The Hunt Begins: Wander and Search
The rain stopped at about three in the morning and by the time we were eating breakfast (quarter past five or so) white flakes were spitting out of the black pre-dawn sky and into the wash of the porch light. First day of Cougar season 2021-2022. The remaining four inches of snow that hadn’t melted in the rain of the day and night before had a light crust over the top of it, not enough that a cat could walk on top thankfully, those are some of the worst conditions for this line of sportsmanship. Unlike bear season where the hounds will scent and strike a bear our main tactic is to run the snowy roads until we cut a track and when there’s a crust thick enough for an elk to walk on (as it was for a few days last year) finding the signs of their passage is reduced to squinting for claw marks or the shallow indent of a single toe.
But today those concerns are nothing more than frustrating memories, anything crossing a road today will be clear as neon.
Stocked up on coffee we head out. Yesterday one of my brothers found a cat track out hiking and we were able to trace it down across the valley and up the other side just in time for the hunters arrival.
We split up, me in my toyota, Chris (the other guide) on a four-wheeler and the outfitter up a third road to cover as much ground as possible. Grey dawn is just starting to break but under the trees a lightbar is a handy thing to have. My tires crunch through the frozen rutts of the day before, it’s the ninth day of December the snow has been slow to come. Usually we’ll have a foot or better by this point but God must have decided we could use the extra time without it, that or the nanoplastics are affecting the weather. We’ll be using snowmobiles by weeks end so best enjoy a heated pickup cab while I can.
Deer and elk tracks bounce back and forth across the road, they can feel the winter coming and are reluctantly, stubbornly, starting their migration down from the mountains to the lower regions. Some of them will stay as long as possible, wallowing across the mountainside in two or more feet of snow before finally giving in and moving on, leaving the moose as the only representatives of the deer species on the terrain. They haunt the snow covered roads and ridges like long legged, bad tempered ghosts, eating twigs and brush until the winter relents and the world is green again. If an animal were to capture the stubborn spirit of Idaho they would strike nearest.
The snow comes in pulsing flurries, building in intensity and slackening off, small flakes more hail than snow then fluffing and fattening to lazy drifting things like feathers in the blue morning air.
My radio pops and a voice scratches through the static, they’ve found the track going up the mountain. I bahaja my pickup in a sliding circle, flinging snow with the tires and backtrack to meet them.
Six miles later we unload the side-by-side and four wheeler, each with a dog box strapped to the back and two dogs in each. We run Plott Hounds, a gritty, self-confident but gentle breed of mutt descended in part from the hounds of medieval Germany. Their bloodline mixed and perfected in the hunting grounds of North Carolina and brought to their full potential here in Idaho.
We buzz up the road two CB markers then dive behind a gate into the miles-long maze of old logging roads turned ATV trails, towards Chris and the tracks he’s found. We’re on top of the mountain here, or at least one of the mountain’s long descending ridges, the trees have been clear cut and the wind whipps over the open ground driving the snow, once again more ice ball than snow flake, into any exposed skin, burning like cold lasers. I drive in front, breaking a trail through the snow for the Outfitter and hunter in the lower riding side-by-side. Seven inches of snow are supposed to fall tonight. We might even be using those snowmobiles by tomorrow.
We cut across the tracks of another cat, half filled with snow, zig-zagging across the road and down into the next canyon, they’ve been moving, yesterday anyways. Chris is waiting for us on the four wheeler, his hood drawn up against the blowing flakes. The tracks look big, I can fit my fist in them with some room to spare, even melted out as they are by the previous rain, it looks to be a decent size.
The frozen tracks drop down the northeastern side of the mountain so we network the roads and head that direction, watching the sheen of the snow for the telltale pattern of craters that would mark it’s passing. The track is cold, the scent rained out, but we may be able to warm it up before the day is through. We loop our way through brush strewn clearcuts down the slope and back towards the island of timber the tracks had gone into. There’s plenty of prey for it still here, elk, deer and moose all have left evidence in the clear ledger of the snow.
One test of your grit is to see how cold your thumb can get running the throttle on a four wheeler before you give into the painful desire for warmth and stop to hold your hands under the warm air of the exhaust. Snowmobiles have hand and thumb warmers but not so often ATVs and on days like this the cold can get to you unless you’re careful about sealing your gloves into your coat sleeves. Something I’ve neglected to do. I have yet to get frostbite but I have been within a few blocks of it.
The road dead ends near the timber edge, and I gratefully pull my gloves off and warm my hands on the carbon fumes of exploded dinosaurs.
The cat’s tracks are thirty yards off the road’s end and looking no fresher than they did above. We decide to split again and make a loop round the island of timber, the others going down and coming up from the bottom, me up and down from above, with any luck catching the fresh track somewhere before we meet on the road. Luck has other ideas and an hour and a half and a dozen snowbursts later we’re back here at the dead end.
We unload two of the dogs, an old hound with a grey face and a young male with a stretched out look of speed. Once the GPS tracking collars have found their satellites we rig them up and march over the hill, if there’s enough scent for them to follow good and well enough, otherwise we’ll walk it out best we can until the track warms up or the day gets too late.
They stuff their noses in the half snowed-in tracks, tugging against their leashes toward the tree line, we set them loose and they trot off on a twisting path through the timber, not barking yet, sniffing hard at the tracks and trying to follow a thread of smell in the dry, icy snow. They lose it. We all spread out, looking to find the tracks again, the Outfitter finds them climbing up the hill towards a spread of bare brush and calls the dogs over. One, the younger named Sur (Short for Survivor, he was the only puppy from his litter that didn’t die of parvo) starts to bark, the scent is stronger out here on open ground away from the fallen snow of the trees.
They trot a weavign track up the hillside, noses working, buried in the tracks and blowing up jets of snow when they exhale. Barking sporadically they flounder up towards a thirty foot rock outcropping, their barking getting louder and more enthusiastic. We nearly run up the hill, hoping the cougar is laying in a crevice in the stone but the only thing perched there is Sur barking at the rock wall. The grey faced hound, T, (named for the white mark on her chest) is on top of the rocks, sniffing and searching for the lost trail. We find the tracks again, winding down into the timber and follow, picking up the trail when the dogs lose it under the trees where the bare ground of the day before has been snowed over.
In mental habits the Mountain lion is similar to your run-of-the-mill cat, they meander aimlessly around if they don’t have anyplace particularly pressing to be and this one is no exception. It wanders down the mountain, the dogs losing and refinding its way. Once more they pick up excitement and speed, barking down the hillside and rearing up against a cedar tree, staring up into its branches like they’ve treed the cougar there. A slick tree, they got excited and overshot the scent, one of them convincing the other it climbed there. We find where they lost the track and follow it further down the mountain.
We need wetter snow to hold the scent, or just more of it, or less rain to have fallen last night, or best of all a fresher track. But if wishes were horses we’d all be eating steak.
For another hour we try to follow but the tracks finally disappear and the early winter nightfall is already two hours away. Better luck tomorrow then, if God wills it. We have the area in a loop, the cat is in here somewhere and when he leaves and crosses that border we’ll find him.
