It was the morning of
January 4th, 2007, here in the Rockies of Central Idaho, a
place far removed from what most folks call civilization. My wife,
children, and I had lived here for thirteen years since escaping the now
people-overwhelmed state of Colorado. We had searched for “The Last
Best Place,” and to us, there was no difference between this part of Idaho
and the state of Montana, where that alluring slogan comes from. Montana
was just over the hill anyway, so who cares. The “Best Place” isn’t
actually defined by some line on a map; rather, it’s where you have chosen
to be and a place that fits both your needs and dreams.
Our youngest son Rob
had gone up to the animal sheds to feed the array of poultry, sheep and
goats a few minutes earlier. He ran into the house, and in spite of
being almost breathless, yelled, “Lion! Lion! A lion killed Carmen... and
it’s still there!”
Heck – it was “Wild
Card Sunday” and I didn’t need this. I was already planning to do
nothing on a snow-covered, ten-degree day, and a real crisis had just been
unpleasantly thrust into my life. Foremost was our seventy five
pound son had been within ten feet of an apex predator, separated from it
only by a six-foot fence that had already proven its lack of worth to keep
such an animal either in or out of the building, or the attached pen
enclosure. The second concern was our milk supply has just been
compromised by at least half, given that we had two milk goats and one was
already a known casualty.
After a thirty-second
kid debriefing, I grabbed my 870 Remington 12-gauge “Slug Gu” and headed
out the door while stuffing the seven-round magazine full of shells loaded
with 00 Buckshot. I also grabbed the next biggest kid and told
everyone else to stay in the house.
Joseph and I arrived
at the crime scene a couple minutes later, and everything seemed totally
normal. The chickens and turkeys were pecking away, and the creek
was cascading away in the background. The sheep were acting
agitated, but I had always been somewhat suspect of their sanity anyway.
Yes-sir, normal seemed to be the case.
It was a “Bluebird
Day” with bright, full sun glinting off the snow. Absolutely
beautiful. Squinting our eyes to compensate, we walked around the
pens towards the side of the building that houses the goats and sheep.
I then thought to myself, “The lion saw the kid, and now it’s gone.”
More than that, nothing could really be wrong. Beautiful day, the
creek is running the same as usual, birds are feeding, and if we lost one
goat, that’s just the way it goes, right? And besides, where was all
that background music like on the Disney movies when things are about to
go south? And there had yet to be the obligatory roar from the lion
either! Just a dead goat and life goes on… heck, it might have been
a Bobcat. What does an eleven-year old kid know anyway?
We arrived at the
gate to the pen, which is directly adjacent to the door of the shed.
I could plainly see a dead goat lying across the entrance to the door, and
being a bit snow-blind, it could not see inside the building at all.
I was still convinced the cat was gone, my mind pretty well still
“Disney-fied” as I told Joe to open the gate.
Chambering a round, I
stepped through the doorway into the blackness, and somehow saw movement
immediately in front of me as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.
LION!
I fired
instantaneously at a range of about six feet, killing the cat. I let
out a bit of a string of expletives as I backed out of the structure while
chambering a second round, uncertain if the cat was actually dead.
But dead he was, as well as both our milk goats.
A “legal but
unlicensed kill” is what such an event is called. I call it
something else, but such is best left unsaid. We called Idaho Fish
and Game, whose agent arrived a few hours later and hauled the old cat
away, remarking that, “Such things happen, but the perpetrator is rarely
caught at the scene”. Yeah. Agreed.
Folks, the odds of
this happening are so close to zero that it is almost not calculable.
“Rare” doesn’t even suffice as descriptive. And in many ways, it is
my fault. That is why I am writing this, because 99.9999% of the
time, predation can be prevented. It is your obligation to
wholly recognize the totality of where you live, what critters live around
you, and then plan and construct structures and pens to keep out what you
do not want in. And I will add this: you do not want that kind of
excitement. Furthermore, the ending could have been a tale quite
different.
