The Horse Killer - By Sean Shea |
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It was several days before Christmas in 1998 when the bitter cold snap hit western Nevada. It was 4:00 pm, and I was returning from an unsuccessful day of lion hunting and decided to try an old road that I knew of that had been successful the year before. Success for me is not actually harvesting a majestic lion but hearing my dogs under the tree that holds a mountain lion. If you have never heard it or lived it you wouldn’t understand.
Darkness had already fallen when I reached the road, and the several day old snow was still 3 – 4 inches deep. I had traveled for several miles and had only seen feral horse and deer tracks, and then I came upon them. As the headlights cast the shadows in the tracks I just figured that they were another set of horses until I drove up and saw the site that every hound hunter loves to see. I jumped out of the truck and walked over to check other tracks for reinforcement. These are the kind of tracks that men and women drive many snow covered miles to find, so you could say I was a little excited. I walked back to my truck and decided that I would come back tomorrow and start this track up with a few dogs.
When I got home I called my good friend Greg Brackett and asked if he wanted to get a couple of dogs into the race in the morning. Greg is the kind you say fresh tom tracks to and he is packing dogs and ready to get it on. The next morning we met up and were on our way.
As we pulled on to the snow covered road the outside temperature gauge was reading 15 degrees below zero. We pulled off the road to unload the quads and dogs and realized that the dogs wouldn’t get out of the box because of the temperature. We had to wait for the sun to come out before the dogs could warm enough to run the track. Finally we were loaded and going down the road. I could see the track from last night and decided to drive down a little further to turn around, and I came across another track going in the same direction that wasn’t there last night. We knew it was the same cat by the size of the track and we figured that a kill had been made. We followed the tracks down the hill and finally found it, a mature feral horse had been ambushed by the large cat. I kept thinking that we need more cats like these to axe these flee infested habitat destroying bag of bones.
We walked back to the track on the road and I grabbed my young dog Brannon to see if he would take the track on his own. As I put him down on the track he opened up and the race was started. We listened as the young dog worked up the side of the mountain and decided to release the other dogs for reinforcement. When we heard the last dog top over the mountain we started the quads and headed up the road to see if we could get into a better vantage point.
It took about forty-five minutes to get to where we wanted to listen. As we stopped we thought that we could faintly hear dogs in the distance, so we headed out on foot. As we rounded the first mountain we could hear the sound that every lion hunter loves to hear, they were treeing. The lion was visible in the pinyon tree across the canyon from us and we both just smiled and headed that way. As we got closer we could see that the cat was fairly large, and then he jumped out of the tree into the middle of the dogs and then we realized that he was larger than large. He ran about forty yards and treed again on the ridge. We walked up to the tree and we both just couldn’t believe the size of this cat.
Then it dawned on me that this cat looked like, only larger, a tom that I treed in this same area three years before. This was his bad day, because when I caught him before I warned him that if I catch you again the outcome will not be the same. We took pictures and decided it was time to leash the dogs up. The cat decided it was time to bail and he headed out. I turned Brannon loose again, since he was semi expendable and he raced down the hill after the tom. After we released the other dogs I ran down the hill to make sure he wasn’t bailing this time. As I got to the tree I could tell that he was getting a little ticked off, and then he came out at me. My adrenaline took off, and lets just say that I would of out drawn any of the old gunfighters at that point in time. As his front paws came off the tree he was instantly turned 180 degrees, due to lead.
After a few moments and a lot of excitement Greg walked up, and we both just starred in amazement of the size of the cat. We both realized that this will probable be the biggest bodied tom that both of us have, and will every see. We measured him out at 8’6” and estimated him to be right around 200 pounds. After sixty days he was scored out at 14 6/16 inches and was awarded the second place buckle for the scoring period of 1998.
I would like to thank my hunting partner Greg and his hounds for sharing a fantastic day with me and my hounds.