Snowshoes are a transcendent invention, rising high above the sum of their parts and second only to grilled cheese sandwiches in poetic simplicity. Like grilled cheese you don’t fully appreciate them until they aren’t there. On this fourth day of January year of our Lord 2022 we don’t have flying cars, but we do have near three foot of powder snow, a 1200 yard hike and no snowshoes, they’re about seven miles behind the deep trench of our snowmobile tracks, back where the hounds and hunter are waiting to see what our hike turns up. To our right lies an expanse of roadless timber that feels bigger than it actually is, we’ve skirted round it on three sides, tracing over the roads with our machines, nearly a complete noose, all that remains is this final 600 yard stretch of timber to complete the symbol of death. 

Last evening, as the snow was picking up we found the fresh tracks of a decent sized mountain lion going into this patch of forest, it was too near nightfall to turn loose so we ran the last few roads as the light faded to put it in a large loop we could dissect the next day. It hasn’t come out and unless it’s passed through this 600 yard neck of timber I’ll be taking the two hounds, a set of snowshoes and hiking in after it. 

Squinting against the sun we wade our way toward the tree line, me and the other guide, Henry, an out of stater who likes to wreck snowmobiles and talk about hunting. Once we’re under the trees walking is a little easier, I’m only sinking to my knees instead of my waist.  We zig-zag our way down the ridge, winding under the trees, staying in the shallow snow and wishing for those snowshoes. Through the blanket of winter there’s evidence of the ancients here, overgrown logging roads and skid trails and steam donkey trenches, traces of the lumberjacks of long ago. The trees are tall and mature and the cycle will soon repeat, they’re slated to cut this stand in the next few years.

There’s glimpses of clear light through the trees below and in a few minutes we emerge from the timberline in the top of the clearcut. The circuit is complete, the forest has been surrounded and the only fresh tracks we’ve found were from that most dangerous of North American mammals, the moose. We can see our earlier snowmobile tracks below and nothing between here and there but clear unblemished snow.  

We trudge back up the hill discussing strategies. The terrain isn’t too bad here, compared to a lot of the area around it, a rolling ridge stretching out and down and hemmed on all sides by steep draws maturing into canyons as they flow south. The cat is somewhere in these trees, bedded down or roaming and about to cross out and leave its tracks over our own.   

 The haze of clouds in the sky has all but burned off and the day is bright as buttered diamonds. Squinting, we mount up and head back to the hounds and the hunter. 

Snowmobiles have come a long ways in twenty years, I’ve grown up ridding them, I can remember getting the old Articat Jag stuck when I was eight or nine and spending a good hour digging it out, I’ve worked on them, toed them, cleaned them and ridden them into stupid places. From the old Phazers to the Yamaha 300s and 1000s. Starting about four years ago The Outfitter started selling off his older two-stroke machines and upgrading to the newer four strokes. Those old machines would have burrowed through this powdered snow like a sandworm but these float on top like unwieldy jet skis.  

We skim and skip and weave our way back, trying to keep in our tracks from before and lay down a good trail should we come this way again, but the snow and the machines fight our direction. You have to steer with weight more than the skis in this stuff, sometimes it’s even easier to turn to the opposite and lean into your turn, the friction from the skis steering you like a rudder on the ocean. 

Tossed by the powder, down to the ice coated main road then over the snow-berm again and we’re back. The hunter, Tim, looks at us excitedly, wondering what we’ve found. He’s a middle aged dude from back-east who’s been dreaming about this hunt for years and finally took the leap to come before his joints stiffend too much. We tell him what we didn’t find while reconnecting the dog sled to the snowmobile. (In years past dogs used to pull sleds but now they get pulled in sleds. Well played mutts, well played.) It’s a thick plastic dog crate in an equally thick plastic Otter sled rigged up with a metal towing hitch, our forgotten snowshoes strapped to its top and stuffed down beside. 

The tracks of last night are still clear despite the fluffy new snow. Scent sticks better in the wet snow ideal for birthing snowmen, I doubt the hounds will be able to smell much in this cold sand but I’ll walk it out until the track warms up, it isn’t noon yet so we have time. 

We unload the dogs from their box and leash them to the snowmobile to clean out and stretch while their Garmin tracking collars sync to the satellites. No colonies on the moon here in 2022 but we have real time displays for our dogs’ location overlaid onto highly detailed maps all while accounting for Einstein’s theory of relativity, remarkable. 

I tell Henry and Tim to wait there and if they don’t hear from me in an hour to start back along our trail and see if the cat crossed out behind us. Then with Sur and T on the same leash, my pack over my shoulder and a set of those glorious snowshoes strapped tightly to my feet I set out. 

I settle into the stumbling wide-footed rhythm of the snowshoes while the dogs  tug and tangle their way along, amped and twitching to be set loose. They can’t smell anything but they know someplace there’s gotta be something, I finagle them over to the tracks from last night about 50 yards from the road. Sur buries his nose and tugs right along after the tracks, there’s more scent here than I thought. I snap them both off the leash and they roll ahead along the tracks, noses hard to the snow for about thirty yards then lose the scent, cutting out and around in ever widening loops trying to pick it back up. After a few minutes I call them back to and leash them to a small tree, and set to sorting out the tracks by eye. T is less than thrilled at this and barks her displeasure at me for the next half hour as I search and untangle. I can see where they lost it at, a few clear cat tracks, leading under some thicker trees and disappearing in the shallow snow. I wheel out to the side, trying to trace a line along the open ground it would have had to cross, nothing but moose tracks. I look closer, two moose at least, and something else maybe, cats will walk in the footsteps of other animals same as wolves, makes the going easier not having to break their own trail. The moose tracks thread off to the right and I follow. 

A few yards further, between the deep post holes of the moose are three shallow prints stepping out for just a moment, a cat for certain. He goes on another fifty yards or so, a few solitaire tracks here and there before separating himself entirely from the moose and cutting off to the east at the top of a gentle ridge. 

T is still barking and she doesn’t stop until I unleash her and Sur from their tree, dragging them out after the tracks. The scent is strong away from the moose and they drag me eagerly onward, some skis might work better than snowshoes if I had them. The tracks weave back and forth under the trees, sticking in the shallower snow where the walking is easiest. In these places the hounds will lose the scent and ‘ll take the lead, pulling them behind me until they can take the track again. For three hundred yards or so we go on like this, fighting through scrubby trees, shoving and breaking and untangling and muttering. 

They can smell clearly now and haven’t deviated from the track for the last few minutes and I’m tired of fighting through brush. I unclip them and they take off, bells on their collars clanging in the thick silence of the winter forest. Like an oversized goose I follow, weaving back and forth, trying at first to keep up then merely following their tracks through the silent trees.

There’s an orange tinted explosion of feathers here, all the earthly remains of a woodpecker serving his last mortal use as a meal for the cougar. I have to wonder how it managed that, maybe it was perched or asleep and was pounced upon before it had time to escape. A small mystery and drama, witnessed only by God and the trees. 

Silence sets here like a blanket, I can hear my blood shoving through my veins with each heartbeat, almost hear the snoring of the winter pines. The GPS shows them together almost 500 yards away, two colored threads tangling out across the screen behind the ticking movements of running dog icons.  Either we missed the track when we drove the road earlier or the cat is somewhere close to it, or T is going old and crazy and Sur is just following along. They stop, hesitating a moment then backtracking, looping, searching, tightening in, the treeing switches go off. I give them a few minutes but they stay in place, two treed dog icons flickering on the dim screen. 

“You got a copy?” I ask into the radio, after a moment there’s a scratch of static and then Henry’s voice:“Yeah?”

“Don’t go anywhere yet, says they’re treed but I’m not too sure on it, they backtracked, gonna go see if it’s a slick tree or what.”

“Sounds good.”

The snow soaked forest absorbs the sound so well I can’t hear anything until I’m nearly to the tree. T has already gone to work on it in her usual manner, tearing all the limbs off that she can reach then pulling away the bark in as big a strips between fits of barking. It’s a small cedar, maybe thirty foot tall, and looking lazily down at the two baying hounds is a huge cat. It’s tom, musclebound and lithe with a square, massive, fat, block of a head. 

I don’t look at it long, it’s a good 300 yard hike back down to the road and time has a way of flying. I call Henry, tell him where to meet me and shuffle down the hill, trying to break a decent trail as I go. 

I meet them on the road as they get there, after they strap their own snowshoes on I lead the way back up the hill, Henry and I packing down the trail and Tim following us.

The cat is in the same lazy position when we return, draped across a few larger limbs comfortable as a parrot on a perch. Tim is excited and out of breath leaning against another tree worried it’s gonna bail out before he can get his hands to stop shaking enough to get a shot. He’s heard our stories of cat hunts past, everything from a female jumping seven different trees to thousand yard hikes into icy canyons. But this cat is comfortable and calm, watching us with bored apathy.

 Henry and I tie the dogs back, getting a few pictures with Tim’s phone as we do. There’s a clear opening to its vitals and a small whitepine to serve as a decent gun rest, Tim sets up, shaking slightly but nearly steady.  

He makes a clean shot, double lunged, dead before it even knew what happened. Usually the limp weight of the lifeless body is enough for gravity to pull it to the ground but this one stays where it is, legs and body woven through the branches and wedged tight. 

We laugh and congratulate the hunter, the cat stays stuck. 

Henry shrugs and tries to climb, ice coats the branches and cuts into the bare skin of his hands, the frozen branches are brittle under his weight, snapping and breaking off. He looks like a camo wrapped bear drunkenly assaulting the tree. All but one in-reach branch has snapped off, he tries wrapping around the trunk and climbing but the ice hasn’t done any favors to his grip and he half falls back to the cold ground. The dead face of the cat stares down, mocking us. 

“I’ll try.”

I jump, grab at the last whole branch and pull myself up, feet slipping against the frozen stubs and limbs that remain, ice biting into my palms like cold gremlin teeth. I scramble and grasp and shimmy trying never to have too much weight on one branch or the other but they still break and snap in the cold. I bear hug the trunk as my boots slowly slide down the flimsy icy covered boughs. “Throw me the gloves in my backpack.” I call down.

Dry gloves are as streams of water in the desert, just in reverse, like dry socks on a rainy day. They also make grabbing the ice embalmed limbs easier. I’m a tree climber by birthright, but this one is tricky, branches snapping and breaking and falling from ever increasing heights, trying not to trust my weight to any one of them but if I fall at least there’s snow to break it. Some snow anyway. The 91st psalm is running through my head mingled with a few swear words. The trunk gets slowly thinner, easier to wrap arms and legs around but the branches aren’t any better.

“God preserve me a dumb redneck,” I mutter. 

The dead face of the cougar is directly above me now, I look down at Ralph and Tim and laugh. “Hope he doesn’t wake up!” I yell and tug on a dangling paw, it’s wedged tight. I move a little higher and try to shove on the wedged body but it doesn’t budge, up close he’s even bigger, all of 120 pounds easy. Heck of a nice cat. 

My arm is starting to cramp, I ignore it and pull my swiss army knife out of my pocket unfolding the saw. Thank God for the Swiss, their chocolate, their knives, and their cheese. The first two branches hardly need sawing before they snap off and join the pile of already fallen limbs from my climb. Stubbornly the cat stays draped over the last branch, defiant to the last. 

A few extra muttered insults and a bent saw blade later the bough gives up and the cat falls with a ragdoll tumble to the ground. The hounds renew their barking, convinced it’s about to jump up and run off again but it lays growing colder as entropy plays its inevitable game. Now I just have to get down, preferably not at the hands of that same natural law. 

Cautious as a turtle in a hammer factory I back my way down and over toward an ice-greased vine maple growing beside the cedar, I grab hold and slide down like Tarzan’s firepole.

“Well that was something I’d never done before.” I say with a grin. 

“I was so worried it was gonna jump out when we got here.” Tim says

“It definitely didn’t do that”

We get set up for pictures, Tim is grinning and filming the entire time, “Thank you boys so much, this has been a dream of mine for a long while. That was just really neat to see.”

Dusk is already chewing away the overcast light when we get back to the snowmobiles and the satisfying exhaustion of success smolders in our muscles as we head for home.