Posted By: Red Cloud
Mountain lion with .357 Blackhawk Arizona, a rather long story. - 02/05/16 07:12 PM
A while back a good friend and I decided ( over a couple of shots of Tequila that we could could "cold track" (no dogs or bait) a large lion that had been killing a lot of deer in the Cottonwood canyon area of northern AZ. At first light the next morning we were in the canyon and around 7:00 AM we cut his track and fresh scat (full of deer hair). Stayed on the track off and on until around 4:30 or so that afternoon when we lost it completely. I climbed to the canyon rim and was enjoying the amazing view across the canyon, looked straight down and there he was on a small ledge, doing the same thing I was. James and I back tracked along the rim to where we figured we could climb down to the same ledge without being detected by the lion and down we went to the 3 foot wide ledge, not an easy task. Forty feet along the ledge was an outcrop, By my calculation the lion should be another 40 to 50 feet farther along the ledge. Enter mistake #1, gun in hand, I climbed through a crevice in the outcrop and there he was! Not 40 to 50 feet away but 7 feet, quartering away looking back at me, mouth open, ears laid back with the canyon dropping away behind him. He made a sound like a ruptured steam pipe and I shot him behind the shoulder. He went straight up, missed the ledge and fell down the side of the canyon. Mistake #2 5:30 PM, sun going down "we can climb down, find the lion and climb back up and camp on the rim for the night!" James going first gripped a boulder to ease down to the next handhold, the boulder pulled out and fell with James still attached (under it) down the canyon wall. When he hit a slope in the wall about 60 feet below on his back the boulder was was on his chest. I have to cut the story short here because it took three days I did climb down and manage to get James back up to the rim. Then climbed back down, found the lion, skinned it out and with God's help got both James and the lion out of there and eventually to Flagstaff. But the first night on that canyon it snowed almost all night , I figured James would probably die during the night and I would come back after the first thaw and get his body out. James is a very tough man, he lived with broken ribs which punctured his right lung, broken right ankle and right shoulder, caught pneumonia and almost died from that. He will never walk right again according to the Dr.s in Flagstaff. Just thought I would share this adventure and the FACT that divine intervention is the only way either of survived.