Chapter One

I sat very still and quiet with my back resting upright against the deadfall. It had now been three hours of waiting and was approaching dusk – I remembered how Dad always called it the “witching hour.” Patience like this was becoming a lot easier with time – I had been surviving on my own almost a full year.

I had picked this spot out last summer. It was at the edge of a clearing just 25 or 30 yards upslope from the stream. I had observed the deer come down the hill to this clearing sometimes twice each day, morning and night, to feed and water. I could sit back in this little copse with a great field of fire and it was difficult for anyone or anything to see me. And it was comfortable – while sitting here I often began to drift into a light sleep – but I would be back to full attention at the slightest noise.

This was my third day sitting here without success. My biggest challenge was my weapon. I was carrying the AR-7 that I had bought several years earlier when I first started into my survival kick. Originally designed for paratroopers as a survival gun, the action and barrel could be removed and stored inside the stock. It was really lightweight and packed nicely into a bag or pack, but it wasn’t very accurate. Two days ago I had taken three shots at a doe about forty yards up the clearing from me, and had only found a light trace of blood on the grass and no blood trail to follow.

I had been irritated. I was probably just a bit jumpy since I was anxious for meat from larger game. Winter’s diet had consisted of rodents and an occasional rabbit, and I was still pretty hungry all the time. “One shot, one kill.” That’s what my buddies and I would say when we were fantasizing about our shooting expertise back in high school. But now I had a limited amount of .22 caliber ammunition, and I had wasted three shells. Furthermore, I really didn’t know how safe I was in this place, and the sound of three shots might attract unwanted attention. I wished I had actually spent the time back then to become a crack shot, but I was all talk and no action like many teenage boys. And an AR-7 with a peephole sight is not the most accurate weapon in the world.

The next night I had meditated longer before coming here, and I was breathing evenly and slowly. I had seen a pair of does but had refrained from the shot because they hadn’t approached any closer than the doe from the night before. I had reminded myself that if I waited long enough, one would venture close enough that accuracy wouldn’t matter.

A slight movement caught my eye. I had learned not to turn my head too quickly and not to stare directly at things. When I brought my head slowly around I could see several deer feeding fifty or sixty yards above me. They were naturally cautious animals, stopping to look around frequently between mouthfuls of grass. I knew it would be a while before they were close enough to chance a shot, so I relaxed.

It was early spring. There were small patches of snow in the shadier spots and lots of snow on the north facing slopes. I still had snow on either side of my sitting rock and underneath the deadfall that was my backrest, but the clearing had no snow remaining, and the wild grasses were pushing out in quantity. In a couple of months there would be blossoms covering the meadow. Last year it had been a menagerie of Indian paintbrush, wild daisies, ….. At the edges of the clearing, the leaves were coming back on the aspens, and further up the slope the evergreens were showing the fresh green shoots of the new year’s growth.

I only had another fifteen or twenty minutes before it would be too dark to take a shot, but one young doe was wandering my way. I continued to breathe deliberately and slowly raised my gun, resting it on the small branch of the deadfall that conveniently stuck out across my field of vision. She was less than twenty yards away and still coming my direction, so I waited.

Nature sometimes shocks you with its brutality. Unbeknownst to me, I wasn’t the only hunter watching this doe as it wandered a little far from its companions – from behind and to my right a flash of light brown fur sped in and took the doe by surprise. In seconds and almost without a struggle a mountain lion had broken the deer’s neck and severed an artery. It was chewing on the neck area and licking up the blood that continued to flow from the animal. The other deer had disappeared into the forest almost as quickly as the cougar had appeared.

It was almost pointless to try to regain my calmer state – the adrenalin was flowing through me and my mind was going a thousand miles an hour. But I hadn’t made it through this year by not keeping my wits about me, and my instincts told me that I should try to kill this cougar. Cats are very territorial, and this one was competing with me for food. Furthermore, I wasn’t a big man and a cat like this might even hunt me if it was hungry enough.

How had it not seen me or smelled me in the copse? I could only attribute it to the early season – the animal was likely extra hungry just like I was after a long winter. I had also arrived quite early that afternoon to sit on my rock, and I was getting a great deal more careful about the way I traveled around the area. Perhaps a year in the wild made my scent a little less unusual to the animals, too.

I quickly thought it through. The cat was somewhat engaged and I could get in one very careful shot. I would shoot it a little behind the ear – if that worked for the deer I had taken in the past, it might work for the lion. This little gun was semi-automatic, so I would be prepared for another quick shot or two if I had the chance. I had no doubt that this animal would be more difficult to kill than the deer, and since I had been up here in this mountain I had killed just four deer and had four more get away mostly unscathed.

I carefully lined up the peep sight on the back of the cat’s head and neck and squeezed off the shot. The cat made a weird flip in the air and landed facing the opposite direction. It was screaming. I squeezed off a second shot right behind its collarbone as it took off toward cover. Those were a pair of lucky shots, because the cat made it about fifty yards into the trees and died. I had very little time to work, so I quickly cut its throat to make sure it was indeed dead and then dragged it back down to where the dead doe lay.

First things first – I quickly gutted the deer and hung her from her rear legs in a nearby tree. Before I hoisted the carcass, I cut a large chunk of meat from inside one of her rear flanks and wrapped it in a cloth to eat back at camp. The winter had given me an opportunity to field dress a variety of smaller animals, but this cougar was just about as big as this small doe. Learning as I went, I dressed it out as quickly as I could and hung it near the doe. I grabbed the chunk of meat and headed up the hill to my little mountain home. Tomorrow I would come back to skin and butcher both animals. The carcasses would remain safe in the air tonight while the forest varmints and coyotes feasted on the entrails.

Fifteen minutes later I had venison roasting over the firepit, and I was reflecting on how many things had changed in the last year. Surprisingly, the adrenalin from the cougar attack had gone and it didn’t seem crazy or unusual that I had just killed it. Life in the city, with a job, a girlfriend, an apartment, my favorite music, a good book – it all seemed like a distant dream.