Hunting with the Bow & Arrow

by Saxton T. Pope

The cougar lives principally on deer. His kill averages more than one a week, and often we may find evidence that this murderer has wantonly slain two or three deer in a single night's expedition.

It is not his habit to lie in wait on the limb of a tree, though he often sleeps there; but he makes a stealthy approach on the unsuspecting victim, then, with a series of stupendous bounds, he throws himself upon the deer, and by his momentum bears it to the ground. Here, while he holds on with teeth and forelegs, he rips open the flank with his hind claws and immediately plunges his head into the open abdomen, where he tears the great blood vessels with his teeth and drinks its life blood.

These are facts learned from lion hunters whose observations are accurate and reliable. A lion can jump a distance greater than twenty-four feet, and has been seen to ascend at a single leap a cliff of rock eighteen feet high.

Their weight runs from one hundred to two hundred pounds, and the length from six to nine feet. The skin will stretch farther than this, but we count only the carcass from the tip of the nose to the tip of the extended tail. The speed of a lion for a short distance is greater than that of a greyhound, less than five seconds to the hundred yards.

Some observers contend that the lion never gives that blood-curdling cry assigned to him. They say he is silent, and that this classic scream is made by a lynx in the mating period. However, popular experience to the contrary seems to be too strong and counterbalances this iconoclastic opinion.

For many years, off and on, we have hunted lions, but sad to say, we have done more hunting than finding. They are a very wary creature. Practically, one never sees them unless hunting with dogs; they may be in the brush within thirty yards, but the human eye will fail to discern them.

Our camps have been robbed by lions, our horses killed by them, cattle and sheep ruthlessly murdered; lion tracks have been all about, and yet unless trapped or treed by dogs, we have never met.

Camping at the base of Pico Blanco, in Monterey County, several years ago, a lion was seen to bound across the road and follow a small band of deer. At this very spot a few seasons before one leaped upon an old mare with foal and broke her neck as she crashed through the fence and rolled down the hill. Three years later I rode the young horse. As we passed the tree from which it is thought the lion sprang, where the broken fence was still unmended, my colt jumped and reared, the memory of his fright was still vivid in his mind. Up the trail a half mile beyond we saw other fresh lion tracks. At night we camped on the ridge with our dogs in hope that our feline friend would come again.

It was too late to hunt that evening, so we turned in. Nothing happened save that in the middle of the night I was roused by the whine of our dogs, and looking up in the face of the pale moon, I saw two deer go bounding past, silhouetted like graceful phantoms across the silvered sky. They swept across the lunar disc and melted into blackness over the dark horizon.

No sound followed them, and having appeased the fretful hounds, we returned to sleep. In the morning, up the trail, there were his tracks; too wise to cross the human scent, and knowing that there are more deer in the brush, he had turned upon his course and let his quarry slip.