One day, I almost thought I got almost eaten by a maybe mountain lion.
I've said before that I've never felt in danger of life or limb due to a wild animal, but I suppose that's not strictly true. I did get awfully close to that grizzly bear sow the day the yellow telemetry plane saved us. And I got growled at by a captive wolf once when I was sitting next to him. That was freaky.
But there was a day in South Dakota that I was almost certain I was going to be eaten by a mountain lion. Why? Did I see this mountain lion? Did I stumble upon a fresh kill site? Did I hear his fearsome scream echoing through the hills?
Nope.
It was during the 2005 season working with woodpeckers in the Black Hills. Back then - and, I believe, this is still the case - mountain lions lived in the area in extremely high densities, owing to the large populations of deer and elk and the complete absence of any other predators. I never saw one. One day, however, my coworker Halle and I stumbled upon a fresh kill site.
I had never seen a lion kill site before, and I was just a sophomore in college with very little experience around these things, but it was pretty clear what it was. It was a mule deer buck, dead in the forest just outside the border fence in Wind Cave National Park, no wounds of any kind, but the fur had been plucked off of it and lay in a little furry carpet around the carcass. It was so fresh it didn't even smell. (Lions often kill their prey with a single bite to sever the spinal cord. Pretty clean.)
Now, if I'd have known anything about mountain lions at that time, I'd have gotten the heck out of there. But even though we kind of guessed what had happened, our position there beside it didn't strike me as particularly precarious. After all, we hadn't seen a mountain lion there, so it must be gone, right? So Halle and I casually finished what we were doing and headed back. Now that I know better, I'd guess that that lion was hiding just yards away, watching us, wondering what to do about us.
Anyway, a few weeks later, late one afternoon when the temperature was high and big storm clouds were beginning to creep into the Black Hills, Halle and I were faced with a predicament.
We had this one woodpecker nest we had to check which was an absolute pain in the neck to get to. There were two ways we could access the site - from the west, or the Old Shirttail Road, or from the east, where the Wind Cave National Park campground road cut into the hills. The roads didn't connect, and it took about 40 minutes to drive all the way from Wind Cave to the opposite end of the Shirttail Road, even though the roads themselves were probably less than half a mile from each other as the crow flies. The nest was about halfway between them.
The reason the nest was so horrible was because it was surrounded by a large thicket of mountain mahogany, a poky shrub that ripped our clothes and contained millions of strange bug things that got all over us when we bushwhacked through. It was also on the top of a steep ridge. Between hiking with our heavy extendable camera + battery (which together weighed probably 50 pounds) up the hills and through the horrible shrubs, in the heat of the afternoon, it was pretty miserable.
On this particular day, the Horrible Nest was the only one left to check. It was getting late, toward quitting time, and with the heat and the storm coming we were ready to call it a day. Halle and I were already on the east side, off Shirttail Road, but if we hiked to the nest and then hiked back, then had to drive all the way back to the Park (where we lived), it would take forever; but if we drove to the campsite and hiked in from there, it would be a harder hike and we might not get there before the storm arrived. Thus, I decided that I would hike to the nest alone, while Halle would drive out and pick me up at the campsite at the other end.
She departed, and I was left with just the extendable camera and battery - no water, no food, nothing. I didn't have a GPS unit, either. We knew the locations of each nest pretty well by now, and we scarcely ever had to use the GPS. However, normally we didn't approach the Horrible Nest from this direction, though I was confident I could find it.
There was a deep gully separating the road from the ridge the nest was on. There were several ridges that ran parallel here, but I knew which one I wanted, so I aimed for it. I had to beat through a dense thicket of shrubs and oaks in the gully, then face the blazing sun as I hiked up the ridge opposite. To my delight, there was not a mountain mahogany bush to be seen. Hey, I thought, maybe this is the way to go from now on! By the time I got to the top I was already sweating and exhausted, and it didn't take me longer than a few seconds to get my bearings and realize my mistake:
I was on the wrong ridge.
By now I could hear thunder rumbling. Sweat was pouring into my eyes as I headed down the other side, certain now that the Horrible Nest was on the next ridge over. All the while I had the heavy extendable camera draped across my shoulders and the even heavier battery cinched around my waist, no water to drink, no GPS unit, nothing. I hoped and prayed that I was right about the Nest, because if it wasn't there, then I really had no idea where I was. And no sooner had I begun hiking up again than I found myself, much to my dismay, swimming in another sea of mountain mahogany. There was just no escaping it.
Half an hour had maybe passed since I'd left Halle on Shirttail Road. I was exhausted and hot and worried about the storm which, although it would certainly cool me off, would probably ruin the thousands of dollars-worth of equipment I was carrying. And then, just when I thought I couldn't get anymore panicked, the memory of the mountain lion kill popped into my head. It had been right in this area somewhere.
This country is crawling with lions, I thought, and here I am, alone, weak, tired...easy pickings.
I could imagine a great big tom staring at me through the bushes, calculating where on my neck to aim his canines, wondering what to do about the strange big tube-thing sitting on my shoulders.
Perhaps it was that new-found worry that sparked me to make my legs most faster, but eventually I made it to the top of the ridge and found the Horrible Nest there waiting for me, the pink flagging tape blowing in the wind. In addition to its horrible location the Horrible Nest was also horrible to check; some malevolent Northern flicker had chosen a cavity high up on a dead tree that was leaning 45-degrees forward into the next gully, and it took a great deal of coordination and patience to get the camera into the hole, then a great deal more coordination and patience to fiddle with it to where it was actually looking down at the eggs. You basically had to lean the camera pole back 45-degrees - on a 45-degree slope - and bear all its weight while manipulating the camera. Since I was already frustrated and tired and nearly done in with nervous exertion, I found this additional fight almost too much to bear, especially without Halle there to help. The thunder was rumbling. I had to get out of there.
So for all that effort, I didn't even get a proper view of the nest.
As fast as I could I lowered the camera and slung it over my shoulders again and headed down the ridge toward Wind Cave. Once again I had to bushwhack through the grove of mountain mahogany, dip under the barbed-wire fence, and keep an eye open for grumpy bison sleeping in the shadows, all the while expecting a lion to pounce on my shoulders at any time. Eventually I made it out and set my feet on the pavement of the campground road.
Exhausted, I walked over to one of the restrooms, set down my burden, and swallowed as much water from the drinking fountain as I could stomach. I was drenched in sweat, filthy, covered in little mountain mahogany bugs, and my hair was a rat's nest of twigs and dirt and leaves. As soon as I finished my drink and sat down against the building, Halle arrived. It turned out, she had been worried too about my excursion alone - we weren't supposed to ever go hiking alone, for our safety - and had driven like the devil back to the park.
No sooner had I told her about my journey than our boss, Dale, also pulled into the campground. I forget why he was there, but it was an odd thing for us to run into him in the field - usually he was out by himself far away doing point counts. I cursed our luck. I knew he would scold me if he found out what we had done. So we lied. Somehow, he believed our story that both of us had just finished hiking in to the Horrible Nest, even though while I looked like an absolute mess, Halle was still clean and sweat-free. He turned around and headed back home.
In the end, the storm didn't even hit, but dissipated before it got to Wind Cave. I never saw a lion but I was convinced they had been all around me, waiting for their moment to kill me, when, in all likelihood, the only thing I was ever in danger of was getting lost or dehydrated. And my panic made the real danger greater.
I really freaked myself out. To this day I think it's the most afraid I've ever been in the field. If I hadn't panicked so much, I would have checked the nest properly, wouldn't have worked myself up nearly to the point of collapse, wouldn't have put myself in the amount of real danger that I had. And really, I should never have broken the rules in the first place.
Sometimes, you're your own worst enemy.
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