Snow has fallen heavy through the night, nearly a foot, light and fine like powdered crystal, the trees wear it heavily and a thick silence hangs over the face of the forest. The world is reborn, transformed and glowing, its beauty slowly revealed as the world fades from black to grey to the muted, cold colors of winter morning as the sun rises behind the white dome of the sky. Winter has come over the Idaho forest settling in like a watchful spirit. 

The new snow has us excited, no squinting our way through drippings from the trees today, any cougar passing through will plow a trench in this stuff. We split up with the pickups again, our plan is to go back to the loop we made yesterday but with snow like this it would nearly be a sin not to run a few closer roads first. 

We’re the first ones out today, no tracks from hunters or snowmobilers in front of us. Ours are the pioneering ruts on this blank white canvass. 4-low, third gear, window rolled down, heater burning, black mug of french pressed coffee, watching the snow for tracks and trenches. 

A few deer have ventured forth since the bulk of the storm passed, flakes are still falling fat and lazy in unambitious flurries. I slip and slide and roll my steering wheel to keep from sluffing into the ditch in some of the steeper parts of the road, jamming on my brakes and backing up to look closer at any tracks I shoot past. More deer, a few elk, better to double check than mis out. Sometimes, in deeper snow, mountain lions will walk in the tracks of other animals where a trail is already broke, it gets trickier later in the season especially in some of the backcountry areas thick with elk. I’ve gone a few miles before, inching along on the snowmobile, eyes glued to the road and into every crossing set of tracks.  

I’m singing the verses of the Colter Wall song that’s stuck in my head when a new thread crosses the road. Wide holes among the deep, sharp tracks of the elk, there’s a shallow dragging trench connecting them. Cougar tracks or I’m a Californian. I hop out and stomp back to look, cougar tracks sure enough, good sized, maybe just a bit bigger than the ones yesterday, there’s some snow in them as well but not much, only a few hours old. 

I Text the Outfitter then radio him, tell him roughly where they’re at and that I’m gonna keep going up the road to see if they crossed back. He has the hounds anyway so it will give me something to do until they get here. The snow gets deeper as I wind up the mountain, my bumper just skimming it when I reach a saddle and turn around. There were a few tracks but so full of snow to be nothing more than divots in it’s smooth skin. Probably a cat the one, the pattern looked right.

They’re waiting at the tracks when I return, unloading dogs and synching satellite collars. Excitement undercuts the air like a subtle knife, with the snow a dry powder as it is they might have a hard time following the scent. The wetter the snow the better the scent will hold but it’s not even eight in the morning yet, we have a whole day ahead to sort this out. 

T, the grey faced old hound, can smell it and follows off over the road, Sur falls in behind her, barking nervously, wanting to run like he does in bear season but the snow pushes back on him. He flounders after T, overshooting her and spinning out of the track, both of them arcing out and around back to the road, then across it and up the opposite side, lost and trying to refind the trail. We catch them and drag them back to it and Chris and the Outfitter take off with them while me and the hunter wait in the road. 

Time for more coffee then, we watch their progress on the GPS, I pour a still hot brew of America’s favorite drug into my mug and wait. We talk as I sip my coffee, the hunter has his gun and me my backpack, ready to go at a moment’s notice. Then the dogs start up, their barking softened by the snow but still clear in the morning air. They’re striking out to our left and up, loud, a roar almost like they’re looking at it. 

We found out later that they’d kept the dogs on leashes out across the river bottom then when they started tugging at them and whining after the track, as the scent got stronger. They’d let them go and they had worked up the river to where the cat had been tucked away under thick tree branches, sleeping, probably there when we had first parked. They saw the bare patch of melted snow after the dogs had lined up and rolled out, they were on the freshest possible trail today. 

Back at the truck we watch them on the foggy Garmin screen, for some reason this GPS only has Sur’s collar programmed into it as well as tracking the Outfitter’s handheld. The hounds loop up through the timber hard on the cat’s trail. It crests the top of the ridge and drops back towards Chris and the Outfitter, making dead at them until it turns and cuts across fifty yards from their position. They can hear it skimming through the snow ahead of the hounds.

It sidelines up a small draw, the hounds roaring behind it then the snowscape grows quiet for just a moment. The GPS buzzes, the small icon of a running dog on the screen has changed to a dog reared up against a tree. 

“I have treeing switches going off.” the Outfitters voice says through the radio.

“Yep, me too. Gonna start heading your way.”

I tell the hunter to go on ahead as I lock up my pickup in case any light fingered opportunists come along. 

The roar of the treed hounds is dulled and muffled, a few flakes fall, the world is quiet. We strike out across the river bottom, through the trees, over the slow flowing streams and across the meadows thick with stillness. It’s about two hundred yards up to the tree, a short walk compared to many of the treks we’ve had before. There’s been a few trees where the closest we were able to get was a mile, and that measured without consideration of the rolling terrain. Other times we’ve had to scale what amounts to a cliff to get to the dogs or on really lucky days even two.  This hike is barely more than an invigorating stroll.

The cougar is clamped thirty feet up in a too-small cedar tree, awkwardly clinging to the branches and looking pissed. The Outfitter and Chris are grinning up at it when I get there, encouraging the dogs and taking pictures with their phones. Most times a cat will choose a larger tree, something with bigger branches and more room to stretch out and glare down at the humans and hounds disturbing its mountainside life but in a fit of poor decision making this one must have taken the first tree handy. It’s up so high in the narrow tree that it’s top is leaning over just slightly. It peers down at us through the thick cedar branches that hide it’s powerfully built body. It’s gonna be tough to get a clean shot at this one.  

From the tracks it looked like a tom, the males have large rounded toes and the females more pointed but here in the tree it looks strange. The head seems large and solid enough, the coat is beautiful and its paws are huge but its chest looks small, not as filled out, almost like its a younger tom. Estimating the size of any cat in a tree can be an art all in itself but this one is evading our guesses, seeming bigger when we decide its smaller and smaller when we decide its bigger. 

“What do you think?” The Outfitter asks me with a sideways glance.

It’s decent,” I say noncommittally, bending back to look at it, its size fluctuates in my mind again. “Probably around three of four years old.” It’s more question than statement, he nods. It’s really up to the hunter. 

The cat is growing restless, it fidgets and moves on the thin branches, trying to find a comfortable position, pausing to glare down with a half open mouth and snarling at us from time to time. Finally its annoyance at the small cedar crescendos, it draws itself together and springs out with an arching, twisting leap landing on the trunk of a large white fir. It scrambles up and stands on the firs branches bending it’s body round the tree in a U-shape, looking down at us still pissed. 

The hunter is watching it, going back and forth in his mind, trying to weigh its size, this is only the second day of the hunt and there’s a good chance we could find a bigger one yet. But he doesn’t want to pass this one up and not end up seeing another…

While he’s deliberating the cat jumps again, into another small cedar tree, raining a small blizzard of snow down from its branches. The hounds go crazy, barking with new vigor every time the cougar moves. The hunter had his phone out and was videoing the last jump, he plays it back slowly, dragging the progress bar from frame to frame trying to get a good look at it mid-leap. A sleek powerful body is shown by the screen, muscles stretched out and rippling.  

“It’s a nice one,” the Outfitter says. 

Its new perch is nearly as bad as the first and it gathers itself together for one final leap, further than any it’s made yet. The supple trunk and branches of the tree don’t provide much for a launchpad but somehow, almost seeming to defy gravity, it makes the last jump and lands on a second and final white fir tree. Darting up its side and into the thicker branches finally getting a comfortable position. 

We duck back and forth, trying to find a clear window through the branches that line up with its vitals. Chris finds one higher back on the ridge, we can see it lying across the branches, quartering towards us secure and almost smug, it’s found its perch and it ain’t coming down. 

We tie the dogs back with leashes, they’re still staring up and barking enthusiastically, the hunter unslings his gun and gets set up for the shot. I stand back and get a good place to watch.

The hunter and the Outfitter are talking, he points up at the cat, gesturing, explaining the best placement for his shot. The hunter nods and settles back, his muscles relaxing and tightening in that old familiar way, focusing, holding his breath. 

The roaring “CRACK!” the dogs go silent, watching, they’re always quiet after the shot, a brief moment of quiet for a passing life, or just trying to shake the roar of the gun out of their head ears. I can hear the branches breaking in the tree, see them moving, the lion falls into the snow almost immediately bouncing up and running down the hill, the last burst of energy, the final spasm of muscles. It crumples mid run into the snow, sliding sideways and falls still, eyes filming over in death. 

It’s a beautiful beast. One of God’s own magnificent creations and it’s died well. 

Sure that it’s dead we roll it over and pull it out from under the tree, we were wrong, it’s not a younger tom but a female.

“Guys look at this!” The Outfitter sounds surprised, he’s opened the cat’s mouth revealing worn, ivory teeth, the upper canines are broken and ground halfway down to the gumline, the black ends of their nerves two painful looking dots in the yellow. Not a young tom at all then, an old female, well past its prime with only a few more starving winters in it at the best.

“She’s probably eighteen or twenty years old, this was a good cat to take out of here, it’s way past the age of having kittens, all it was doing was killing.” The Outfitter holds its mouth open and takes a picture of the worn teeth. “Crazy.” he says. 

That also explains why it was throwing us through such a loop when we were trying to size it up, it was on the decline, its fur is still sleek and healthy but body shrunken with age inside it, we pull and tug it over to a log for pictures and when we do we can see just how loose the skin is, it stands in a tall ridge on it’s back, like the handles of an under packed suitcase. Later in the season (February and March) it would have stunk from the scavangend carcasses it would be eating. In the shape it’s in, kills would be hard, there was one killed a few years ago, later in the season like that, teeth worn down, skin and bone, chewing on a frozen elk hide to stay alive. 

This was a good one to harvest, she won’t have to face the slow gnawing of starvation, and maybe a yearling elk or two was saved in the bargain. 

A good hunt, we get our pictures, round up the dogs and head home. Snow is falling again, we leave the forest once more to its silence.