opened his mouth and spit. He seemed to consider trying another desperate leap.
He was game and noble game, the noblest and the most beautiful predatory animal on the American continent. As a bullet found its mark I felt, momentarily, mean and ignoble. I shall never forget him. That last bit of chase, that leap, the fervor of the dogs, the tawny bundle of cornered killer up there on the pillar of rock were worth all the ten days of grueling work we had put in.
When the lion’s body fell to the ground and we examined it, we found that all the claws of his right paw had been pulled out by the clasp he gave the rock that checked his fall. One claw on the left paw was out. But he did not have a bone broken.
He measured eight feet and six inches from tip to tip.