Hunters Barely Avert (Cat)Astrophe

At least two Eastern Washington hunters got the scare of their lives this week, and we’re not talking about ghosts, vampires or haunted houses.

One hunter, who preferred to be unnamed, was hunting elk in the Blue Mountains on Sunday when he was surprised by a mountain lion crouched in the trail. The hunter had a cougar tag in his pocket, so he didn’t hesitate to raise his rifle for a shot.

But the cougar was so close, all the man saw was fur.

As the hunter brought the rifle down to adjust his scope to a lower power, the cougar seemed to sense the opportunity. It flattened its ears and charged.

The hunter raised his rifle and shot the cat at very close range.

Pat Fowler, Washington Fish and Wildlife Department biologist in Walla Walla, said the cat was a big female, 7-1/2-feet long, with an empty stomach.

However, the Human Prey of the Week award goes to Jim Ebel, manager of the state’s Colville Fish Hatchery, who was out on Sunday to put up a tree stand.

A serious bowhunter, Ebel was preparing well in advance for the archery deer season that opens Nov. 10 in Unit 101 of Ferry County.

He had gone out alone to hike a half-mile from the road into a hunting spot he had scoped out last season.

Once he installed the stand in a tree, he climbed down and began using a small pack saw to clear brush for a shooting lane between the stand and a game trail.

“I was bent over, cutting on a bush and stacking the little branches when, for some reason, I looked up,” he said, his voice wincing at the thought.

“There was a cougar, his eyes locked on me just 10 to 15 feet away.”

Time out. Before continuing with Ebel’s story, please stand up, take four long paces and look back at your chair. Imagine looking up from that distance and seeing a magnificent and powerful creature that survives by taking down deer and elk and consuming 30 pounds of flesh at a sitting. Got the picture?

“He surprised the hell out of me,” Ebel said.

At least Ebel knows the last two words he’ll utter in the impulse before certain death. They are an appropriate combination of heaven and earth, although the word “Holy …” is the only one that newspaper rules allow us to print.

“I stepped back and the cougar made a bound back,” Ebel said. “Then it just stared at me from 20 feet away.

“I did all the stuff the experts tell you to do. I was armed only with a small saw, so I raised that and my hat above my head to make myself look as big as possible and I yelled and took a few steps forward.

“The cougar just stared at me and flicked its tail a few times.”

Ebel backed slowly away and carefully climbed up into his tree stand, hoping the cougar would lose interest and leave.

“Sure enough,” he said, “the cat cut behind some brush and I was starting to relax until it showed up again and sat on its haunches 20 yards from the base of the tree.”

The mountain lion sat there and looked up at Ebel much like a house cat stakes out canaries hanging out of reach in a bird cage.

“I yelled at him, broke branches and threw them at him and he didn’t even flinch,” Ebel said.

“Then the cougar laid down.”

The hunter on the ground and the prey in the tree played the waiting game for a while until Ebel made a move.

“I climbed down the tree and put on the big backpack that I had packed the tree stand in hoping I could make myself look bigger,” he said.

The cat sat up, its eyes intent on Ebel as he eased onto the trail and out of the cougar’s sight.

“I got out to an old logging road, went about 200 yards and then he showed up behind me again,” Ebel said. “He was trotting down the road right toward me.

“I picked up some baseball-sized rocks and threw them at him. He stopped but only flinched a little when one rock hit right beside him.

“Every time I’d start walking, he’d gain to within 30 yards or so. Eventually, I hit him in the shoulder with a softball-size rock and he jumped into the brush. I thought that was the end of it.”

About 200 yards down the trail, the cougar appeared again.

“I was almost to my truck, but I had to get through a fence,” Ebel said.

The pucker factor was tense as he went through the gate with the cougar coming his way. “I ran to the truck, where I had a shotgun I brought in case I went grouse hunting,” Ebel said.

The cougar, however, veered off at the fence and vanished into the brush as though it knew the odds had just shifted in Ebel’s favor.

As Ebel drove out of the woods, that afternoon, his thoughts churned with the possibilities.

“I’m happy to have had that experience,” he said. “In retrospect, I think the cougar might have been attracted to the noise of my hand saw, which might sound like a deer rubbing its antlers on a tree.

“I shudder when I think that I almost brought my 10-year-old daughter along, and she would have been at the base of the tree playing alone while I was putting up the stand.

“For a long time, that cougar was only one bound away, and the fact that I’m 6-foot-2 might have been the only deterrent.”

Now that he’s ruminated on the experience for nearly five days, Ebel has only one lingering concern.

“I’m not sure any deer are going to pass by my tree stand with that cougar in the area,” he said.

Regardless, there isn’t any chance he’s going to doze off while he’s up there with his bow and arrow.

Blood in the streets: Serious hunters have a bone to pick with their peers who improperly dispose of butchered deer remains.

The Washington Fish and Wildlife Department’s Spokane office has received several complaints this week regarding deer heads and skeletal remains being dumped in inappropriate urban places, such as behind a Tidyman’s store.

“That sort of behavior doesn’t do hunters any good in the public relations department,” said Madonna Luers, department spokeswoman.

Tweedle dumber: While hunters can pull some stupid stunts, the non-hunting public isn’t necessarily the brightest bunch on the block when it comes to dealing with wildlife.

State wildlife officials are concerned that they will have no choice but to kill a cow moose they’ve nicknamed “Trouble” now that people in the Colbert area have been feeding it by hand.

“The other morning, the moose showed up off Colbert road, and people were trying to pet her and kids were poking her with a stick,” Luers said. “This moose has a history, and it can go from docile to belligerent in no time, but we can’t seem to get that message through to people.

“The message is that this ain’t a big pet. It’s a big, unpredictable wild animal that can hurt a person very badly.”