Watched by Wild Animals Part 15

Another time I frightened a lion from a cliff where he was waiting for a near-by flock of bighorn sheep to come within leaping distance.

Though it was nearly forty-eight hours since snow had ceased falling, not a track led to the lion's watching place or blind.

The lion probably is the game hog of the wilds. Often I have read his red records in the snow. On one occasion he killed nine mountain sheep in one attack. He ate a few pounds of one of them and never returned to the kill. On another occasion he killed eleven domestic sheep in one night. Inside of twenty-four hours a lion killed a doe, a fawn, a porcupine, a grouse, and was making a try for a mountain sheep when I appeared on snowshoes. He seems to prefer colts or horses for food.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Photo. by Enos A. Mills_ _Johnny, My Grizzly Cub_]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Drawing by Will James_ _Echo Mountain Grizzly_]

Mr. J. A. McGuire, editor of _Outdoor Life_, who has made special investigations concerning the killings of mountain lions, estimates that a lion will kill a deer every week if he has the opportunity to do so. From personal experience I have known him to kill four deer in a single week.

On one occasion, when I was hidden and watching the carca.s.s of a deer which a lion had killed to see what carnivorous animal might come to the feast, a mountain lion walked quietly and unalertly to it and commenced to eat. After a few minutes the lion suddenly bristled up and spat in the direction from which a grizzly bear presently appeared. With terrible snarling and threatening, the lion held on to the prize until the grizzly was within a few feet. He then leaped toward the grizzly with a snarl, struck at it, and dashed into the woods. The grizzly, without even looking round to see where the lion had gone, began eating.

From many experiences I believe that much of the killing of domestic and wild animals attributed to bears is done by lions. The lion prefers warm blood and fresh meat for each meal, and will kill daily if there is opportunity. I have known bears to follow mountain lions evidently for the purpose of obtaining food. One day I came upon the recently killed carca.s.s of a cow. Only mountain lion tracks led to it and from it. The following night I spent at a near-by ranch house, and the rancher informed me that on the previous day he had discovered a bear eating the carca.s.s of this cow which he accused the bear of killing. The lion is a most capable raider of ranches, and colts, horses, sheep, pigs, and poultry are his prizes.

In northern New Mexico one day I saw a lion bounding across an opening carrying a tame sheep in its mouth. On another occasion I saw a lion carrying off a deer that apparently weighed much more than the lion itself. The lion appeared to have the deer by the shoulder, and it was resting on the lion's shoulders in such a way that I do not believe it touched the ground.

I suppose when the lion makes a kill in an out-of-the-way place, where he may eat with comparative safety, he does not take the trouble to carry or to drag the victim off. Often, of course, the kill is made for the benefit of the young, and hence must be transported to the den.

It is quite true that he will sometimes wander back to his kill day after day and feast upon it. It is also true, when food is scarce, that lions will eat almost anything, even though they have nothing to do with the killing. They have been trapped at the bait that was out for bears: and so, though a lion prefers blood and warm meat, he will return to his kill to feast, or, if food is scarce, gladly eat whatever he can obtain.

From many observations I judge that after eating he prefers to lie down for a few hours in some sunny or secluded spot, or on a many-branched limb generally well up toward the top of the tree but sometimes not more than ten feet above the earth.

The lion has extreme curiosity. He will follow travellers for hours if there is opportunity to keep out of sight while doing so. Often during long snowshoe trips I have returned over the route first travelled.

Lion tracks in the snow showed that I was repeatedly followed for miles. In a number of places, where I had taken a long rest, the lion had crept up close, so that he could easily watch me; and on a few occasions he must have been within a few feet of me.

While walking through a forest in the Medicine Bow Mountains I was startled and knocked down by a glancing blow of a tree limb. This limb had evidently broken off under the weight of a lion. The lion also came tumbling down but caught a claw on a limb and saved himself from striking the earth. Evidently in his curiosity to see me he had leaned out too far on a weak limb. He fled in confusion, perhaps even more frightened than myself.

The mountain lion is not ferocious. Mr. Roosevelt, in summing up its characteristics, concluded that it would be no more dangerous to sleep in woods populated with mountain lions than if they were so many ordinary cats.

In addition to years of camping in the wilds in all sorts of places and under all conditions of weather I have talked with careful frontiersmen, skillful hunters and trappers, and these people uniformly agreed with what I have found to be true--that the instances of mountain lions attacking human beings are exceedingly rare. In each of these cases the peculiar action of the lion and the comparative ineffectiveness of his attacks indicated that he was below normal mentally or nearly exhausted physically.

Two other points of agreement are: Rarely does any one under ordinary conditions see a lion; and just as rarely does one hear its call. Of the dozen or more times I have heard the screech of the lion, on three occasions there was a definite cause for the cry--on one a mother frantically sought her young, which had been carried off by a trapper; and twice the cry was a wail, in each instance given by the lion calling for its mate, recently slain by a hunter.

During the past thirty years I have investigated dozens of stories told of lions leaping upon travellers from cliffs or tree limbs, or of other stealthy attacks. When run down each of these proved to be an invention; in most cases not a lion or even lion track had been seen.

Two instances of lion attacks are worth mentioning. One night in California a lion leaped from a cliff, struck a man, knocked him down, and then ran away. Out of this incident have come numerous stories of lion ferocity. The lion was tracked, however, and the following day the pursuing hunter saw it crossing an opening. It suddenly clawed and hit at a boulder. Then, going on, it apparently ran into a tree, and fought that. As it started on the hunter shot it. This beast was badly emaciated, had a swollen face from an ulcerated tooth, and was nearly, if not entirely, blind.

Another instance apparently was of a weak-minded lion. As though to attack, it came toward a little ten-year-old girl in Idaho. She struck it over the head with a bridle she was carrying. Her brother hurried to the rescue with a willow fishing pole. Together they beat the lion off and escaped with a few bad scratches. Yet had this been a lion of average strength and braveness he must have killed or severely injured both.

The mountain lion rivals the shark, the devilfish, and the grizzly in being the cause of ferocious tales. The fact that he takes refuge on limbs as a place of lookout to watch for people or other objects, and that he frequently follows people for hours through the woods without their ever seeing him--and, I suppose, too, the very fact that he is so rarely seen--make him a sort of storm centre, as it were, for blood-curdling stories.

Through years I investigated plausible accounts of the ferocity of mountain lions. These investigations brought little information, but they did disclose the fact that there are a few types of lion tales which are told over and over again, with slight local variations.

These tales commonly are without the slightest basis of fact. They are usually revamped by a clever writer, a frightened hunter, or an interesting story teller, as occasions offer. One of the commonest of the oft-told tales that have come to me through the years is as follows:

"Late Sat.u.r.day evening, while Mr. and Mrs. Simpson were returning from the village through the woods, they were attacked by a half-starved mountain lion. The lion leaped out upon them from brush by the roadside and attempted to seize Mr. Simpson. Though an old man, he put up a fight, and at last beat off the lion with the b.u.t.t of the buggy whip."

Sometimes this is a family and the time of day is early morning.

Sometimes the lion is ferocious instead of half-starved. Sometimes it is of enormous size. Once in a while he leaps from a cliff or an overhanging tree limb. Generally he chews and claws someone up pretty badly, and occasionally attempts to carry off one of the children.

Many times my letter addressed to one of the party attacked is returned unclaimed. Sometimes my letter to the postmaster or the sheriff of the locality is returned with the information: "No such party known." Now and then I ask the sheriff, the postmaster, or the storekeeper some questions concerning this attack, and commonly their replies are: "It never happened"; "It's a pipe dream"; "A pure fake"; or "Evidently whoever told you that story had one or two drinks too many."

One day I came out of the woods in the rear of a saw-mill. I was making my way to the living room of the place, between logs and lumber piles. Right round the corner of a slab heap I caught sight of a mountain lion just as it leaped at me. It missed me intentionally, and at once wheeled and rose up to play with me. In the two or three seconds that elapsed between the time I had my first glimpse of it and when I realized it was a pet I had almost concluded that, after all, a lion may be a ferocious animal.

On one occasion, when I was on a cliff at the edge of a gra.s.sy opening, I was astonished to see a coyote trot leisurely across and just before he disappeared in the woods a lion appear on the opposite side of the opening, following contentedly along the trail of the coyote. The next day I again saw this friendly pair, but on this occasion the lion was leading and the coyote following. Afterward I saw their tracks a number of times.

Just why they were a.s.sociated in this friendly manner we can only conjecture. It will be readily seen that the coyote, which has all the wisdom of a fox, might follow a game-hog lion about and thus, with little effort, get a substantial and satisfactory food supply. But why the lion should willingly a.s.sociate with a coyote is not quite clear.

Perhaps this a.s.sociation proved to be of some advantage to the lion in his killing, or it may have been just one of those peculiar, unaccounted-for attachments occasionally seen between animals.

In any discussion concerning the mountain lion, or, for that matter, any living animal, hardly can the last word be said concerning the character of the individual of the species. Individuals vary, and now and then a mountain lion, as well as a human being, shows marked and peculiar traits. These may be the result of unusual alertness and sheer curiosity, or they may be subnormal, and cruel or murderous.

CHAPTER XV

FAMINE IN BEAVER-LAND

Cold weather came one fall before my new beaver neighbours had laid in their winter's food. They had harvested one food supply several miles down stream but a fierce forest fire had devastated the region while they were in the midst of their preparations for winter and left their home site unliveable. The beavers in a body started off to found a new colony, having the hardships and adventures that ever fall to pioneers.

The place selected for their new home was on a tributary stream not far from my cabin. Here they built a typical house of sticks, sod, and mud. The stream ran through an old glacier meadow partly overgrown with forest. One side carried a belt of pines. Beyond the pines was a ragged and extensive growth of quaking aspen. Up stream the mountain rose steeply to the summit of Mt. Meeker.

While the beavers were working on a dam which was to give them ample water in the pond to prevent its freezing to the bottom, a trapper came into the region. He lingered and broke and rebroke the dam three or four times. When he finally left, autumn was half gone and preparations for winter in the new colony were only well begun. The dam was still low and uncompleted. As yet they had not begun cutting and storing aspen for their winter's food supply.

These beavers had been industrious. They had planned well. But it was a case of one misfortune quickly following another. A severe cold wave still further and seriously handicapped the harvest gathering of the colonists. The quieter reaches of the stream were frozen over and a heavy plating of ice was left on the pond. They would have difficulty transporting their food-cut aspens under such conditions.

Winter supplies for this colony--green aspen or birch trees--must be had. Ordinarily, beavers cut the trees most easily obtained: first those on the sh.o.r.e of the pond, then those up stream, and finally those on near-by, down-hill slopes. Rarely does a beaver go fifty feet from the water. But if necessary he will go down stream and float trees against the current, or drag trees up steep slopes. This pond did not have, as is common, a border of aspen trees.

Late October I visited this new wilderness home. In the lower end of the frozen pond was a two-foot hole in the ice. This had been gnawed by the beavers, but for what purpose I could not then imagine.

One crew of loggers had started to work in a grove about two hundred feet from the hole in the ice. They were cutting aspens that were about four inches in diameter and twelve feet high. But before dragging them to the pond an opening or trailway through the woods had been cleared. Every bush in the way was cut off, every obstructing log cut in two and the ends rolled aside.

Dragging their tree cuttings to the pond was slow, hard work, and it was also dangerous work for a slow-moving beaver to go so far from the water. A beaver is heavy bodied and short-legged. With webbed hind feet he is a speedy swimmer, but on land he is a lubber and moves slowly and with effort.

A few days later the purpose of the hole in the ice of the frozen pond was made plain. A freshly swept trail in the snow led to it out of the woods. The beavers were taking their green aspen cuttings through the hole into the pond for their winter's food. They had begun storing winter food at last.

I followed the trail back to where a number of aspens had been cut.

Their stumps were about fifteen inches above the snow. Two trees still lay where they fell. These were about six inches in diameter and perhaps twenty feet long. Preparatory to being dragged to the pond they had been gnawed into sections of from three to six feet.

The beavers had not nearly finished their harvesting when a heavy fall of snow came and they were compelled to abandon their carefully made dragway and the aspen grove where they had been cutting. The nearest aspens now available were only sixty feet from the edge of the pond.

But a thick belt of pines and a confusion of large, fallen, fire-killed spruce logs lay between the pond and this aspen grove.

Deep snow, thick pines, and fallen logs did not stop their harvest-gathering efforts. Tracks in the snow showed that they went to work beyond the belt of pines. During one night five beavers had wallowed out to the aspens, felled several and dragged them into the pond. But wolves appeared to realize the distress of the beavers. They lurked about for opportunities to seize these hunger-driven animals.

While harvesting the aspen grove wolves had pounced upon one of the beavers at work and another on his way to the pond had been pursued, overtaken, and killed in the deep snow.

During three days of good weather which followed, ever watchful for wolves, the beavers cut few aspens. Then came another snowstorm. The work of harvesting winter supplies was still further hindered.

But beavers never give up. To obtain aspens which were to supply them with winter food they finally dug a tunnel. They began this on the bottom of the pond near the sh.o.r.e and dug outward toward the aspen grove. The tunnel was about two feet under the surface for fifteen feet. From this point it inclined upward and came out under a pine tree, close to the aspens. In only the last few feet, where the digging was through frozen ground, was there difficult digging of this tunnel. Apparently the thick carpet of fallen leaves and the deep snow checked the frost and the earth had not frozen deeply.