by Pete Fromm
The next morning the tent was darker than it should have been and, blowing through the door for my usual emergency pee, I stepped into a blizzard. It was still warm, but safely warm—in the twenties—and I stopped worrying about the moose. I hiked the six miles to Paradise through wildly flying snow.
At one exposed bend of the river, where the wind had cleared the ice of all but the newest snow, I saw the trail of an elk that had run down the mountain and crossed the river. Its tracks showed how it leaped the last bit of riverbank, landing on what looked exactly like more snow. But on the ice, all hell had broken loose. The elk's front feet had shot to the left, while his back legs had done the splits. He held on for what must have been a long time, his feet making wild looping patterns on the ice, but then the snow had been wiped clean by the big broad side of the elk spinning over the ice.
I laughed, translating what must have occurred, and I wished I’d been just a few minutes earlier, that I could have seen the mighty, majestic elk take such a pratfall.
Walking on, though, I thought of what a fragile thread held everything together out here. If the elk had broken something, dislocated a hip (which looked more probable than not), it would have been all over. There would have been nothing left but a ring of dirty snow and a pile of stomach grass centered in a haze of coyote tracks.
Since the river had frozen over I’d found a number of coyote kills. The coyotes, working together in groups of six or seven, would drive deer out of the timber and onto the flat, level bed of the river. Tufts of hair would show where the coyotes had nipped, how they’d weakened the prey.
Occasionally there’d by tiny, sparkling bright drops of blood in the trail. I always expected a gradual progression, more hair, more blood, then more, and finally the kill. But it never went like that. Always just a little hair, sometimes no blood, and then, suddenly, the huge, trampled circle, with nothing but the stain and the grass. Only once did I see a spot where a deer had fallen but regained its feet and run on. Its final circle was just yards off.
Once at Paradise I called out to West Fork. Since the phone at Indian Creek had never worked I was pretty sure a tree had clipped the line between there and Magruder, so I was surprised to hear a ranger pick up the phone over in Montana. They told me the warden was due in on the fifteenth. They hadn’t heard anything about the biologist or his plan of taking my place for a few days.
There really wasn’t much else to do at Paradise so I turned back around. They’d only said they hadn’t heard about the biologist’s idea, I told myself, not that it wasn’t going to happen. I planned on getting myself ready for it, packing just in case he should come in ready to relieve me.
I’d only made a few hundred yards when the Paradise mountain lion guide, Brian, the same one I’d met in the fall, came barreling down the river on his rickety old snow machine. While out trailing a bobcat, he told me, he’d lost his newest hound. That’d been last week, but he asked me to keep my eyes peeled.
I thought of the endless series of ridges and peaks surrounding us forever, heavy timber clotting every draw, and I tried to imagine a hound surviving out there alone for more than a day or two. But I thought of what it would be like to have Boone suddenly disappear, and I told him I’d look around.
Brian wasn’t a big talker so we stood around looking out at the frozen stretch of river and eventually I said something about heading back before dark. He surprised me by inviting me to stay at Paradise for the night. I climbed onto the back of his little machine and we roared off, Boone giving wild chase.
The outfitter tent we stayed in—the same one I shared drinks in at the end of the big-game season, the one the old man left to drive into the ditch—was musty and cold, but Brian had the fire going quickly and I sat down to look at all the things they had. Cabinets and shelves lined the walls, full of all sorts of bottles and cooking ingredients and tools. The cooking stove and the lighting were powered by propane, which seemed a nearly unimaginable luxury. I thought of my little tent, packed with nothing but clothes, dog food and mice. I felt like I was in a real house again.
Brian took off his coat and his shoulder holster with its .45 caliber six-shooter. In the fall I’d learned to ask about guns and Brian showed this one to me. It was heavy and looked like something out of a Western.
I followed him around while he fed the lion hounds. They slept in hay-lined fifty-five-gallon drums buried horizontally in the hillside, the earth’s heat warming them the same way it’d kept the food in my cache from freezing. The hounds stood outside the drums to eat, held in place by heavy chain leashes. Brian told me Boone could take the drum his dog had been using.
I knew these guys didn’t have pets and I knew dogs had no place in their tents. I wondered how Boone would take it. I’d made a collar for her a while back, just to get her used to the idea, thinking ahead to when we’d be out in the world. We stood in front of the empty drum and I snapped the chain onto her collar. Brian put an extra bowl of food in front of her but it wasn’t what she was used to, and she only sniffed. As we walked away, toward the big tent, she began to whine. When we’d disappeared inside she began to bark. And to howl. And to plead.
She kept at it so long Brian was moved to explain that he’d let her come in, but some of the clients might be allergic to dog hair, so he thought it’d be better to leave her out. It was fully night now and I couldn’t even think of walking back to Indian Creek.
We spent the night playing cribbage, something I hadn’t done since high school. We sipped a little whiskey too, and Brian nearly became talkative. He was probably only a few years older than I, the closest person to my age I’d met in here yet.
Boone cried and whimpered the entire time. I felt sorry for her, but underneath that I felt a tingle of embarrassment. Brian’s dogs weren’t making a peep. I wondered if Boone would have the sense to crawl into the drum for warmth. Just before I crawled into one of the empty hunter bunks I walked out to check on her. She was inside, whining quietly, and I snuck away before she could know I was there. The last thing I wanted was a renewal round of howling to listen to as I lay in the strange bed.
By morning Boone was standing outside the drum, waiting for me. When the chain was unsnapped she bolted away, then turned in a spray of snow and came back, leaping up on me as if some horrible mishap had separated us, as if I hadn’t hooked her onto the chain myself. Brian shook his head, but smiled.
He offered a ride to Indian Creek, since he was heading that way himself, looking for cat sign. He loaded a trailer box with a pair of hounds and we rumbled off slowly, Boone trotting anxiously behind, always keeping me in sight.
Before we reached Indian Creek we bumped into another set of hunters, this one based up at Magruder Crossing, about six miles upstream of my tent. Cary was the dog owner and Phil rode behind him, smiling a lot, looking as sure about most of this stuff as I did. He talked with some sort of an Eastern accent and I guessed he was a client, but Cary introduced him as a friend.
Brian and I’d been stopped when they pulled into view, dragging their own box full of dogs. Brian was looking up the draw across the river, studying ravens through his binoculars. “Kill?” Cary asked.
Brian shrugged and they decided it was worth checking out. They asked if I wanted to go with them, to hike up the mountain after the dogs, hoping we’d find a lion kill and be able to track the lion straight from it. I’d never seen a mountain lion before and said, “Sure.”
Cary had me hold Boone back while they let the hounds out and chained them up. He explained that they weren’t very good with strange dogs. Once they were ready, the hounds all on leads, they told me to lock Boone into the trailer box and we’d be off. I didn’t want to do that to Boone again so soon, but they told me that the hounds might turn on her and kill her. I didn’t want to back out in front of these guys, mountain lion hunters of all people, at least not because I felt sorry for a dog.
I could feel them looking at me. They said the ravens were close and it would pr
obably only be an hour. I put Boone in the box.
As we started snowshoeing away Boone began her racket again, as if she’d never let up from the night before. Two miles away, up on the mountain, when we stood still for a rest, the sound of her moans floated up to us. I avoided the eyes of the hunters and wished she’d just shut up.
We never did find a kill, or even see the ravens again, once we were up there, and we were back to the machines in little over an hour. Since Cary had already checked the river upstream, Brian decided he’d call it a day and we split up. Cary couldn’t take another rider, and Brian offered to take me home but I told them all I’d be happy to walk.
I waited by the river, holding on to Boone while the snow machines rumbled off in opposite directions. When I couldn’t hear their whining scream I thumped Boone on the side and scratched her ears and we headed home together.
For the next week I saw Brian and Cary and Phil nearly every day. I started eating after dark, sawing steaks from the meat pole by headlamp, not wanting even these guys to know about my food source. At one point Brian talked a little too much about moose and I had a nervous feeling that he knew, that he was hinting around, seeing how much I’d admit. But the next day he brought over the front quarter of a deer. He said he couldn’t imagine going without meat for so long.
He said, smiling, that the deer was left over from the season, which seemed like an awfully thin veneer over the truth. He seemed to be leaving himself open, waiting for me to reciprocate, but I held my tongue. I thanked him for the meat and later, after it was dark and I was alone, I hung the shoulder up on the meat pole beside the moose.
The person I didn’t see over the next week was the warden. I hung around the tent all day the fifteenth and sixteenth, even turning down an offer to go on another lion trail. But the warden and the biologist didn’t show. Brian drove by to tell me he and Cory had treed a lion, a big female with three kittens, the kittens still in spots. They took pictures he said, and it was good training for the dogs, but they were getting a little anxious to find the big tom.
The next day Cary pulled up to the tent. He’d had some friends pull in for the weekend, to stay with him in his tent. “Drinkers,” he said, grinning, “not hunters.” He looked like a hangover was hard at his heels.
But, he went on to tell me, his friends had stopped at West Fork, to see if there was anything they could bring in, and they’d heard that the wardens had blown up a snow machine trying to get over the pass. “Fire. The works,” Cary said, laughing, and for the first time I realized that in the eyes of the hunters the wardens were visitors, not people who stayed out here as they did, as I did, but just visitors. Slightly less competent visitors even. People who could cause trouble, but people who blew up machines trying to get over passes the hunters seemed to hop over like nothing. I thought of the way the wardens never stayed over, how they popped in and out in an hour or less, and I adopted the hunters’ view. They weren’t like us.
I asked if he knew when they’d be coming in again and he said they they’d loaded their burned-up machine and high-tailed it back to Idaho the same day.
Though I didn’t like the idea of missing my January mail run I laughed with him about that, too. We were standing out in the snow, blowing cloudy breaths into the sky, laughing. We weren’t in an office in Idaho. We weren’t like that. We were the real thing. We were hunters.
13
Late the next morning Brian stopped by and said he was going up to Cary’s, that they were going to hunt together today. He wondered if I was interested. Still wanting to see a mountain lion, I agreed to go along. Boone hopped peacefully onto the bed I made for her in the cab of the snow-covered pickup truck. She’d been in there a time or two, and seemed now to believe that I’d be back.
I crawled onto the snow machine behind Brian and we chugged upstream. His machine, he yelled back to me, wasn’t really strong enough for two people, but once on the packed trail it ran fairly well.
At Magruder Crossing we rousted out Cary and Phil. Brian told Cary he thought he’d seen a track on the way over, the path of a lion crossing the river. We hadn’t stopped and I hadn’t seen anything, and I wondered what Brian was talking about.
Cary’s friends were still in bed but Cary had his dogs loaded in no time; Phil took the back seat and they were off. Their big new machine was much more powerful and we struggled to keep up.
Only a few miles back toward Indian Creek the lead snow machine idled to a stop and we slid in behind it, our skis stopping just short of the peeling plywood dog box Cary towed. Cary stepped off his machine as if dismounting a horse. Brian pushed me back a little and I stumbled off so he could get up too. He met with Cary in front of the machines and I came up a moment later. Phil smiled at me as we all gathered around the lion track in the snow. He was wearing what looked like a second pair of Cary’s wool clothing, things that didn’t fit perfectly, and he looked at me while the others looked at the tracks. I was pretty sure he must be a client.
The snow was deep and light and the lion’s path was nothing like the dainty paw prints of a cat on a driveway. I could see marks where the lion’s chest scraped through the snow here and there, his legs punching deep holes. And even though the snow had fallen back into those leg holes, covering his footprints, I could still see the careful placement of each foot, each step in line with the last.
“Big tom,” Brian said.
Cary nodded and looked up into the trees where the trail led. “Real big one,” he said, glancing at Phil. He smiled widely. “This is the one you’re after.”
I kept looking at the track, the path of something big and heavy moving through deep, soft snow, and I wondered if there was any way to tell if the cougar was a male—a tom—or not. I didn’t really think it was possible. It was probably one of the things the guides added to the show.
“Want to?” Cary asked.
Phil said, “Sure. If you think we should.”
“Damn right I do,” Cary said, still smiling. “He’s not far. We got ourselves a hot trail.”
Brian moved back to his dog box and slipped the pin. He kept the door nearly shut with his knee while he dug through the struggling pair of dogs, snapping leads onto collars. Then he let them push the door aside and he held the wiry, short-haired dogs back until Cary had his trio out too. They met at the lion trail and the dogs whined and barked, looking out of place here in the snow and dark firs. Mottled gray, black, and liver, they were what I always pictured as coon hounds, and I’d only ever imagined them baying through Southern swamps at night.
Since they had a trail this time they didn’t keep the dogs on the leads, as they’d done when we’d chased the ravens. The hounds shivered as Cary and Brian tried to unsnap all the leads at the same time. It could have been from cold or excitement.
When the leads were off so were the dogs. They leapt wildly forward, dashing any which way, until the oldest bitch let out a bay and began to bound though the snow, directly in the lion’s track. We stood without speaking for a minute or two. The dogs got farther away, barking and yipping now and then. I thought we should probably be doing something. Following them or something.
Then all the hounds began to bay and Cary said, “Locus has him strong,” and both he and Brian went to their dog boxes and unstrapped the snowshoes from the top. They used the metal and plastic Sherpas, bragging about the teeth under the toes that held in the ice and hardpack. I strapped on my ash and rawhide shoes which were bigger and held me up better in the three feet of loose powder.
As we started into the trees, following the huge trail the dogs had mashed down, I kept wondering at the relaxed nature of our trailing. I asked Cary what would happen if the lion just ran. What if he took the dogs out forever?
“He’ll tree,” Cary said. “They’re built for speed, not distance. Only once had one run. We didn’t give up til it got dark. Had a helluva time getting back. Dogs started trickling in around three in the morning.”
“That’s when
Beau got lost,” Brian said. Beau was the prize pup he’d lost a few weeks earlier. He figured coyotes got him in the end and I pictured the tangle of tracks around the stain in the snow. “Lions won’t mess with a dog,” Brian said finally. “Less there’s no choice.”
Nobody talked for a while then. The trail was straight up a hillside that was nearly too steep to follow. We floundered along, sliding back and falling forward. It became impossible to hear the dogs over the pounding of our own breath.
We created a small flat and paused. The snow we’d stumbled through stuck to the wool we all wore and we began to blend into the trees. Phil breathed harder than the rest of us, and I guessed he wasn’t used to the altitude. But he kept smiling whenever anyone looked at him.
The dogs’ barking came back to us, still getting farther away. Cary guessed a mile and we left the trail and cut through clean snow toward the sound. I wouldn’t have done that myself. I knew how sound could twist through the draws and ridges until it finally came from everywhere. Cary had done this for years, but I would have stuck to the trail, giving up the short cuts.
The next time we rested Cary held up his hand for quiet. No one was saying anything, but our breathing sawed through the chill air, wrapping us in clouds of vapor and sound. We held our breaths a moment and the howling of the dogs wasn’t any farther. It was wilder though, angrier.
Brian nodded and let his breath out in a rush. “Treed,” he said.
Cary grinned. “Big cat,” he said. “Damned if he was gonna run far. Haul his big, lazy ass up a tree and take a nap.”
He started off again, barrel-chested and pushing fifty, but excited now, nearly running, forgetting to give Phil time to get some air in his lungs. Phil unzipped the coat he was wearing, grinned and ran after him, sweat glistening on his reddened face. I brought up the rear, my big shoes wasted in the well-packed trail.
