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CHAPTER 15. JONES ON COUGARS
The mountain lion, or cougar, of our Rocky Mountain region, is nothing more nor less
than the panther.
He is a little different in shape, color and size, which vary according to his
environment. The panther of the Rockies is usually
light, taking the grayish hue of the rocks.
He is stockier and heavier of build, and stronger of limb than the Eastern species,
which difference comes from climbing mountains and springing down the cliffs
after his prey.
In regions accessible to man, or where man is encountered even rarely, the cougar is
exceedingly shy, seldom or never venturing from cover during the day.
He spends the hours of daylight high on the most rugged cliffs, sleeping and basking in
the sunshine, and watching with wonderfully keen sight the valleys below.
His hearing equals his sight, and if danger threatens, he always hears it in time to
skulk away unseen.
At night he steals down the mountain side toward deer or elk he has located during
the day. Keeping to the lowest ravines and thickets,
he creeps upon his prey.
His cunning and ferocity are keener and more savage in proportion to the length of
time he has been without food.
As he grows hungrier and thinner, his skill and fierce strategy correspondingly
increase.
A well-fed cougar will creep upon and secure only about one in seven of the deer,
elk, antelope or mountain sheep that he stalks.
But a starving cougar is another animal.
He creeps like a snake, is as sure on the scent as a vulture, makes no more noise
than a shadow, and he hides behind a stone or bush that would scarcely conceal a
rabbit.
Then he springs with terrific force, and intensity of purpose, and seldom fails to
reach his victim, and once the claws of a starved lion touch flesh, they never let
go.
A cougar seldom pursues his quarry after he has leaped and missed, either from disgust
or failure, or knowledge that a second attempt would be futile.
The animal making the easiest prey for the cougar is the elk.
About every other elk attacked falls a victim.
Deer are more fortunate, the ratio being one dead to five leaped at.
The antelope, living on the lowlands or upland meadows, escapes nine times out of
ten; and the mountain sheep, or bighorn, seldom falls to the onslaught of his enemy.
Once the lion gets a hold with the great forepaw, every movement of the struggling
prey sinks the sharp, hooked claws deeper.
Then as quickly as is possible, the lion fastens his teeth in the throat of his prey
and grips till it is dead. In this way elk have carried lions for many
rods.
The lion seldom tears the skin of the neck, and never, as is generally supposed, sucks
the blood of its victim; but he cuts into the side, just behind the foreshoulder, and
eats the liver first.
He rolls the skin back as neatly and tightly as a person could do it.
When he has gorged himself, he drags the carcass into a ravine or dense thicket, and
rakes leaves, sticks or dirt over it to hide it from other animals.
Usually he returns to his cache on the second night, and after that the frequency
of his visits depends on the supply of fresh prey.
In remote regions, unfrequented by man, the lion will guard his cache from coyote and
buzzards. In sex there are about five female lions to
one male.
This is caused by the jealous and vicious disposition of the male.
It is a fact that the old Toms kill every young lion they can catch.
Both male and female of the litter suffer alike until after weaning time, and then
only the males. In this matter wise animal logic is
displayed by the Toms.
The domestic cat, to some extent, possesses the same trait.
If the litter is destroyed, the mating time is sure to come about regardless of the
season.
Thus this savage trait of the lions prevents overproduction, and breeds a hardy
and intrepid race.
If by chance or that cardinal feature of animal life--the survival of the fittest--a
young male lion escapes to the weaning time, even after that he is persecuted.
Young male lions have been killed and found to have had their flesh beaten until it was
a mass of bruises and undoubtedly it had been the work of an old Tom.
Moreover, old males and females have been killed, and found to be in the same bruised
condition.
A feature, and a conclusive one, is the fact that invariably the female is suckling
her young at this period, and sustains the bruises in desperately defending her
litter.
It is astonishing how cunning, wise and faithful an old lioness is.
She seldom leaves her kittens.
From the time they are six weeks old she takes them out to train them for the
battles of life, and the struggle continues from birth to death.
A lion hardly ever dies naturally.
As soon as night descends, the lioness stealthily stalks forth, and because of her
little ones, takes very short steps. The cubs follow, stepping in their mother's
tracks.
When she crouches for game, each little lion crouches also, and each one remains
perfectly still until she springs, or signals them to come.
If she secures the prey, they all gorge themselves.
After the feast the mother takes her back trail, stepping in the tracks she made
coming down the mountain.
And the cubs are very careful to follow suit, and not to leave marks of their trail
in the soft snow.
No doubt this habit is practiced to keep their deadly enemies in ignorance of their
existence. The old Toms and white hunters are their
only foes.
Indians never kill a lion. This trick of the lions has fooled many a
hunter, concerning not only the direction, but particularly the number.
The only successful way to hunt lions is with trained dogs.
A good hound can trail them for several hours after the tracks have been made, and
on a cloudy or wet day can hold the scent much longer.
In snow the hound can trail for three or four days after the track has been made.
When Jones was game warden of the Yellowstone National Park, he had
unexampled opportunities to hunt cougars and learn their habits.
All the cougars in that region of the Rockies made a rendezvous of the game
preserve.
Jones soon procured a pack of hounds, but as they had been trained to run deer, foxes
and coyotes he had great trouble.
They would break on the trail of these animals, and also on elk and antelope just
when this was farthest from his wish. He soon realized that to train the hounds
was a sore task.
When they refused to come back at his call, he stung them with fine shot, and in this
manner taught obedience. But obedience was not enough; the hounds
must know how to follow and tree a lion.
With this in mind, Jones decided to catch a lion alive and give his dogs practical
lessons.
A few days after reaching this decision, he discovered the tracks of two lions in the
neighborhood of Mt. Everett. The hounds were put on the trail and
followed it into an abandoned coal shaft.
Jones recognized this as his opportunity, and taking his lasso and an extra rope, he
crawled into the hole. Not fifteen feet from the opening sat one
of the cougars, snarling and spitting.
Jones promptly lassoed it, passed his end of the lasso round a side prop of the
shaft, and out to the soldiers who had followed him.
Instructing them not to pull till he called, he cautiously began to crawl by the
cougar, with the intention of getting farther back and roping its hind leg, so as
to prevent disaster when the soldiers pulled it out.
He accomplished this, not without some uneasiness in regard to the second lion,
and giving the word to his companions, soon had his captive hauled from the shaft and
tied so tightly it could not move.
Jones took the cougar and his hounds to an open place in the park, where there were
trees, and prepared for a chase. Loosing the lion, he held his hounds back a
moment, then let them go.
Within one hundred yards the cougar climbed a tree, and the dogs saw the performance.
Taking a forked stick, Jones mounted up to the cougar, caught it under the jaw with
the stick, and pushed it out.
There was a fight, a scramble, and the cougar dashed off to run up another tree.
In this manner, he soon trained his hounds to the pink of perfection.
Jones discovered, while in the park, that the cougar is king of all the beasts of
North America. Even a grizzly dashed away in great haste
when a cougar made his appearance.
At the road camp, near Mt. Washburn, during the fall of 1904, the bears, grizzlies and
others, were always hanging round the cook tent.
There were cougars also, and almost every evening, about dusk, a big fellow would
come parading past the tent. The bears would grunt furiously and scamper
in every direction.
It was easy to tell when a cougar was in the neighborhood, by the peculiar grunts
and snorts of the bears, and the sharp, distinct, alarmed yelps of coyotes.
A lion would just as lief kill a coyote as any other animal and he would devour it,
too.
As to the fighting of cougars and grizzlies, that was a mooted question, with
the credit on the side of the former.
The story of the doings of cougars, as told in the snow, was intensely fascinating and
tragic!
How they stalked deer and elk, crept to within springing distance, then crouched
flat to leap, was as easy to read as if it had been told in print.
The leaps and bounds were beyond belief.
The longest leap on a level measured eighteen and one-half feet.
Jones trailed a half-grown cougar, which in turn was trailing a big elk.
He found where the cougar had struck his game, had clung for many rods, to be dashed
off by the low limb of a spruce tree.
The imprint of the body of the cougar was a foot deep in the snow; blood and tufts of
hair covered the place. But there was no sign of the cougar
renewing the chase.
In rare cases cougars would refuse to run, or take to trees.
One day Jones followed the hounds, eight in number, to come on a huge Tom holding the
whole pack at bay.
He walked to and fro, lashing his tail from side to side, and when Jones dashed up, he
coolly climbed a tree. Jones shot the cougar, which, in falling,
struck one of the hounds, crippling him.
This hound would never approach a tree after this incident, believing probably
that the cougar had sprung upon him. Usually the hounds chased their quarry into
a tree long before Jones rode up.
It was always desirable to kill the animal with the first shot.
If the cougar was wounded, and fell or jumped among the dogs, there was sure to be
a terrible fight, and the best dogs always received serious injuries, if they were not
killed outright.
The lion would seize a hound, pull him close, and bite him in the brain.
Jones asserted that a cougar would usually run from a hunter, but that this feature
was not to be relied upon.
And a wounded cougar was as dangerous as a tiger.
In his hunts Jones carried a shotgun, and shells loaded with ball for the cougar, and
others loaded with fine shot for the hounds.
One day, about ten miles from the camp, the hounds took a trail and ran rapidly, as
there were only a few inches of snow.
Jones found a large lion had taken refuge in a tree that had fallen against another,
and aiming at the shoulder of the beast, he fired both barrels.
The cougar made no sign he had been hit.
Jones reloaded and fired at the head. The old fellow growled fiercely, turned in
the tree and walked down head first, something he would not have been able to do
had the tree been upright.
The hounds were ready for him, but wisely attacked in the rear.
Realizing he had been shooting fine shot at the animal, Jones began a hurried search
for a shell loaded with ball.
The lion made for him, compelling him to dodge behind trees.
Even though the hounds kept nipping the cougar, the persistent fellow still pursued
the hunter.
At last Jones found the right shell, just as the cougar reached for him.
Major, the leader of the hounds, darted bravely in, and grasped the leg of the
beast just in the nick of time.
This enabled Jones to take aim and fire at close range, which ended the fight.
Upon examination, it was discovered the cougar had been half-blinded by the fine
shot, which accounted for the ineffectual attempts he had made to catch Jones.
The mountain lion rarely attacks a human being for the purpose of eating.
When hungry he will often follow the tracks of people, and under favorable
circumstances may ambush them.
In the park where game is plentiful, no one has ever known a cougar to follow the trail
of a person; but outside the park lions have been known to follow hunters, and
particularly stalk little children.
The Davis family, living a few miles north of the park, have had children pursued to
the very doors of their cabin. And other families relate similar
experiences.
Jones heard of only one fatality, but he believes that if the children were left
alone in the woods, the cougars would creep closer and closer, and when assured there
was no danger, would spring to kill.
Jones never heard the cry of a cougar in the National Park, which strange
circumstance, considering the great number of the animals there, he believed to be on
account of the abundance of game.
But he had heard it when a boy in Illinois, and when a man all over the West, and the
cry was always the same, weird and wild, like the scream of a terrified woman.
He did not understand the significance of the cry, unless it meant hunger, or the
wailing mourn of a lioness for her murdered cubs.
The destructiveness of this savage species was murderous.
Jones came upon one old Tom's den, where there was a pile of nineteen elk, mostly
yearlings.
Only five or six had been eaten. Jones hunted this old fellow for months,
and found that the lion killed on the average three animals a week.
The hounds got him up at length, and chased him to the Yellowstone River, which he swam
at a point impassable for man or horse.
One of the dogs, a giant bloodhound named Jack, swam the swift channel, kept on after
the lion, but never returned.
All cougars have their peculiar traits and habits, the same as other creatures, and
all old Toms have strongly marked characteristics, but this one was the most
destructive cougar Jones ever knew.
During Jones's short sojourn as warden in the park, he captured numerous cougars
alive, and killed seventy-two.