00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is a me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bog bitten and in my case, underwear listening Don't Make You Eat podcast. You can't predict anything, all right, Bart George, there you are a month ago. Yeah, getting a bit on the arm by a mountain lead lay that. I'll lay that all out for me. Well, how that all happened? Um? Yeah, I wasn't thinking about it at the time. I guess what it led all up to it, But um, we're starting a project. It was the first day of a project with a new crew, UM putting collars on cougars and Washington up in the northeast corner, an area that I'm very familiar with and feel comfortable running the dogs around. Um. Anyways, I was the hound handler that day and had my four dogs and found a nice tom track. UM in the snow. Yeah, we had about it was I don't know, just before Christmas something like that, So we had about eight inches of snow on the ground. UM found a good track fresh last night and figured we're gonna pop it up pretty quick. So I put the Nosy, the little tiny dog that we hunted with, and then Radar, the big male. UM, I put that that's the greatest name for a dog in the history of dogs. Is a good name? Knows not knows he's a good name. You get to know, knows he's a little better. You'll agree. No, No, there has nothing to the dog. I'm saying, like, if I ever get a dog, I was gonna name my next dog high Ball among the name of Radar. You don't mind, Yeah, I don't mind. Put a junior or something, maybe Radar Junior. So there are you, Nosey and Radar, right. Um? So I put those two on the track and there they smoked it for like four yards and then they had a loss, which you know, I'm not able to keep up with them. They get out ahead of me there four hundred yards in no time. And you got a GPS collar on the dogs. Yeah, I've got collars on everybody. So I'm watching the collar. And there's a handful of us now you know, the state biologists and um a grad student, and we're trying to figure out what's going on. Like I said, the first day of the projects, there's still some you know, introductions and that kind of stuff happening. Who like who's who? Right? Yeah, can you explain a loss. You say, well, you got to back up before that when he says watching the collar. You have a handheld GPS unit that shows you where you are and shows you where the dogs are based on the little GPS units that are on their collar, right, so it's a yeah, it's a transmitter then from the collar back to my handheld, so you see yourself relative to your dogs, like you see everybody on there right now, I know where all the dogs are. I know where I'm at. And then there's also of course the map layer of the road layer and stuff like that. Um. So I'm watching the dogs and they get out, you know, four yards and they have a loss where and I can tell it's a loss because they're like they lost the track. Yeah, they're moving the track well, and you could hear them, of course at that distance. They got out of hearing and you're watching the GPS unit and you'll see it where they kind of start circling and doing different things, and you can tell they're looking for a track. And sometimes that's because the cat made a kill, um, and there's tracks everywhere. Sometimes the cat would you know, walk out and turn back and walk on its own tracks and that will confuse them and they have a hard time finding an out track there. Um. So anyways, I had one of those going on and it took quite a while. Um there's a fairly long loss, but they're far enough in where you know, I could take off and walk to them, but generally by the time I got there, they'd have sorted it out and taken off. Um. So I'm trying to give him a chance to work. And I decided to kick Whisper loose, who's kind of the old dog, um, pretty good at line and out a tough track. I put her on the track thinking that she would get everybody together. But by the time I let her go, and you know, in while she was en route, the dogs split, So I had Radar going one way and Nosy going another, which is a little bit unusual. Um. And when Whisper got there, instead of pulling everybody back together or getting everybody on the right track, Whisper went with Radar just automatically. He was probably making more noise or whatever. Um. So those two ended up taking off on a backtrack and Nose he turned out to be on the right track, of course at the time, and you know, at the time I didn't know that obviously had no idea. Um, so I'm still fairly close. I'm within a half a mile of everybody, and knows he's kind of working up away from me and radar and whisper kind of paralleling the road that I'm on. So I'm able to get closer to them and listen and see what they're up to. And while I'm doing that nose, he starts showing treat and what's that look like? Um, Well, like I said, I can't hear her. She's now eight tens of them mile away. So I'm looking at the GPS unit. And when the dog sits still for I think thirty seconds or whatever setting you put it on, you get a little tree symbol that just shows your dogs not moving. Um. Then it shows you how much it's barking. They can yeah, but knows he's um hers doesn't usually register. She pretty You don't get the barks permitted that dog. No, I don't know if she's just too quiet or what's going on there. She she barks, but um, yeah, I don't know. I I don't usually get it radar, you know, I get a p p MS at a radar anytime he opens his mouth, but he not really, so I'm not concerned that it doesn't show her barking at this point. Um So I started up towards her, hoping, you know, thinking maybe she's had another loss and she's just not moving or she's sometimes they get hung up. Why aren't you thinking that it caught the line? Uh? Well, I was hoping that was the case, but I was still because Whisper and Radar were on this other track. I was still thinking that they were right, and she was still searching, trying to figure stuff out. Um, I don't know. I just trusted the two dogs more than the one. So when you know, I got within maybe four yards of where she was, and I had Tipsy with me, the young dog. Who's she's I say, she's but she's you know, three and been on a lot of cats and knows the routine pretty well. Um I had her with me in the box, so we got out. I had her loose, walking down to nosey to see what was going on, and I couldn't hear her barking, which then I was pretty concerned because I knew she wasn't treat at that point. Um So we walked down into kind of a swampy area similar to where we were, uh, where we found your cat. You know, there's a lot of tracks around he's been living in there. Pretty tough spot, um for a dog to work. And we got down. You know, I'm watching the GPS unit and I can see her caller showing like eighty yards. I'm still not here and her and I'm showing fifty ft and I can't hear her. And you're thinking it got killed by wolves. I'm thinking at that point, I didn't know. I didn't know. Maybe she was in a river down there. I didn't know. You know, I've had a dog one time get hung up on a stob at a caller, you know, get a stop through its collar, and it was just sitting there quietly, just waiting for me to come get it. So I was hoping something like that. UM, but I obviously was concerned. I hadn't seen any wolf tracks yet, so I didn't think wolves had killed her. Um. And yeah, down you know, twenty ft or whatever, and I'm it's fairly open and there's a you know, the trees are pretty open and they're heavy with snow, so all the imagine, like a Christmas tree is heavy with snow, and it builds this kind of cave underneath the pulls the branches down to the ground. So Tipsy walks over to one of those, and it was strange, she never smelled anything. She was still Another one of her dogs came and found you. Tipsy was with me with me and Radar and Whisper is still working on a trail and knows he's missing at four of them. So Tipsy starts showing like a major concern around this tree m She walks over kind of to the entrance I guess, to this cave or whatever underneath this tree well, and she lowers her level and her ankles go up and she starts this growl, and at that point I knew what was going on. So I walked towards her to get ahold of her, and I'm sure now, I'm like, okay, the cat's got nos he's got her dead underneath this tree is probably eating on her. Um. I want to get Tipsy out of there before I ever wreck with this cat and her. So I walk over and I leaned down to grab Tipsy and I'm, you know, six or eight feet away from the entrance to this tree well, and that cat kind of steps towards me, and that's the first time I saw him. Um. So I how close is no? Six or eight feet away? Its real close. Um. I still don't see Nosy, but I know she's there. Um. So I grabbed Tipsy by the collar and I started, you know, hollering at him, and I back off and UM kind of put a little angle so I'm not like blocking his way out, and you're not toting the firearm or anything. I didn't have a gun with me. I didn't have bear spray with me because it's not bear season. Um yeah, no gun. Um. So yeah, I back off maybe fifteen or eighteen feet and I'm hollering the whole time, screaming at him, and he kind of backs it back into that hole where I can't see him anymore. And so I put a little bit of angle on that cave entrance so it doesn't feel like I'm trapping him in there. And uh, I start, you know, I'm still screaming and screaming. He won't come out. So I grab a stick and I'm just gonna toss this stick in and you know, spook him out right. Um, which always works if you just throw a snowball at a cat, it'll jump out of a tree or whatever. So I'm thinking, toss a stick at him, get him moving, um, get him out of there. So I break this stick off and I've got Tipsy on a leash nowo to my left arm, and I take this stick and I just kind of under arm toss it over to the tree. And the minute that it hits the tree, he just blows out. And he's coming towards me, and it's close like fet like I said, So it's happening quick, and I'm thinking, like in my head, I've got this dog attached to me at this point, the cats underneath the tree, and I'm like fifteen or eighteen feet from it, and I I just want to get my dog out of there, right. I want to get Nosi's body out of there. I want to get my collars off of her. I just want to be out of there. You feel a little sad? Are you feeling sad for the dog? He's like your buddies? Yeah, totally my buddy. Yeah. At the time, there's a lot happening. Um, yeah, I wanted to get I was whatever. I figured. I knew that knows he was dead. I wasn't gonna you know, I had to get Tipsy out of there safely, had to get myself out of there safely, and I wanted to make sure I got Nosi's body out of there. Um. So I take this stick and I tossed it at the tree and the cat just immediately blows out and he's coming straight at me. Um, like accidentally on purpose. Well that's what I thought, right, because you know, it happens fast, but you're you know, it's kind of in slow motion in your mind as it's happening. And this cats coming towards me, and I'm thinking, okay, there's snow coming out of the tree, and everything else is confused, doesn't really know where I'm at. And he just keeps coming, and you know, I've got Tipsy on a leash, losing her mind, and I'm thinking the cat's gonna stop or turn or do whatever, and it just keeps coming and coming and coming until it makes it big jump towards me. And um, I had her on my left arm, so I kind of turned the right side of my body to him, and he hit me on the right side and knocked me down. Hit you with what front feet? Yea I don't think he ever actually got teeth on me. Um, So he cut me a little bit on the right arm, knocked me down, and I had my backpack on luckily, so I kind of bawled up underneath my backpack. And I think Tipsy was just as shocked as I was, because she was still pretty quiet at this point, or she was quiet again, and the cat kind of went to work on my backpack and I could feel him up there, and I could feel his weight on me and stuff like that. And then Tipsy I heard the dog fight start, you know, And I don't know if he attacked her, she attacked him or whatever. But so while he's working on my backpack, I hear this big dog fight happening right on top of me. They kind of move off to my right side, and so I rolled in my back and now they're all they're all piled up kind of my right hip pocket and Tipsy hooked to my left arm. So it's a weird position to be in and they're fighting, and um, I rolled in my back and I started kicking him, and you know, you don't have much power anyway. I'm wearing rubber boots and I'm kicking him the best I can, and he gets off a tipsy and he starts back towards me, and he's kind of right between my legs now and I'm still on my back and I'm kicking him in the face and chest trying to get him away, and he's he never, like I said, he never got his mouth on me, but he was hooking my gaiters and stuff like that. Yeah. So when you say he has some puncture wounds, I thought, so you had just like a little marks. Yeah, yeah, little hooks. Um. So as I'm kicking him kind of off more pushing him away, like how many seconds have gone by? I don't in contact with you. I don't know. Um, you know, the whole closer of water ten probably ten. It seemed like ten. I don't know, it's probably ten seconds. I was. It lasted longer than I actually expected. I thought, maybe just give me a swat on the way by or something, but he was he was pretty interested in me. Um, I'm glad I had Tipsy with me. So I'm laying on my back and Tipsy's on my right side and got my left arm pretty well trapped, and he's working on my feet and trying to get up towards my body, and then he stops and he circles around to the left where I'm kind of vulnerable, and I turned just enough to give him both feet and just kind of push him away, and that's when I was able to get to my feet. And Tipsy's at this point, she's fighting mad, she's barking, and she's, you know, at the end of her lease, trying to get at him. So he must be ten feet away from me or something. And we're just kind of in this standoff where we're sitting looking at each other and he's in full position. You know, he's down like you would imagine him to be, like in a crouch is. You know, he's working his tail and he's looking at me. He's pretty focused on what's going on. Um And he sat there for a long time the same ways. How much pounds later, okay, how much? So we're kind of having this stare down for a little bit. And again that's probably another five or ten seconds, and and then he walks kind of walks the semicircle back towards the tree where knows he's at. And of course the whole time I'm screaming at him. You know and carrying on, make a lot of noise at dogs barking. Um, where are the other biologists that you're with, They're still don't know any this is happening. They don't know any of this is happening. Because I went in to get nose he lined out and figure out what's going on. I was going to call them if we were treated, um, and I had them listening to those other dogs to see what they were doing. And they're the ones that the tranquilizer gone. They've got the dark gun. Um. So yeah, he finally kind of walks off and then he got maybe twenty yards away and jogged off. So I was glad to have him gone, and I didn't want to come back, and I wanted to get nose he gathered up and go take inventory on myself and on tipsy to see how bad she was hurt. And I walked over to the tree to gather her up, and that dog hopped to her feet. She was like buried underneath. I don't know if she was unconscious and the cat buried her like a kill, or if she was just playing dead and the snow fell out of the tree and she didn't move, but throughout that whole you know, screaming match. She never got to her feet until I walked over and was like underneath the tree looking for her, and she hopped up. She was in tough shape. She had holes in her head and across her back and back of her neck. But it's kind of a miracle she's alive. You guys saw. Yeah, we stitched her up, not very many because they're all puncture wounds. There weren't any long cuts. Um, it's not like gash has a bit, more like like tooth march. Yeah, she's yeah, um up. And you know he had a hold of the side of her face, the right side of her face, and put a several holes in the top of her head and underneath the kind of on her jawline, and then across her back. She had a bunch of holes, probably from clause. He probably gathered her up that way and then hit her on the head. Um. So she ended up with five drains, you know, the latex tu being drains in her and handful of stitches putting those back together. Now what percent recovered as the dog now, uh, she's treats several cats since then. Does she have a renewed vigor. Yeah, she's like more cautious. Now. I don't know, I haven't seen her well now she's she's right back where she was. I don't think she missed a beat. Actually, she's had cats bail out of the tree and she's right on their case. She's not like more blood thirsty. She's always been pretty bloodthirsty. I don't think she's I mean, she's a she's a good little hound. Um. I wonder if she wasn't unconscious, because I would think that would really blood. No, l they don't like chase. Someone told me. I think Floyd was telling me one of his dogs got scratched up by a line and he thought that he came out extra excited about running line. Yeah, they I mean, hounds aren't real smart dogs. By the way, it wouldn't chase lines right to be bird dogs or something. Do you know, I totally disagree with that sentiment. I don't know. So you guys went back out like there was a debate, right that you should maybe go kill the cat because he's no kind of mixed it up with a person who was that not a serious debate at all, Um, not really a serious debate on something, you know, It's not like I was just out hiking and this cat pounced on me or something. You were asking for it. Yeah, I was knocking on his door. Um So, Now we didn't really talk about like youthanizing that cat. I you know knows he was in tough shape. I was unnerved for sure. Yeah right, Yeah, it shook me up a little bit. Um it was that your first skirmish with the mountain lion. Yeah. How many mountain lions have you, um been either like the you treat or were present for the like? How many mountain lions have you encountered hunting and in in your professional life as a biologist? Oh jeez, I don't know a lot, um more than a yeah more, and never had a skirmish with one. No, I've never had a cat even look at me. Like when this cat looked at me underneath the tree, I should have known that it wasn't impressed by what by? What is so like? It wasn't intimidated, not at all. No, um So I should have known right then. But again, there's a lot happening. I got my dog under there, and you know, it's do you get a little bit complacent after however, many cats right, you don't I think it's ever gonna happen. Had you ever heard of something like that in your final work? Um, well, Floyd's buddy joke up attack by one, I didn't hear that story. He got his ankle and foot all chewed up by one, and I don't know. I mean again, he's been running. I mean he's treated. I'm sure in the hundreds, mart, I heard a story that I thought to be untrue about some guy in the whatever Southwest States that treat a lion. There's two of them, and a lot of times cats will focus on a person down underneath the tree. You know, they'll pick one person out out of a group or whatever, and they'll kind of focus on them, and that's not unusual. Um, but this story went that the guy's were underneath the tree and this cat was kind of watching this guy and whatever. When he got the opportunity, the guy turned his back and the cat jumped out of the tree over the dogs and landed on this guy and was like working on him. And I always thought that that was untrue, but maybe it wasn't. Your believer, Yeah, it might be, but with all the dogs around still, it still sounds like a tall tale. This guy, Joe Mitchell, the guy on top of Mouth, the got chewed up by one on his boot. I think it was a little bit bad, like he had had some work done on his foot. Um. Oddly, he likes two things which I think are completely incongruous. He likes running lions and he likes playing golf, which is just like you. I mean, he's like, yeah, And I was saying to him, but how could you golf, because like, lion hunting is so challenging and hard, and how could you do something so like kind of benign and you know, like unmasculine his golf, you know. And he said, man, you got a golf all the time just to be shitty at it? Yeah, he was. He felt he found the challenge there. I wonder how that attack went. I got Yeah, he told me the story. I remember the details. But then so, okay, so you guys still want he wanted to put a collar on his line. No, the one that got you. Now we're over this line come out of you were chasing in the first place, to put a collar on it for a predation study, right, So you'd watch where his lion goes and he'd see that he kind of hung around the area and you're going there and see what he killed. Or you had deer note wearing kyle and when they got killed, you go see who killed him. Right, So the state has a study going. They're going to call her I think fifty deer and whatever, fifteen cougars um and that's right, we'll get a point cluster from a cougar going and investigate to kill. That's what the grad student was there for. I think this and so this work. When you got scratched by its cat, that was what you were trying to do, right, But you guys went back and caught the line accidentally. Yeah, um, how do you accidentally catch a line? Well, so accidentally the same line, accidentally, the same line as you were, like out with a vendetta line. I wasn't after that line. So were you avoiding that line? I was a little scared of that line because all he was unpredictable. Yeah, like they usually go up a tree. He didn't want to go into a tree. Well with one dog though, I wouldn't necessarily I mean for nosey to get attacked like that. Okay, that's not that unusual anymore. Like people used to run with one dogs. You don't do that anymore ever, because of protect forest protection. What's that? What do you mean like you're protecting the dogs by having multiple dogs though right cats have I don't know if cat behaviors changed whatever. That's sort of the conjecture at this point, Like people Bruce used to run one dog, used to guide his sons with one dog, and he did it for years, um until the dog got killed by a lion. Um. But yeah, everybody's kind of upping the number of their packs right now. And I think maybe we've had three dogs ambush this year by lions. Yeah, so this is kind of an emerging trend with lions and learning how they're like developing a different strategy on dealing with dogs. So in all three cases, it's been a single dog that got out in front of the pack. Um that they perceive a single dog differently than a group of dogs. Ye, and they outweigh him by I mean, how much is how much is the dog that got scratched up? Way, She's thirty two pounds that day at the vent and I think, yeah, there's no contest. Yeah, that's why it's surprised me. And would ever bother to run away from him. Well, you've got to think about you know, lions live out there. It's silent. They're not vocal animals. Really, they don't make a lot of noise, especially a big solitary tom. He's not making much noise. Um. The only noise he ever hears is like if he snatches a calf or a faun or something you briefly. And also it sounds like Holy hell. Coming to the roads of those dogs has to be an unnerving, pretty stressful deal when you know a whole pack of dogs flies up on you like that and they just pop up a tree. Um. Yeah, I think I was telling you this. Like my Boddy re Emmy this year. He was watching some lions on a kill and some wolves rolled in and the lions just popped up the tree, took a nap, right, you know. It's like they've done it a hundred times. That's and that's I mean, maybe that's why dogs are fighting more now. Not like I said, nobody knows. All the hound hunters are talking about different theories. Theories you know, um probably may probably reasonable. And this cat, being as big as he is, if one wolf rolls and he and killed that wolf too. That doesn't mean anything. So I think maybe he's just sick of getting run off of kills, you know, every time he kills a dearyelk if a wolf rolls in and takes it from him, he's over that. So after a while he's like it's not going to work out for him anymore. Um. But anyways, Yeah, we don't really know what the deal was with that cat. He Uh. Yeah, the way we accidentally got on him. We were hunting south of kind of a main road that day by a couple of miles. And how many miles from where the scratching occurred. Yeah, like I said, a couple of miles from that spot. So the next day we went like four miles or the next day we went to a different drainage and caught a cat. Um. I actually called a friend in to bring some dogs because I was like, Stacy wasn't into the idea of me taking any more dogs out, and yeah she was. It was like, your wife said, you can't use these dogs or run lines anymore. There was a brief moratorium on cougar hunting for the day. Yeah, we had a more torment eating black bears in my house after trickings. I know, I know what you're saying. It's kind of waited out and yeah, so that took a little while to kind of get ourselves back together, um and whatever. Yeah, it was unnerving. It was spooky for sure, like you just don't expect that. And I needed to get my you know, feedback in the water right away. I didn't want to take a break, but um, yeah, I was not ready to put my dogs back on a cat just yet. Um. So anyways, I called a buddy up who's got really good dogs, and we caught a cat. The next day. Everything went exactly the way it was supposed to. Um, I did have one dog with me. I had tipsy that day. Um, all the dogs were safe. Of course, we got a dart and him safely collared released. Everything worked perfectly. So we're feeling pretty good. When you hit that line with the dart. How long does it take for the dart to take effect? About five or six minutes? No, um, fairly quick. But um, you know, if a cat jumps out of a tree and takes off with a dart in it, we have all the dog is tied back. Obviously, they can go quite a ways in five or six minutes. So you put the dogs back on them. Um, risk because the dog, because they can't, might fall asleep on the ground, right and the dogs chew it up. We can't have that happen. Um. So the way we would do that is then just put a dog on a leash and track it that way. Um, you catch another one, catch another one, go smoothly, everybody's feeling good, projects back on track. Um, got our first collar out, feel good about that. We go to another spot and cut a track looks like a tom track, pretty good size, and we're the same day as the other collar one, now the day after that. So two days after the dog got attacked a little the same day as he caught. Another day after that one caught one. Then the following day we went back out just like whatever Wednesday. And you're saying, first collar of the whole study. Yeah, so the the attack happened on the very first, say morning, an interesting way to kick off. Yeah, yeah, it was a lot of drama to start with. Um. So on day three we go out, we cut a track and we're you know, I look like whatever majorun Google Earth or whatever else. We're six miles from where nosey got gathered up so pretty good distance two days across the main road, you know, across a big drainage. We didn't expect it to be the same cat. Turned out that it was. Now, how do you know that? Though? I hope it is, uh, because just the behavior of the cat, the size, the behavior, proximity. Um. We ended up on a really long chase. We put Jared has good fast dogs. They ran this thing like over several drainages. We ended up on a super long chase. Finally say ran so actually like in pursuit. No, no, no, just track. And he was a traveling cat. He was a traveler. Yeah, you know what this is. This is an important thing. And I know we harp on this all time, we're talking about lines. We might as to take a minute now to talk about this. No on the way this out. Then you then you run with it or correct me where I mess up? When when people when you're running a lion track, it's not like like for the bulk of that time, it's not like the lion is thinking, holy shit, these dogs are chasing me. I'm gonna go run all around and try to get away. Right, they're way behind him in time, and and in distance possibly and for the bulk of the chase, as it's called. The lion has no idea that this is going on, probably until moments before it ends, when almost sudden he's like, what's that noise and runs up a tree. Right, But he just out doing his business hunting. Yeah. When I say we ran that cat for a long ways, we didn't run the cat. We tracked the cat for a long way, tracked his past movement, that's right. So you know, we're running yesterday's track and we're trying to freshen it up and figure out what that cat has done in the last twenty four hours. Um. So it might take us all day to do that. Um. But by the time the dogs catch up to the cat, the actual chase is probably four or five yards. Like the cat, here's the dogs coming. He might get out of his bed and start moving away from the noise. But a cat cannot run those dogs, um for any length of time. So when he gets jumped when you know, that's what we call the jump. When the when the dogs get him up on his feet, moving or whatever, it's a really fast thing. Seconds seconds. Yeah, if they if they run you know, five yards. That's gonna be pretty long one. So once those dogs get a visual on that line, and the line gets visual on the dogs, he's not going to think I'll just run for miles and get away. No, he can start jumping up giant cliff faces, you know. Sometimes, Yeah, they can. It's real unusual in our country, you know, you hear about that though. Sometimes they'll if they climb up a cliff face or something like that, they can get some space on the dogs, or if they go someplace they can't get um. That's possible, but again, it's not like this foot race where the cats just doing all these tricks and whatever. Yeah, like it might be he's up on a cliff face because he happened to be up on a cliff face and the dogs happened to find him at a point when he was up on a cliff face, or they tracked to the base of it and they can't get up it, and he's then jumped moving away from the dogs. I got you. I imagine it's not too different than if you startle like a house cat that you're not familiar with and it's not familiar with you, whether it was like with a dog or kids, or whatever it's like outside, and you also just like see a cat that's chilling Austin. The cat is just oh my god. He runs up a tree. It's probably very similar to that. Right. He just goes from like this whatever he was doing, loafing around to being sort of surprised, and he's like, what's the easiest way to get out of the situation, And that's that tree right there, right. Lions especially are that way. Um. I think lions, once you get them jumped, you know, I think they lay and just listen to those dogs come quite close before they get concerned. Um, but once they realize that the dogs are coming for them, they take off and they probably climb pretty quick. Um. Bobcats will outrun dogs. Yes, I've had bobcats on chases, walked past me at you know, ten yards, and I've kicked fresh dogs on them, and the podcast still outran us. They have more stamina, they can absolutely outrun a dog, and they're a little bit lighter scented, so the dogs can't run the track quite as quickly, so they have a pretty major advantage there. And bears can outrun dogs, which surprises people. Bears can they'll smoke a group of dogs. Yeah, so you get the lion. So we get the track. Okay, we got this cat finally starting to like, we think we're on the fresh end of this track. And this is a huge you know, it's a forty five minute drive to get back around the next drainage where we can get close enough to even get a signal back on the dogs and figure out what's happening. This is an all day deal. Um. So we get this cat in this canyon, we think we're close. The dogs are really moving the track more quickly. Um, and then we start getting a tree single, so we start their way, you know, walking down this steep, nasty canyon. The dogs are all showing tread and then they'll break tree and you'll hear this. You know, once you're in hearing, you can kind of figure out what's going on. So you hear all the dogs barking tree like they're looking at it. It's a different bark, and then all of a sudden gets super excited and their move and they'll go back to tree again. So let you know, the lions jump in the tree. That's right, So what you know the the great humor is Jerry Clower calls it tap in the tree for some reason, tap the tree, which means it left its tree, in reference to Racoon's Really Yeah. You know Jerry Clark, he used to get up between sets at the Grand Old Operation tell hunting stories. You should get yourself from Jerry Clower's CDs. I'm gonna have to most about coon hunting and a lot about dogs. His dog was high Ball. Okay, I was gonna steal his name. Now I'm stealing your is a good dog name. So how the cats moving and jump in and um had Jared's dogs on the race again, and I had a Tipsy with me, and then James brought a dog along. So we have these six dogs that are all fast, and you're letting all these dogs out because this thing won't get into a tree, and state point let it out because we thought it was treat. So I dump, you know, we have all that we dump. Uh Tipsy, like I said, I still call her a pup. She's been a lot of cats. She's three. And then James dog is actually a pup. She's like a year old. Um. So they raced down the hill and we hear, you know, they hear him get to the tree. And now there's I said, there's all six dogs are there. We think we have this cat caught. It's in a it ends up climbing a big cedar tree. We feel good about it. Um. The state crew shows up, biologists and um the grad student and we're getting things set up to dark this cat and with whatever, all five or six of us standing around and the dogs and we're trying to get the net set up to catch it if it goes under in the tree and falls. And the cat just finally said it had enough and climbed down out of this huge tree that it was sixty ft up, climbed down, jumped over all of us, and then refused to tree again. So now he's just walking and fighting dogs, which was a problem. Um. And it's just blow down, it's steep, it's getting dark. I mean, this is like the worst place in the world to do this. UM. So we're at this point like thinking we need to just get the dogs off of this cat and get out of there before somebody gets hurt or one of the dogs gets killed. And so probably took you know, twenty minutes of you know, catching the cat on the ground and trying to get dogs gathered and then you see in the cat. Yeah, we're on the count the whole time, Like Jared and I are like right on him all the time. When you can't shoot it with the tranquilizer because you gotta catch the dogs where you tranquilizing, right, Um, And we want it in a safe spot and whatever. Brian's running the trank gun, the dark gun, and we're just you know, we're just there to handle the dogs at this point, which means now we're just trying to get the dogs out of there. Um. We're all pretty well fed up with this cat. And we get finally, you get this cat caught in a blowdown, and we think we can get all the dogs gathered and just pull them. Um. So Jared slips in to start getting leashes on dogs, and UM, I'm about fifteen yards downhill from them, and I'm like still headed their way, and Jared starts pulling dogs out, and that cat comes out from underneath the blowdown, and I think it's the first time he'd actually really got to look at us and knew what was going on, and he looked at Jared and started at him through all those dogs. Yeah, it was terrifying. Um, so Jared had one of the you know, saw the cable leashes that we used with a clip at each end, and it was still clasped. Jared's whipping this cat in the face, trying to get it to just stop, and the dogs are you know, all over its case and it's like focused on him, which is a weird, unnerving kind of thing. Um, so, yeah, I have my gun with me this day. Um so I have my gun out, but there's dogs everywhere and the cat's very close to Jared and you don't want to shoot a cat unless you like absolutely have to. And at this point, I'm thinking, now there's pretty good chance nobody's going to get hurt yet. Um the cat turns and takes off, and he finally climbs up on a leaning log about eight feet high, and he's war out. Now he's been like he's been in like a twenty minute scrap and he's on this log and you can see he's breathing pretty heavily, and Brian was a able to slip a dart into him, so we were able to you know, and then we darted him with the dogs loose still, but we were able to tone the dogs and pull them back off once we had a dart in him and he ended up going out on that log. Basically, toning the dogs is the GPS color has a shock feature and then also a tone feature, So the dogs are trained to stop what they're doing if you tone them. When you're training them, they know that the shock follows the tone. So once they figured to add out, they just do what you want when they hear the tone. Yeah, once they're broke to that, they they pretty much do whatever you want when you hit the tone. So we got a caller on that cat that day, which was nice. Ye, he was a big tom. He's a hundred forty eight pounds um broken tooth, had a busted off lower canine. We aged him at about eleven years old, so he's as old as he's gonna get probably. Yeah, he's on his way out. Yeah, he's probably been defending that territory for half a decade. You know, he's been up there for a long time, seeing a lot of stuff. So again, did you guess that that casts been treated before? Maybe? You know what, maybe not legally they wouldn't. There's no hound season there, but um, I guess back in two thousand and eight, and nine. They were doing some hound hunting there. Maybe he got treat then, but yeah, I don't know why. I don't know why you had the attitude other than just being old, you know, kind of like the old man was kind of over all this nonsense. And how when you guys go out. I mean, I saw how it happen when we were hunting, But like, when you're there, how are you It sounds kind of women you say like, oh, we caught a track, Like isn't that? There's there's more to it than that, Like how are you guys cutting tracks? Because if you task a lot of people and you said, hey, go find me a mountainline track this morning, they're not gonna find a mountline track. Yeah, most people wouldn't. Um, well, we have we have pretty good cougar densities up there, and as winner gets on, you know, they get even more dense. So finding the track, if you know what you're looking for, is not that hard. A lot of time time, Um, you look, you're working off a deer hurts. Yeah, we're looking at winter range, so we're trying to hunt or you know, we're trying to whatever capture near deer and elk herds. Um so to find you know, like finding this track. We know that that area has quite a few deer and elk in it. We know there's going to be a cat anywhere there's deer and elk in that area. Um so we cut the track and then, you know, the harder part isn't just finding a track. The harder part is figuring out where it's at and finding the freshest track we can for the dog's sake. You know, yesterday we were hunting and are trying to capture a cat and we ended up getting on what wasn't the fresh end of the track. He'd crossed the road several times, and we you know, misjudged which track was which, and the dogs ended up spending all day working and they ended up right back at the road at a track that we already knew was there. So we just messed up. So the hardest part is figuring out which track to turn loose on if even if it's the same cat, to get the freshest senter do you like running? Uh? We put this way in your life of chase amountain lines, has more has more of it been functioning like as a biologist, or has more of it been functioning as a hunter. More of it has been as a hunter, um for sure, but not necessarily as like a consumer, like we treat mostly cats, We treat our for pictures and dog training purposes. Um. Yeah, like that thing that surprised me. As houndsman who've chased lions their whole life, how few lions they ever actually shoot? Yeah? Well that's just how many lines do you really need to kill? Right? I don't want to kill a whole bunch of cats. I'd rather chase him and let the dogs get the work and you know, show somebody else a cat. It's kind of fun. It's fun to take somebody new out and show him a cat and let them take pictures. Ever, ever, it's exciting for people and learn about. I mean, I feel like that the work that you guys are doing, I mean, it's not like it's been done a million times before, right, right, you guys are gonna possibly gain new data that it's gonna you know, Yeah, the study that the state's doing is going to be it's pretty robust. It's gonna generate a ton of cool data for sure. Um, but yeah, I think you know what you said about hound hunters, like not killing that many cats. Most most town hunters aren't in it to kill the cat necessarily. We just want to chase it and get the dogs in the woods and stuff like that. So when I was when we went out, so I heard it was bart this December and we went out like looking to get a line and kill line. Did that feel? Are you like, oh, this is gonna be more fun than normal or is it just all the same to you? Um? Yeah, somebody's shooting a cat out of that's pretty sort of anti climactic too, Like, I don't I'm not like excited to go get a line. I'm excited to tree a line, But if somebody wants to kill one, it's just it's an one more step, you know. It's then you've got to deal with the hide and the meat and everything else. So, um, it's different than I guess. I get asked a lot like well, even Stacy asked me, like, why why do you have to go kill all these deer? Let's just take their picture. Wouldn't that be the same. It's like, well, not really, it's not the same. But for cougars, it it is the same. It's almost more rewarding for me to just get a picture of a cat and let it go. It's not that way for any other species. It's kind of strange for me. I don't I don't know. Um, but now somebody's shooting a cat. I don't get that excited about it. Kind of whatever. I know that, you know, a lot most hunters, I feel like they want to get a cat at some point in their life. And I get that. I understand that. I've I've got a big one, um that I killed for whatever sport. How many years ago, Um, it was a long time ago. It was. It was actually whispers first kind of solo cat, and it turned out to be a big you know, Poont and Crockett Tom. It's just kind of a special cat. Whisper struck it and ran it and treat it. Do you regret killing that line? No? Yeah, I think the build up and want to hunt one is a real gradual for me. Yeah. You know, like even when I first saw you know, I saw a handful of lines in the wild. Um, when that first happened, I was like, man, I'm dying to go on the mountain lion. Because after a long time, you know, okay, almost a couple of decades, of looking at their tracks, seeing a handful of them that eventually I'd like I had this like like I really wanted to go on line hunt, you know, and a lot of it was just to just to really get a look at one, because they're so like you just glimpse them, you know. It was like, Yeah, the moment I walked up, I wanted a tree. I was like, holy shit, I mean, that's exactly what I said, Like, there's one just standing there and it seems like bigger than life, you know? Was that the first one you've seen a tree was the one when we were with Bart. Yeah, when they jumped him and three trees. You got a lot of lyon looking there him in three trees. Yeah, I've never seen one in a tree before. Yeah, we should talk to you that hunt because it's interesting. But yeah, seeing that line for the first time, it's surreal. So we went out and Bart found the track. We're hunting in the Idaho Paine Handle, and the first morning we went, we went out um on an area had a ton of white tails. Yeah, a lot of shiploads of white tails, and they're not always there. Obviously, it was deep snow up above and they moved into that winter range. Yeah, like the snow up high because we later went up hind the snow up pies ball deep and there's deer to spend time up in that zone. And as the snow was coming deer and moving down, we're just find like concentrations of deer. And you found a track cutting the road. You found a track crossing the road of a traveling cat coming out of that high country and we're on snow machines and one of these that guys. One thing you guys did that I thought was interesting was rather just being like, holy sh it, let's let everybody let the dogs go. You went as best you could, checked a couple other areas where you could get on roads with snow machines to see if that if there was an obvious place where that cat crossed another road. Right, that's and to look for wolf track. That's right. There's two parts to that. So we always want to find the freshest track. And you know, sometimes you can kind of guess. Bruce is very good and he's been hunting up there forever, so he can kind of tell you what the cat is going to do, especially if it's on a you know, big travel um. But the second part of that is finding looking for wolf tracks and sign and if we have any idea that there's wolves around, that changes, you know, how we hunt that or whether or not we hunt it. Yeah, because the wolves are here, all that ruckus and no come kill the dog, that's right. Yeah, they get territorial and they hear the dogs coming. That can be trouble and to go check for tracks like you kind of some of the roads we looked at were distances of a couple of miles from there, and you're just trying to rule out like, Okay, he crossed this road too, so there's no sense and turn them loose where he crossed the last road, because you're just gonna wind up getting to this point anyways. Right. Yeah. The idea is, I mean, ideally we would you guys call it boxing them in, Yeah, hamming him in, righting figure out you know, one piece of ground where that cat has to be, which we don't usually get that lucky, but it can still be a huge patch of grown It might be huge. But if you can knock out you know, two or the three sides, you have a pretty good idea either that cat went that way or he's still in this basin or canyon or whatever. So, um, it really saves on dog dogs also, you know we have whatever certain number of dogs whatever, I think we had six on that hunt. Um, if you turn all your dogs loose on the wrong end of a track and they wipe their feet out, like, it takes three or four or five days for them to heal up, so you can hunt again. We'll take care of them. What was interesting about this track, the bart phone, Well, he had a bloody foot. So it was interesting because you could always tell, because we ran into a number of lion tracks in the area, you could always tell this one, Dukes, he had a bloody foot. Yeah, it was like it's right rear or something blood want me, It was kind of a mass like it was a weird foot, and um, usually something like that happens. You expected to get better, but a couple of times it like bled worse. Yeah, well you know it's probably just kept it open too. So we turned out on that thing and nothing happened that day. I mean they ran a lion. A lot happened. They trailed thee and found a lion bed and with a different member we caught it. We were like right away we found a different line bed and a different line track. That's right. That caused some confusion for us. Um. You know a lot of times those cats will get into spot and they'll start circling and hunting um, and we weren't you know, we couldn't be sure that it wasn't the cat. The dogs were on and they just hadn't gotten to that bed yet. Let's say that cat ran out and did a big loop, and you know, we don't know that they're not going to end up back at that bed a few hours from now after a circle, and so we didn't really know. So at that point you're sort of like just trusting the dogs and letting them work work it out. And he's crossing rivers. It was that was the dangerous part of that, which is a pain in the ask because it's um, it's like zero degrees. Yeah, the dogs don't they're not gonna smell it. Were across the water, but it ends up being that they crossed on a log. But it's difficult for the dogs. Like the dogs aren't agile enough to cross the same little brush jam little lion is gonna cross if the dog go in there, they're gonna be in rough shape, right, Yeah, we don't want the dogs falling in the water. And when it's that cold. Um. The other thing I don't I'm sure you remember. Um, there's a pain. The dogs hang up at that crossing, and then we start getting a tree sign and the dogs are far enough away we can't hear him, and it's easy to get excited and take off running down there to see what's going on. Plus they're nearly it turns out there to staying at the bank the river. Can't get across the river. But you have to do that because if one of the dogs is actually in the water and you're getting a tree signed, you better get there quickly to get them gathered up. Um. So that first day we spent a little bit of time just walking and crossing that river several times and having pretty tough time of it getting everything lined out. And then that cat split out of that river valley on a pretty much a straight line and found another found another bed yep, and the bed this is like he lays on the ground and just kind of melts a little spot into the snow. It looks like a deer bed, something like at the base of a tree. I had in my head. I don't know why I had in my head. He would be like, it would just be more of a dramatic sight. It looks exactly like a deer bed, right. It just seems peculiar to have like a line curled up sleeping on the ground out in the open. They'd somehow be more like like a cave, you know, like a big crotch in a tree, which, in fact, he just like, I was gonna lay down right here. I walked up sleep and one time, in the middle of a logging road, I thought it was a dead deer. I was walking. It was pretty it was like, you know, four thirty in the morning of the summer, so it's it's pretty dark, but not pitch black. And I saw the thing laying in the road, and I was scouting for an elk counting spot, and uh, I'm walking up on it, and I'm just getting closer and closer, and I'm finally I'm like, you know, ten yards away before it dawns on me that this thing is it's a cougar, and its sound asleep, and it rolled finally it rolls to its belly. It must have heard me or whatever it rolls to its belly and it just gives me a look for a couple of seconds and bounds off the road. But what a weird thing. It's just sleeping in a logging road and they just laid down to sleep wherever. I guess, like a dear wood. One of the ones I ran into spring bear hunting. Um ran into it on a trail. It was coming down the trail, run up the trail and he sees us in books and runs on over to steep ledge and I ran over to the ledge to see, like to watch him then run off through the woods. And I'm watching watching, I'm thinking, how could that some bitch be so fast that he's already clear of all this area I can see? And eventually I looked down and he just like feet away. Yeah, he's went and tucked in under that little ledge. And I'm just standing there looking out over with no idea. He's just standing down there looking at me. Do when it made eye contact him with me? Booked? Yeah, but you just can't. He's just like he's just like I got his way till this thing passes by, You get is like surprised, just like when you visualize these things is now what you meant how you imagine them operating, you know, But as we're chasing the line that day, what else do you what else happened that day in your mind that you remember. Remember it got to be toward dark, and you guys really wanted to get the dogs rounded up because it was so cold. Yeah, it was too cold. Um to leave dogs out overnight for sure, which you hate to leave dogs out overnight, so you don't like to do that, even if it's warm out with wolves and everything else. Is just not a good idea at all. Um, So we like, it would have to be a really unusual circumstance to leave dogs out overnight. So um, we ended up. Remember we ended up in that nasty swamp and that just had terrible losses in there. The cat has circled and there was another cat in there, we think, and there's old tracks and fresh tracks, and the dogs just really had a hard time moving through that. Once we finally got them lined out, they got to that roaring river. Remember the water was really high and it was going to be a very dangerous crossing and we're afraid that dogs were gonna get down in that, So we pulled them at glass light and then of course it's a whatever thirty miles snowmobi all ride in the freezing cold to get back. So we don't want to be doing that too late at night either. Um. So yeah, the first day we spent I don't know how many miles we covered or how many of the dogs covered. I should have checked, um, but it was quite a I mean it was like I said, a traveling cat come out of that high country. Yeah, I feel like they moved the track three miles. Yea. The next day we go back up there, and you guys didn't want to go in and just go let the dogs go where we quit the night before, because of that river. You wanted to do more, kind of like trying to find out if the cat moved more if you cross another road right. And there was so damn any deer in there. It was hard to like because there's so many deer like beating trails everywhere. It was hard you realize you could miss line tracks. Well we did that costs us. Um. Yeah, we spent all day back in that swamp. You and I walked through there and found um, you know, cat tracks going every direction everywhere, and dog tracks tracks were there some moose tracks were there, and dog tracks were everywhere with them. Um, they just didn't have a good track to follow. There's no obvious direction for them to go. Um. And then when we found that out track, that, I mean, that was the savior. Once we had that, we could you know, I think that we were moving in the right direction finally. And that was interesting because, uh, Bruce, another hound has been Bruce. He checked some of the same areas a bunch times and eventually knew there must be an out track, and events you found an out track. And I'm telling you what, nine percent of American hunters would not have found that track. No, it was I would found that track. It was on top of all those deer walking on I mean that deer, the deer in there. It looked like a feed lot. There were so many things it did. It really did look like a stockyard. So it looked at the fact that he like picked that track up on that ship kind of blew my mind. You guys, I hung with Bruce a lot that day because I think that's when you guys were kind of walk in that one of that final kind of side of the box to make sure he hadn't gone I don't know what direction that was south maybe anyways, but I was with Bruce and I can tell you he ran that one section of the road half dozen't maybe even ten times until finally he just kind of was sensing something and he told Gary and I he was like, you guys, just stare right here, don't do that stone we go around anymore because he's starting to think like we're gonna cover up this out track. And then, you know, I think it was one in the afternoon when he when he finally cut that track. Yeah, I was getting on in the day when we finally figured that out. And the problem is it's a it was a small area and you you know, you try to hem them in and do you think it's temmed into this small area? And then all of a sudden you have dogs running all over the place in there, and you're thinking, are these dogs just absolutely worthless as they got in there and they can't get it caught or or yeah, but he was left and then came back in again and stuff like that. So it's confusing a ship. But when he found that out track, you caught loose, then right away your dog's got confused up the hill and you go up there, there's a giant freaking white dead white tail. Yeah. So they ran up with a few hundred yards and find that kill and again there's cat tracks all over Bex. He's been feeding on it. Um yeah, frozen, pretty much stripped clean, white tailed, but still some meat on the neck, neck twisted around a bunch. Oh yeah, totally busted. And he killed him like that, probably like you know, turned his neck and killed him, or in the process of dragging him all over, Holy hell, grabbed him. But he was probably going back because that wasn't brand new. He's probably going back into some other line killed and he was checking out and he just went back to check on his frozen kill. Yeah. And how often do you find kills chasing all the time? I mean, if you follow the line tracks very long, you're gonna find a kill. They're either eating on a kill or they're about to go make a kill. Like if you fall around very long, you're gonna find something. Yeah. My friend Floyd, where he talks a lot about the reason he's always hoping to find a kill is because the cat might just lay up. Yeah, we had that last week. Um, we were hunting up there and uh, had a track that was just going all over the place, circle and circling, and we had it hemmed in and there's like a little narrow band like two hundred yards that we hadn't checked. It's like, well, that cat, there's either an outrack there that cats somewhere in there. So Rick took off with the snow shoes on and took off walk in the last little bit of this place out and he gets on the radio and he's like, turn the dogs loose. I just jumped the cat off a kill. So he walked up on this cat and it was just laying on top of an elk. Yeah, and uh, we were only three hundred yards from him, so we opened all the dog boxes and they're all just like standing around like you know that, what do you want us to do? And Rick's holler and and finally they got the idea to go to him. And the minute they got to him, of course, they just blew up and ran the cat and had it treated with and you know four yards um. So yeah, I mean, you walk walk their tracks right far, you're gonna find a kill somewhere. It's amazing that those things a hundred forty pounds whatever you can kill those pounds. This is like a pound female. We just took pictures and let her go big, a nice mature female. You didn't put a collar on her. That was up at rix. We're just okay, just I got you, I got you. What what kind of elk calf cow? Mature? Yeah, yeah, nine pound female killed that thing. So back to the one we got. You go up there and it was kind of a mess of tracks. Yeah, there's a lot of tracks. You messed around there a long time looking for the out tracks. That's like an interesting thing about running lines is the dogs are doing so much of this, but there's certain things that dogs are never going to figure out. Look if if you got a line and he kills a deer and he like leaves and goes on some big walk about, comes back, eats more of the deer goes out a big walk about, comes back, sleeps, eats, the deer goes back to some place he'd been the day before. It comes back to the carcass, and you pick him up on one of those forays, right, and you trail him back into where all of a sudden he's coming back into like the center of the spokes on a wheel. Oh, I mean, the dogs has gotta be bewildered by it. And that's where like being an expert tracker, a human being, expert tracker needs to commit and do something deductive reasoning about what in the world is going on here, and then find that track that seems the most fresh, because the dogs, like are good at knowing a fresh track, but they're already feeling like they're running it, you know, and they could be going backwards. I mean, they could be doing any number of things wrong because the dog don't look at the track and tell what way it's going, which is one of the things that makes one of the other two times I've gone down to hunt lions unsuccessfully in the desert in Arizona is there's not a lot of saying for them to leave tracks. There's a lot of rock and there's no snow, and the dogs can't tell the way the lion is going, So right off the bat, there's even if the dog strikes it starts baying, there's a chance they're going in the wrong direction. Yeah, until you can find a track. And again that's where it winds up being that. That's why the handful of houndsman that I have countered, have been the best sign readers I've ever been around, because they find tracks no one's gonna find. Yeah, if you can, Floyd does it from the top of a damn mule. He finds tracks you'd never see if you were crawling on your hands and knees. It's just like there's like a you look at it so much, you're gonna treat very few cats if you can't find tracks, Like, if you can't identify tracks and figure out what's going on and when to pull the dogs and when to help the dogs, you're just not gonna have any success. No, A lot of these tracks aren't like, oh yeah, big claws and ship. No, it's just like nothing. Like you might see the heel or just one part of a track or whatever, and the area is creamed with dog tracks. At a passing glance, there's a lot of similar to the passing. There's a lot of similarity between dog tracks and line tracks, even in size, right, you know, I mean like a passing similarity on dry ground for sure, cat track cat feet aren't that big um in the snow, they leave a bigger track because they've got a lot of fur and they snowshoe out sometimes and things like that. But when you just see a cat step in fairly hard sand, their actual pads and toes aren't that big average average with being um, you know, three inches or something. They're not. Yeah, they're just not huge feet like people think. So you went up into that kill area and got that sorted out once once, did you at that point be like, oh, we'll catch this lion today. Well, I'm like that all the time, but I thought I knew that our chances just went way up. But it was late in the day that was the problem, and the cat was going you know, weird. We still hadn't gotten him jumped, but we were tracking him straight up that mountain, up that deep canyon, which is good because he was finally leaving this that's what we're possibly leaving, this cluster fuck of ger tracks and line tracks and dead deer and lion beds. We wanted an actual out track, and that the way the dogs moved that. I don't know if you remember the noise and how fast they were going, but when they're doing that, you have a pretty good idea that they're on like today's track. Yeah, that's the thing, is that what these guys do uh. We would periodically see a line track and you kind of check it out walking a little bit, you know, try to make some ideas about how big it might be and what the snow like, whether it had time for even there's no new snowfall, Snow is always blowing down out of the trees, so you're looking at like, has snow had time to blow in there? Has the track kind of eroded from wind? And the thing I would watch you guys, do you just take a dog? They put his nose in there, and you could tell a lot about how old that track is by his enthusiasm, right, Yeah. They seem to kind of know like, oh, he's showing me a track. Oh yeah, no, that they know exactly what we're doing. And you can start to learn your dogs too, um, especially like Whisper, my old dog. I've been doing that with her for seven or eight years now, so I know what I'm going to get on a fresh track. And if she just loses her mind, it's like, all right, we're gonna get this cat right away. It's super fresh. If she's sort of tapping about it but wants to take it, it's probably you know, it's probably that day's track. But if she starts moving it silently, then it's like, all right, we're gonna have some work cut out for us. Now, Like a humor, you would check this track out there to figure out pretty quick, like what the dog, how the dog reacts, And not all dogs are created equal. Some of them just freak when they get one particle to cougar center, but they learned to be more skeptical when they get older. At least that one didn't. No, not necessarily, you just learn, you learn how they respect their personality. Yeah, so when you got that sorted out by that book, they took off, oh yeah, and Whisper, Tipsy and Gus were on that chase. And they're fast dog, especially gust and Tipsy. Um. And when they start on a fresh track that they're gonna get that cat moving and they're gonna catch him, um pretty quick. They're super athletic, fast dogs. Um. So that was the right group to have with that cat, especially the way he acted once he was treated. Um. Yeah, when they lined out from the kill though, I had a pretty good feeling that we were going to get him up. I just did. I was hoping it was still because like you know what we're like right at the summers, right at the winter solstice, so you had like very short days. And that's the thing. You know, everybody you know who hunts waterfowl his eyes very aware of like legal shooting light. But you know it spelled out Alaska doesn't do it because the days are so weird and the light periods of the photo periods are so strange. But yeah, I mean, you gotta find that thing. You can find it a perfect daylight, but you can't shoot, right, I should say perfect daylight. But you could find it in light that you could shoot him, but it'll be illegal for you to do so. Yeah, for sure. It's different than like a deer that's a hundred and fifty yards away or something that at the same time you wouldn't be able to make the shot of cats in a tree. I mean, yeah, you're gonna find a way shoot it if you want it to um, but you can't. But you can't put artificial light out it either. Yeah, so not that was matic. You can't legally do it at dark anyway. It's not like predator hunt like Kyo hunting area where you can use the artificial light. You can't use the artificial light. No. Um. Yeah. So once the once they lined out like that, we had it was a little bit of a race against time to to get that cat in a tree and make sure we can get to him, which you know, we had to drop back down off that mountain and snow machine all the way back up to the top and then come down the mountain to him. And we got we got to that thing. Now, it had snowed a lot, and it was like a like a fine fine powder and it was not a breath of wind. So all that snow is hanging in the trees and it has just been like consistently very cold, consistently not windy. So like the entire snowload, when you're under like a canopy of big trees, it would be almost like bare ground, you know, just like a dusting of snow that all that snow is still up the tree. And in that line we show up there and he's up in the tree. On how high he was, he's pretty high upen the tree, but he was on that steep hill where you're almost looking straight at him. Yeah, I was eyeball to eyeball with him coming down the mountain toward him. And he was fine with the dogs blown. We showed up and he pitched out of that tree, and it's like it's stuck in my mind as one of the most surreal things I've seen, next to a time I had a mountain go fall off a cliff and standing above it watching it go was like locking in my mind. But the way that thing just bailed out of that tree and sent down a shower of that powdered snow and hit the ground at a full tilt run, it didn't mean anything. Time didn't like, yeah, it was just like like he does it every day if he needs to. He's sort of like rode the bows and then this sort of like cascade of powder, you know, almost like just snow everywhere. Man, you couldn't have planned it better, though, to get away from those dogs. I can imagine being a dog underneath there and just getting all that powder in your face. But he bailed out over the dogs. Oh yeah. Now he ran right, and then he hit a downward slope and just hit it like at a full tilt run. He was going as fast as he could. And the bigger problem was he was running his tracks from about five minutes earlier and I thought we'd lose a line, because then he was headed right back down into the into where he came out of and it was getting followed his own followed, his own set of tracks down. We have never lost a lion that way, and I was thinking that that might be the first time. And it was gonna be because you guys, all the time we're telling me, oh, yeah, he might jump the tree, but he'll he'll only go three gonna be we started chasing that thing. Like a mile later, I'm like, somebody just still running. Yeah. Even I looked over and I was like, Oh, I don't worry about it, will be. Well, haven't treated four hundred yards? And then oh yeah, and he gets in another tree. We show up there and you can't. You can't shoot the lion in the tree with the dogs on the loose, because you don't want the lion to come down out of the tree and fight the dogs, right, yeah, you don't want to blow him out of the trade of the dogs. Plus you know, the time, you have time for you know, people to get pictures, and you get the dogs leashed and tied back where you want them, and you plan this thing so it's a very controlled situation most of the time with your cat, it wasn't he didn't want to stay up at all. No, he bailed out of that tree in an amazing shower of snow. And then that time he did, like you were saying, when three yards and climbed up another tree. We got in there right at dark, and he did not seem like he was gonna stay putting that tree. And when I was thinking about all this, like when I was thinking about lion hunting, going into a lion hunt, there's always this idea that and people say it all the time, people who who think that, you know, would ever have like a misguided opinion that there's like no challenge of lion hunting because they think of like, in their mind, the hunting is the shot, right, Yeah, there's like the challenge and honey is making the shot. But the challenge in lion hunting is reads finding a line in the first dame in place, which is like again people like, oh, we caught a track, and it sort of seems like, oh, yeah, you could a track, easy peasy. It's not. No, it's not. It's not like finding a deer track. You know, there's a line at the other end of the track once you find it. But finding the track can be tough, and we've had we've had weeks where we didn't find a line track. Yeah, when it's cold and they're lockdown on winter range and they're just not moving very much. We've like literally gone an entire week without cutting a track that we could run. So it's not you know, it's not necessarily easy to find a track, although we were finding quite a few while you were there, And um, you know, the cat population is pretty good up there, so finding a track isn't necessarily the hardest part up there. But um, it was the densest lion side I've ever seen in that area. Well, but we caught him on that move too. We caught him perfect conditions, just coming in a lot of deer. But and like in anticipating going on a line hut, a successful line hut, I'd always been like I really was interested in participating in and be watching right, experiencing how hound has been work, which I've developed a lot of respect for the sign reading capability of a good houndsman, right, the athleticism of the dogs, Like just see all this play out. I always had a little bit of trepidation or you know, like a little bit uneasy about that. You'd get here and here's this this like amazing animal in a tree that you don't get to really see. You don't get to really ever look at him. And you'd find a tree and the time would go by, and you almost became like familiar with the lion in some way, and that I was afraid that, um, I'm not afraid now that I was like, not that I'm afraid of myself arriving at any kind of conclusion, but I was open to the idea that I would find the lion, you would catch the lion, and then I would be like, man, I don't wanna like this is I'm good now. That was my lion hunt. No need to get a gun involved in this. But I think that after like after jumping it out of the two trees and then finding the third tree right at dark and he was not gonna stay in a tree, it wounded up being like a snapshot. Let's get there was no sort of like thinking about it. You don't want to being like there he is, I m you know, And it wasn't I had in my head there's gonna be this sort of big like a like emotional wrestling match about like like everybody says, like shooting the line up a tree. There's a story I told a hunter times. I'm gonna tell one more time. Um. I got a friend who who built this dear blind that he calls the condo. Okay, and he bought a bunch of old pulp land and he and he built uh blind. You can pull in a park inside a garage and then you go upstairs and it's the blind and it's wrap around benches, sleds okay, rolling off his chairs. Electricity and radiating out from the condo are like like laid out like Washington d c are spokes of shooting lanes planted as food plots, so you're in the center of the wheel and there are spokes going out. They have yardage markers on them. Okay. And he's like made the desert bloom out here where he's got like deer in a place that traditionally wouldn't have shipped for deer, like pool land, um in the southeast. But he like these all these food plots, just deer just come in. Okay. We're sitting up in the condo seeing if some buck did you know they know about by name right would show up. I'm telling them about how I'm going to go out to hunt lions in Arizona, and I think at that time was the second time I was going to go. And I'm telling him, man, you know, it's just like really frustrating because there's no snow, so you you gotta like just take out and just kind of free cast with the dogs and hopes that the dogs are gonna smell a track and make the right noise that the dog's owners like, that's not a bobcat, that's a lion. They're gonna take off. You're gonna do some deduction about like how you know how lions move through the landscape, try to figure out what way the lions going. Then you're gonna follows dogs studying the ground for a freaking track to figure out if you went the wrong way or not. Then you got a size of thing because you don't want to run a female. You're trying to run a mail and it could be a bobcat and all the ship going on right, and you don't know when the thing came through anyways. And then I'm telling them all this and in the end, you know he's standing there and like in his swiveled off his chair. I'm saying, I just don't see the challenge and shooting some line out of a tree. You know, it's like so much like a perspective issue because I'm like, well a lot of guys might look up what we're doing right now and just really failed to see the challenge of shooting white tails out of a house interesting. But it's like a perspective issue. But it was messing with my mind this side. Do you like you're gonna like shoot it out of a tree, which is sort of like a very loaded like there's fish in the barrel and there's ship the tree, right, I mean, it's not again, it's not about the shot. So you even told me that you said something interesting interesting to me to where you were. I called you and I was like just trying to figure out, you know what, Like I'm like, you know, this is a goofy question, but what do you imagine total for a firearm? You know, because I'm thinking it's gonna bring like a light caliber sculped rifle. And you had said something to me like about you've you've seen it happen, but you had like an opinion about bowl bowl hunting lions. Yeah, that's a weird thing. And I don't know, I mean whatever. People are good with their bows, and bows are super effective. When people shoot a line with a bow, it dies in the tree and it comes out and you know, it works. Um. But it's weird to me when somebody goes on a hound hunt and like enters their cat and the Pope Young record book because they got it with a bow. Yeah that's what you said to me, you dogs. Yeah, you know, it's like like snuck up on it. It's bed and shot it or something that the shot isn't what should matter, Like the getting has already happened. Yeah, it's got like you got it, it's caught. Um you know. So yeah, pulling the trigger on the cat. It's sort of the whatever, the anti chimactic part of that. Yeah, I thought it would be. But it want to be in on this yourular situation. It wanted feeling very different than what I imagined it. Yeah, you know, and and then I was like it was I was like so happy. Um yeah, I was like really I was really happy to get the line. It was. It was funny because I I'll say to people, you know, people be like, oh, you're gonna I'm like, you know, I said, that's probably like the first line I ever got, and I would guess I'm imagining it would be my last line. And people like, oh, yeah, well you didn't like it or something bad happened. I'm like, no, I just it was like a thing I really wanted to do. Um I did it. It's just different than hunting deer milk. I think, yeah, I think if you went, you know, you're always welcome to come out and chase cats with us. I think the next cat you tree, you're gonna look at very differently. And that's probably, you know. I have a hard time explaining that, Like people always like assume that hound hunters are just killing every cat they tree, and now you know, the shot is like you said, it's just like whatever. I don't care if that cat ties or not. I don't want it to die really because I'd rather chase it again next year. And yeah, yeah, get pictures of it and get a look at it and just let it go. Yeah. I was surprised talking to your friend Bruce all surprised about that the quota systems like the idea of managing lions as a big game animal and not managing them as a like varmint right, because some states still do have like three sixty five day a year season and they manage them. They don't manage them. They're like get them off the landscape to avoid livestock depredation. And that's kind of their approach. Some states Idaho, Montana, some other ones management as a big game animal where they're making like population estimates. Those lions are famously hard to count. They make population estimates on lines and they try to figure out how we can maintain those populations or in some cases probably you can grow those populations. And they do it with having female quotas, right, or permit draws. There's a lot of areas of Montana you gotta draw damn lion tag. Oh yeah, it takes time too, and it's like they're competitive. Yeah, Like there's are I put I put it in for before this hunt. I put it in for an area a couple of times, did draw the tag. A matter of fact, I put in for lines three times in certain areas and never draw teg. There's also some over the counter ones, but some of those over the counter areas have a female quota in a total and a total cat quota. That's a good way to manage them. Um. You know, I hound hunters have pushed all those quotas, and that's that's that's what I'm trying to get to tell me, Like the history that that came from. Hell, Yeah, that was an anti hunters that wanted a female quota or a hound quota or the cat quota. It was hound hunters and the reason was the people were killing too many cats and we wanted to have something to chase. Um. So you know, we kind of led the way on that protection and it worked. Like there are places that have huge deer elk herds and really healthy line populations where you can expect to cut a track every day. Now I put a picture of the line I killed. It was like it was like a good representative example of a male line. It was like a like a yeah, not a nice cat. So I put a picture of the one up there in uh on Instagram and it got you know, like over like well over nine thousand likes on Instagram. So it's like a lot of people looked at it and they're like, oh, that's cool. You really gotta line. Um, there's a lot of like not as the blowback, but a lot of people being like really like wanting to know more. Are you going to eat that big one? Why are you holding it up like that? Okay, so a guy was like, you're not a guy and this is funny. Um My wife even pointed something out because she was kind of looking through him because she's was conflicted about this whole thing too. Uh where people like, why would you hold it up like that? Like you don't strike me as a big like trophy shot gripping grand guy. They're like, wow, that's not true because I put up all the time with people with animals all the time. You're just viewing this differently because what it is, you know, and people like being like, why do you why do people pick the line up and hold like that? It seems like disrespectful, Like how else do you I understand? I mean I can, Like the guy was like, where does that come from? Why do people hold lines up by the armpits? Because because just when they're laying on the ground, you can't tell what's going on, that's right. It's the more it is definitely like the traditional whatever you want to call hero shot, whatever you call it, you know it's like grabbing a deer by the antlers and standing back and taking your sure. But I think people like people, A lot of people wanted it to be that I was super sad that I got a line. I'm like, if I was super sad that I got anything, I wouldn't go do it right. It's like you, I set myself out to do something, I'm gonna do it. Looking forward to having the lions rug, I'm looking forward. I'd i'd eaten three damn lions with i'd ever killing one. Yeah, Like guys would give me lines or got a line met one time I got a whole line from a guy, So I'd eating a bunch of line. It was like I was entering unfamiliar territory there. So I'm looking forward to having, you know, the line meatould again. It's not like hundreds of pounds of line meat, but it's like a novelty. It's a really nice break from red meat that you get off deer elk. So like looking forward to that, looking forward to the experience. I'm in an area where lions are like well managed through a season structure. There's a lot of lines, But people like I wanted it to be that you were real bummed out that you got a line. And if there is a thing in honey where there's like a remorse factor now and then, or like like there's like a there's a kind of a solemn thing with doing it. But I think this idea that that um that you would anyways, why why would you want to go do something that made you so depressed. I was like happy to get the lion. So I'm happily holding up the line. I'm not gonna like pretend to be all like, you know, caught in prayer over this dead lion, as though I did some horrendous thing like ran someone's dog over with my car. It just wasn't like that. It's like I intentionally set out to get this line. I'm happy about getting the line. I want people to see the lion. I'm gonna hold it up and be like, check out this line. The same way when I got married, I was real happy to haven't gotten married to my wife and we had a dude, they're taking pictures of us being married because it was like a good thing that we planned out and it happened, and we were happy it happened. But it just killed some people to be that there's a dude happy with the lion. People are strange about lions, lions predators in general. I may imagine if he were doing with the wolf right, and you would have heard the same thing. It would have in the same thing. Just predators that are or I don't I hate to even call it, like a non traditional game animal, but whatever. People have been eating lions since people on lions co existed. There's a couple of things people trip up about. They're like, I can't imagine eating another predator. And I think that they're saying something different because they're like, you know, we're um, we're om divorce. Yeah, they're a predator, but I don't think you really don't want to hone them because it consumes meat. Like, I don't think that's really what you're talking about. All the people say like, oh, they're so old, but old like a bull elk, a big giant bull elk is potentially gonna be older than like a cat that one would hunt for and get because you guys estimated based on toothwaar and other things that the lion I got was six years old. A giant bull it could be seven or eight years old. So it's not the age thing. I had another guy point out, the friend of ours pointed out once. I think we actually discussed this that he was like, we're trying to be like why would He was like really upset about the idea that someone would shoot a wolverine. Nothing, I've ever shot a wolverine. We're having a discussion. He's like, oh, they travel so far. We like, yeah, a Carrey, we travel a lot farther. There's Carrey with the migrate of thousand miles. So it's not traveling because we just shot a carry when I didn't bother at all. It's something different, and I think people are really like struggling, like why is it different. There's thirty thousand lions in the American West. Yeah, if you go and look the like, if you go look, it's international conservation status is as low as you can get. It's a species of least concern. Yeah. I think there's a more exception, like people think that lions are really rare. I hear that a lot, like, oh yeah, people think we're And that's a lot of that. If you hop on you know, any number of sort of activist websites, they'll tell you that they're rare, like they're extrapated from sevent down of their historic rang elk are going from the rest. Right, there are no lions in Illinois than they used to be, Like I understand that, but the Rocky Mountain States we have a lot of lions are not going anywhere. It's a well managed population. Um No in the i u c N status like the international conservation status. I always I was, I always feel that when I look at up I sometimes feel like they're a little bit jumpy, like they give things status like conservation statuses that are unwarranted. And I even was talking to Hotis on the phone. I'm like, I guarantee lions have like a critical or whatever status. But you go on least concern. There's the there a species of least concerned about vulnerability. It's good people with weird stuff. People just get really upset about that ship. There's a bill right now and what Arizona. They want to eliminate the lion hunting season to let because they're killing deer and that's a public safety is you're having too many deer or some it was a guy and of course it's it's it's like, of course he's a he's a Democrat. I knew the minute I saw that Bill. I was like, that's gotta be coming from a Democrat. Um. Not to bash on Democrats, but just it's like, you don't see a lot of anti lion hunting legislation coming out of Republicans, right. They tend to be more like biology friendly folk when it comes to big game management. But this guy, Uh, we're having too many deer and elk on the roads. We need to stop hunting lions in order to reduce deer and elk because it's a public safety hazard. No, that man is not motivated by road safety. That man is motivated by some people constituents or donors who got a real bone to pickle lion hunting and rather saying can hunt lions as people really like the idea of lions and feel and relate to them, and then the same way they relate to housecats or whatever. Um, so we don't want anybody killing lions. You can't say that. You gotta like try to sell it to people on some bogus ship like public because right away Bar pointed out to me there's a time proven way of getting rid of excess deer and out in a very targeted fashion called hunting seasons. Right, and anyone who's hunting in Arizona knows the tags in Arizona not a gimme. Yeah. If there's an overpopulation of deer, I mean, the first thing that comes to my mind isn't too like protect all the predators. It's like, all right, let's address this overpopulation of deer through whatever a hunting season. It's like colde language. Yeah, it's totally yeah, a guy. People are weird, Like I said, people are strange about predators, predator management, especially big ones. You know. They don't worry about coyotes too much or even like bobcats, they don't get too excited. But wolves, cougars and now grizzly bears. This whole conversation has gotten big, and a lot of the most vocal advocacy tends to come from the people who are at least likely to run into one. Oh yeah, of course you want to cougar hiding in every tree if you live in Seattle, right, because you're never gonna see one anyway. Ye always talking like New Jersey cat ladies, you know, or getting fired up on behalf. But I think it is I think it's like a you know, there's a different like a different physiological difference between predators and prey is uh, you know, your eyes are centered on your face and you know lying what what it does is when your eyes are centered on your face, Um, you know, you can focus on stuff, like you're focusing on something you're gonna pounce on. Like a deer. He's got like think of an antelope. Deer, Like their eyes are way out to the side of their face. What they're doing is just scanning all the time, and you can see almost behind them. And when you have eyes that are focused, like when you have eyes in the center of your face, you're really good at staring at something. And when you see a cat, if you're watch a house cat kind of dodging its head up and down inside to side, he's doing like a death perception thing. He's calculating a distance for a leap, you know, and a praying which this is incapable of that kind of ship. They're really good at detecting movement all over, but they don't folk. It's not any particular thing at all. I think that people maybe see those front facing eyes and empathize with it more. We don't have a lot of because we have it, we have a creditor. How many prey animals you see getting walk around the neighborhood on a leash. People just don't to like, like people don't divorce wolves from dogs, which which taxonomically speaking, isn't unreasonable. And people don't divorce lions from house cats. Maybe maybe yeah, or it's a or divorced coyotes from it. Yeah. I think it's the perceived rareness. Maybe. I think a lot of it is that. I think people, yeah, when they think that, like we're out there killing the last cougar in North Idaho. Um, it's easy to get behind, you know, sort of that anti hunting action, whether it's just hitting a donate button or whatever else. Um. But in the case the cats were seeing like an unprecedented explosion of line range. Um lines are more be easy. It's almost like it just took them a while to figure out how to cope with people. Now they're like they're reclonizing old places. Well, and I think there's also a lot people are more tolerant of predators than ever before. I mean, you're probably talking about the Black Hills. Yeah, Like so South Dakota had kind of like been out of them and now they got you know, they're running a hunting season down there. But and a lot of that has to do with exactly what you just said, the hunting season. It's not a environment anymore where and you know, the rural communities are there's not as many ranchers, there's not as many people out farming and out the woods as there used to be. Um, so there's you know, maybe less opportunities for them to get shot at. Yeah, and then you can't. And and and the other thing is we're not poisoning anymore like that. And in the old days, you would take a animals did you take like an old mule out or whatever, and shoot it and then inject it with strict nine before it died, so the strict nine would pass through the circultary system and the whole animal you tanged with a shipload of strict nine and then that would be sort of like whatever eats that is dead. And we did a lot of damage on predators, Yeah, I mean that's kind of like largely we lost a lot of grizzies that way, a lot of wolves that way in the old days, just poisoning programs, right. Yeah, I think a lot of people have the idea that wolves were hunted to whatever extra patient in the forty eight and it was a lot more than that, you know, obviously bigger picture stuff with habitat loss, prey loss. Wolfers like the old wolfers, commercial wolf harvesters were poisoners. Yeah, you hear about that, like the little wolf bombs or whatever with a little feather on him and the Strict nine that would poof out kill wolves almost immediately they were they were like rained, like they ran basically a Strict nine trap line on the old days. After the kind of like after the buffalo time there a lot of guys went to wolfing and then we ran bonies on them. So up until the nineteen sixties, I think Montana had a bony online. Yeah, And there was this kind of this epiphany where you know, again coming from Hollandsmen and others, where they has made a radical switch, like instead of paying people to kill mountains, we're gonna have people pay us to do a limited amount of hunting for mountalins and were to find like a place in our heart to have the animals on the landscape. The hounds are the last guys that want to see lions get down. Oh for sure. Actually it was funny, yeah, talking about like letting cats go. Um, I've told you about like seeing cats and talking people out of shooting them. I've taken moose hunters a couple of different times and had cats. We've watched a cat come down to a stream and taking a drink in. This moose hunter was like, oh my gosh, there's a cougar. I wanna you know, I'm gonna shoot him. And I'm like, nah, let's see if it's a tom, you know, because you haven't caught it. Yeah, I don't want him to shoot that cat. What for? Um? So I kind of talked him out of it. The cat out away, of course. And the other day Bruce is right in the snowmobile and he comes around the corner and there's a podcasting in the road, and he has a gun on him. You know, here's this bobcat and he's like five yards away from it. It moves aside and he rides past it, and then he stops and he sees a pair. There's a second bobcat on a deer kill right below the road, like like ten yards away. So here here's this you know, hound hunter, hunting guide, all this stuff. And he said, there looking at these two bobcats. He's armed, and you know, obviously he doesn't want to shoot him because he hasn't he didn't catch it. Yeah, what's he gonna do with that bobcat? Right? So he comes back, he's like, oh, there's a couple of bobcats up there. We can go turn loose on those and like take a chance at him. Um. But it's just an interesting way to look at it, Like, yeah, I don't want to. Would I want to shoot a line without catching it? Do you think you'll ever shoot in their line? Yeah? I mean I'm sure I will for you know, control stuff for whatever. I just like a hunt, you know, not a big game hunt. Now, I'm not going to really, he's no, you won't. No, I've got no. I'm happy with the lion I've got. Would you do? Are you done? Itch? And know? But I like to, but it's not an itch, you know, what's you're feeling about it? Like like where you at on it? Um? You know, I kind of if I had an itch, I could definitely kind of scratch it by going on that hunt, you know, And definitely seeing that cat, I'd like to go on more. I mean, I've got a couple of friends in Bowsman that are running cats and are you know, sometimes killing them, sometimes not. And I've been invited to go out and I'm gonna try to make that happen, just to go see another line, because again, just seeing a line at thirty yards its special, special, It's crazy, you know. Um, But yeah, I don't know. I mean, yeah, the meats, like you said, the meets kind of a novelty. It's actually great, great meat. I mean we served it Christmas Day at my house in laws there with it. Dude, they loved it. I was I was like really serving it like you know, trepidation, like I don't know, man, And I mean that's the hadn't even been like chopped up. We just took the lid off, the Dutch off and there's my mother in law sticking her fingers and it's like it's like the best pork. Yeah, it was awesome, Like it got gobbled up, like it's really really good eating. You know. But I wonder if that's not part of the reason that like people have that big problem with the wolf in the Mountain Lion because it's just not known as like a common food source. But it's not. It's it's just the food thing is kind of novelty. Like I I like, I think of myself as like I kind of in large measures, like live off dear meat. Yeah, for shere moves elk. I got like it's we are always eating dear meat. So someone say, like, you know, here's this predator. What this predator focuses on is he eats a lot of deer and elk and moves meat like he eats a lot of umulate meat. It would be weird and now and there and I'll have like these little bonus things. But when I sort of like map out my future meals, you know, I just imagine that I'm like a being that consumes venicone. I think it would be even as a hound on her I think it would be strange if somebody was like, did you get your cougar this year the way they do your deer or your elk or whatever, you were like living off cougar meat, that would be really weird. Yeah, definitely don't. I can't imagine I can started living off cougar meat. Even if you could. It's just I just like, you know, I'm a specialist. I guess on prey. But yeah, I've been saying I'll never go again. But see now I have a few bonus points in Montana you need to go. You're curious about that seely Swan area, because that's where I saw my first line. Yeah, I love that area, so you can see. Maybe I'll do me a little lion hunt over there someday. I don't know. You've got tight and that. You know. The nice thing about lion hunting is you don't have to shoot the cat either. You can run cats and tree cats all week and yeah it's not it's a potentially non consumptive hunt. Yeah, I'm pragmatic fellow man like mountain like mountain climbing. I have like a lot of respect for alpinistent. But you know, finding me go out there, going up there just to go out there and say I did it, it's like I'll do that kind of stuff. But it's like like a big motivation for me. It's you know, I'm like a practical guy man, Like just set your goal at getting pictures I could. Yeah, it's different than deer nowk though pictures of them are no fun when you when you got your first lion out? Was it because what? Because you wanted to have a line. How do you want to get a line? Uh? Both. Before I had hounds, I would have like shot a lion if it had walked in front of me while I was deer hunting. That has changed. I wouldn't do that now. Um. But I grew up around hounds, and I knew I wanted hounds. So when I got my first dogs, you know, I moved from the Midwest where you're hunting wreck wounes out here, and obvious choice here is lions. Um. So once I got dogs, I still hadn't killed a lion. Um. Once I got dogs, then I was like, I had to train the dogs, had to do all these other things, and I knew eventually I was going to catch a lion, but it took took a little time. I trade lions the first year. Oh yeah, not easily. It was pretty hard. It was hard training because the dogs were up to it yet, or you weren't. I didn't know anything. I didn't know what I was doing. Um. You know, I had a couple of friends that had been around it, and they helped me some. Um, but I didn't have a finished dog to train Whisper, so I'm you know, without trying to figure out these tracks. The first year, I didn't even have snow machines, so I was like park and walk in with snowshoes until I got a track and start walking with his dog on a leash and try to like pet her when she did things right. And I had a Border Collie trotting along next to me. It was a show or GPS. UM. The first year I did not. The second year I did UM and we actually treat a few cats that way. And I had it from like I said, I had a first head on striking out on snowshoes and getting on, but it's a that's a really really hard way to do it and low success rates. I think I treat you know, one or two that way. UM. I had problem females, which makes sense. They're just more dense, densely populated. UM. And then once you know, I got I picked up a couple more dogs, and Whisper was coming on and got the GPS and I was starting to feel more like a like a legit hound on her after a couple of years. UM, but I think I was in it. I don't know, two years or something, three years before I caught that big tom, And it was kind of a special deal the way it all worked out. So that was your first line, That was the first one I killed. Yeah, I try had treat and released several cats before that, kind of How did you grow up with uh English red ticks and blue ticks that chased coons? Yep, yep, when you were running coons where for price is good? No, no, we made up for that with quantity. Nobody was running dogs. Nobody was really trapping much. I think. Yeah, so you're you know, you're getting ten fifteen bucks a piece or something. Well, if you had a good night, you had a pile of raccoons, Yeah, we got four one year. Yeah that's pretty good. That's a big here. But then you said your dad has now switched dogs. Yeah, he's running beagles now for rabbits. Yep, No, your dad don't hunt, Stepdad. Okay, okay, so stepdad's running beagles he uh yeah, he's like a non consumptive hunter now just runs rabbits all day. He runs rabs with beagles and doesn't shoot the rabbits. Nope, it doesn't even take a gun, which brings us all the way back around to the whole, Like Ronnie Baby the dogs after a while and be like, I'm not hung this guy anymore because they're good dogs. They don't need to catch the rabbit, just like they don't need to chew on it too, you know whatever, Well, they like to chew on it. They like to see it. There, you get to see it. I'm not blaming the dogs. I don't care. I'm just I'm surprised as the dogs after what I learnt, Like, man, you know, their asses off here and no one's doing anything about it. I don't know. I guess they just don't need to they do anything. You want to add, Yeah, I added, I added that Barne I talked about that earlier. I thought that was interesting. You know, the non consumptive rabbit houndsman. Yeah, this is like just the guy that loves his dogs, loves his hounds, loves the chase and the pursuit, and then at the end of the day, it's like load up, no cleaning, let's go. Yeah, I guess he's chicken breasts. Yeah, it's easy to get permission on private property too. Don't have a gun and you got a dog, that's like big enough you put it into purse. You're not that threatening. No, you're not. You're not. You're not dipping into the game. Pop. They're like standing around in the field and letting the dogs work contail permissions. We've had, um, you know, back home in Michigan, we had like really good luck getting contentail permissions. Yeah, you never like really like wanting for contail spots because you're hunting the winter. No one's out after dear more and more. People don't really care about small game, right, Yeah, if you can do it during the off season for the big game stuff, nobody, nobody's gonna get to People always let us out rabbits. Not always, but we had a lot of places not rabbits. You got any eighth final concluding thoughts you want to add, Park, I can just add a little bit to mine, please. I don't feel like now that we did that hunt, I'm actually more interested in do anyone because I sort of had my um, you know, my question not not on your questions, but just I had these like even just explaining that chase part, you know that like the dogs aren't actually chasing the line from most of the chase. Yeah, that was a real sticking point for you. Yeah, you were hung up on that for a long time. Well, I feel like because when you talk to people, people just don't understand. They think the lions, I'll do all this evasive act or he's doing all this evasive activity and like trying to like shake the dogs. And why you hear that too. You hear that from you know, the groups about Chase is the cat to exhaustion, toil, they can't go any further than it climbs the tree, And that's not really accurate. We rarely have cats panting, even they're just standing there our cameraman. We're like, we kind of brought that up for the first time. They were like, yeah, that's what happens. Like, No, he's got all these tricks and he's crossing and recrossing creeks to lose the dogs where the red fern grows, that kind of stuff. Like. But now that that's been cleared up and I'm not really gray about how it all goes down, and the fact that we ended up having such a you know, real pursuit like hunt in the end where it was me, Corey, you and Bruce, I mean, for fall on down the hill. I mean I watched Corey rolled ten yards down the hill and somehow protect his camera but you know, fully lathered up and sweat, you know. And we're like halfway through and Bruce looks at all of us, He's like, every here, all right, we gotta really turn it up happening, you know. We're like, man, you know, and we had this real pursuit. Were at the end You're just like, you know, yeah, like, I mean, it's wild and um just because again and everybody in their mind has this idea that some oh boy just gets out of the pig on truck and walks ten feet into the woods and he's like, oh they're lying, and just wasn't like that, you know, And so um, yeah, I do see myself at some point killing what, you know, But I'm not like I should just go ahead and do it right now because I have the opportunity, you know. Yeah, at this point, I think I've spent we're close to Bart obviously like a like a percent of Bart's time, but I've spent or teen or fifteen days following lion hounds, and um caught a line was there for a lion to be caught? And I through all that. If you were to like put my um, you know, if you were to put my appreciation for what goes into a lion hunt on this sort of graph, it would be this like this, like lion that goes up at a forty five degree angle, like higher and higher and higher for my appreciation for lion hunters in lion hunting, um just like a steady increase. I never saw any aspect of it, maybe like suspicious of it or be like you know, it really is just not fair. I mean it's like it's it is a if you're looking at like a challenge thing, uh skill set mhm. It mad be different too if you weren't able to hire a guide to do it. I mean, thank god. I mean think about it. If it had to be that way, if like when you got a tag or you wanted to go kill a lion, you weren't allowed to do it with a guide, you had to like do it on your own. Maybe no freaking lions getting killed, like you said it took you. Sure you treat a couple that first year, but like think about the effort Washington grab a couple of dogs, yeah, and to stay like Washington where you don't have hound hunting for for lions, they basically giveaway lin tags everyone that buys a deer was it five bucks? Yeah? Because you know and in the states where they in states where you have hound's been in a hound hunting there, you're not like like encouraged to go get your lion thing. In Colorado, you got pass the test to get a lion tag. I can get behind that. I think you should be able to sex a lion before you are able to go out and hunt them. I mean that's the that's the beauty of the quota system, right. You can you can say there's many females as many males if you wanted to, You could even assign age classes per unit, and you can really manage that with a a lot of precision. Yeah, that's the point we could bring up real quickly is that Washington went from a Holland season outlining honeywood dogs. So now they just give away what like five bucks for the tag whatever, and a lot of lines are getting killed, all like the wrong lines were getting killed. And didn't she say that there's like a group of houndsman now that are starting to organize to um, We've tried that a few times without a lot of success. But you know there are people, um behind it politically, Democrats behind it, politically Steve Back, Oh, yeah, totally, yeah, it's yeah. Now they we've tried that some Washington's a weird spot because they've, like I said, they've made hound hunting illegal. Um. As a result, they've really increased the number of hound or of cougar permits, and there's actually more cougars being killed now than before. But the age, class and sex has changed. So it used to be like from five I think it was you know, female, uh we're killed. Um, and now it's up like sixty of the cats killed or females, which really impacts the population more. You know, they're they're there, they're the breeding portion of the population. They're important. And you call those guys boot hunters, the boot hunters that dog hunters, right, yeah, you know, yeah, I've read a lot about it, you know this all the aspects of lines and stuff, and talk a lot of people about it, but it's like, um, it's not something that you're gonna like really quickly get a grasp on ideas of mountain lion hunting mountain lion management. The difference is how different states vi lions. Just from my perspective right now, I think that, like I really like the systems of manageing them for longevity as a big game animal. YEP. I think if you can remove yourself from sort of this emotional idea about what hounds and lions do and just manage them like a big game animal, like like Montana does a great job of that. Um, we need this number of cougars killed, um, and remove yourself again from that sort of individual idea of the cat and think about the population. Um. We don't care how it happens, but we need you know, ten males and ten females killed from this unit. Go take care of it. Um. That that would be a more wise way to manage them. Yeah, And they're still running targeted predator control, Like if you've got a lion, it's killing livestock. There's a lot of ways in which they go after and remove that specific animal, depending on outside of any kind of season structure. That big cat that attacked me got killed last week by for attacking goats no ship. Yeah, yeah, with the collar on him. With the collar on him, they got that, so he's dead though he got tangled up with some goats. He killed five goats and like two or three days and they called another houndsman to come in and take care of it, and he went into kill this cat. It turned out to be the big mean cat and it wooden tree, and it started after him and he ended up shooting it right in the point of the nose, basically at point blank range, as it was like coming at him. Did you get your collar back? The state got the collar back? How far was it from where you guys put the collar on? It? Pretty close within you know, four or five miles no ship. Yeah, he's dead. Yeah, where did you get the school? Yep, I'm gonna you don't want to know it. I've got it. You want to be a goat killer? Yep? Yeah, just a short time after the callering. Five goats in a couple of days, so he was killing him at a faster raith than he was able to eat him. Yeah, he's probably squirreling him away somewhere, sticking him on her logs and yah huh, all right, man, Bart wants to get thanks for joining us. Yeah, anytimes, I don't know. You know, we're gonna remember the last time you were on. I was like you have to come back and talk about Lions. I don't know what we're gonna have to have you out of things. I don't know what we're gonna talk about that. It'll be something. Thank you. Yeah, of course