The Beast in the Garden by David Baron

Author:David Baron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2004-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

The dogs circled among the rocks. Their baying grew louder and fainter, louder and fainter, as heard from below. Matt Miller climbed toward the sound, up the jagged slope. His strength was fading, as was his macho attitude. “I was just dripping, tired,” he recalls. Matt stopped to catch his breath. He could barely move his legs.

Meanwhile, Don Kattner walked slowly and deliberately through the snowy ravine below. He was tracing his dogs’ tracks while following their progress aurally. Lion dogs communicate with a language of bawls, yips, yelps, cries, howls, bellows, chops, growls, squeals, whistles, and whines that convey with remarkable specificity what the pack sees and smells. In the jargon of lion hunting, hounds don’t bark; they “speak” (and hounds that speak inappropriately are “babblers”). Kattner could tell by the pitch, volume, tempo, and urgency of the vocalizations that his hounds were close to the lion. The scent was strong.

Then, in an instant, the barking became staccato and excited. Kattner knew what his dogs were saying: they had jumped their quarry, and it was on the move. He turned to the brothers-in-law, Jay and Henry. “The dogs are on that cat right now,” Kattner said. “Get ready, boys.”

As Frank Hibben has written, “Lion hounds, with cougar scent in their nostrils, can go faster than galloping horses.” And that’s what the floppy-eared dogs were doing now—galloping, careening, flying down the rocks. As they reached the bottom of the ravine, they launched themselves off a twelve-foot ledge, soared across a creek, landed in a snow bank, and scrambled up the forested slope to the south. Kattner didn’t see the lion, but it must have been right in front of the hounds.

Matt Miller, still high up the rocky slope that the dogs had just abandoned, dashed downhill at full speed, leaping over rocks and brush, but his progress could not match the hounds’. “I finally got halfway back down the mountain, and I stopped to try to find out where the dogs were, and I look straight across the valley, all the way over to the other mountain, and there are the dogs running up that hill. And I’m like, Oh, shit.”

Don Kattner, seeing that Matt could not keep up with the dogs, asked Jay and Henry to take over the lead. “We gotta get on this cat,” he said. “I don’t want him on the dogs too long.” The men, rifles in hand, ran southward and upward, through tangled branches and deep snow, along an east–west trending hill called Winiger Ridge. A throaty, feverish baying permeated the woods before them.

In most contexts, “tree” is a noun, but in cougar hunting the word becomes a transitive verb, and it describes what the dogs had done to the cat. The lion, out of breath (cougars have little lung capacity) and with dogs on its heels, had leapt into the branches of a ponderosa pine where it now rested, panting, glaring at its tormentors through slanted eyes. The dogs surrounded the trunk, necks craned as they jumped and howled at the beast above.

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