Mountain Lion Attack

Not unlike many travelers this year, by the time I hit the plane seat I was exhausted. I didn't care that my flight was being delayed, or that I'd have to spend 3 hours parked on the runway;like the old bluegrass song says, I was going to "my blueridge mountain home."
I arrived in a sea of clouds and fog,but I arrived nonetheless, and after making it to my mothers place, contacted my cousin John. John was taking the next day off and we had laid down some plans to reconviene with mother nature- he was taking me Grouse hunting. Now, I like to caputilize the word Grouse, because anyone who has ever hunted these hen sized avians knows they deserve the respect that only a capital letter can emphasize. When I talk of Grouse hunting, I am really speaking of Grouse hiking, because in between the occasional bird sighting, there are miles of steep mountainside to negotiate, as well as rockslides, brambles, thickets, laurel patches, honeysuckle, poison ivy, grapevines and acres of pines that block out all signs of sunshine and only let the rain through. This is my kind of mountain.
I drove to Johns house in the morning and jumped into his truck. The dogs were in the truck bed whining and ready to get I to the woods. If you tried to hunt Grouse without a dog or two, it would be interesting but mostly unsuccessful. The dogs are there to sniff out every possible hiding place, to track down the birds, to point them out, and then on the hunters command, to flush them out and get them to fly. If this sounds unfair, let me just add that the Grouse is no fat chicken. These birds fly a hundred miles an hour in the opposite direction you are facing, behind trees, under thickets and literally disappear into the brush, all in about 3 seconds. Oh, and they are camouflaged as well. There is ample reason why most Grouse hunters return exhausted and empty handed at the end of a hunt, and why they return to the woods whenever they can to match wits with mother nature's speeding speckled ghost.
We arrived at our hunting locale around 10 am, a spot in the mountains about 6 miles from the West Virginia line, and John let the dogs out to run a bit before we started up the trail. After we got our blaze orange on and John loaded his shotgun, we started up the trail and headed into the woods.






The dogs were running all over the mountain, excited to be out in their favorite habitat, and the day was beautiful. We flushed birds every half hour, but John never got a clear shot. The smell of gunpowder and pine warmed up the chilly air,


and we wound our way up the craggy trail while the dogs sniffed circles around us. The clouds hung close to the shoulders of the mountain and the trail led us up and up til we reached the rocky top, where we sat snacking on apples and silently soaking up the surrounding vistas, looking out into West Virginia and beyond.






While we waited for nothing in particular the dogs began to get nervous and wanted to move on, so we grabbed our gear and pushed down the mountain into the deep and the thick. All at once the dogs began to get excited and were locked on to something. John knew right away it wasn't a bird, and he said it's probably a deer or something. All of a sudden the dogs rushed to a pile of logs and began to dig frantically,


tossing leaf litter and sticks aside. John and I ran to pull them off whatever they were digging, and we came upon a grisly scene.
A medium sized buck deer was stuffed in between two logs, covered over with leaves and brush, it's broken neck twisted and legs sticking out like broken branches. What happened here.? I asked John, and we sat staring at the mangled body before deciding to make a closer inspection. I held the dogs back while John pulled the deer out from it's makeshift grave , and we immediately saw something that sent a chill down my spine, and made me quickly scan the surrounding woods. The deers neck was red and had been bitten,


and something had eaten it's heart out, leaving the rest of the body behind for later. Now, John has hunted those woods for years, and when he said "I've never seen anything like this" I took his word for it. The next thing he said made me both excited and terrified: "this might be a mountain lion attack, Dol"
Needles to say, I immediately asked about the possibility of being able to fend off a large cat with a small shotgun, to which he responded something to the effect of: shooting a mountain lion with bird shot would be like slapping a Grizzly bear in the face. So we decided to cover the deer back up and get the dogs moving up the trail, and try to leave the body the way we found it: mangled, messy, and mysterious.





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