“Pull the trigger” I said over my hunting partner's shoulder.
His .270 cracked, the round slicing through a suppressor and stripping the tree bark a foot to the right of two sets of glowing eyes.
Nothing. They didn’t budge or even flinch.
Shit. Suppressors. No one warns you how quiet ‘quiet’ really is when you’re trying to scare something off, I thought.
Putting down my bloodied knife, I grabbed my own suppressed rifle and stood beside my buddy. Not unlike the siege of Tyre, we had found ourselves unexpectedly defending a castle of mule deer meat, which we had taken just an hour before sunset at the bottom of a dank, dark, canyon.
With the animal mostly dismantled, I had been working on removing the back straps when my buddy had taken a break to get up and piss. It was in that moment of focus and exhaustion where all I could hear was urine striking the soft earth and meat being ripped away from bone that my buddies' calm voice cut through the air, “Ugh, Zach, come over here, there are two sets of eyes staring at me.”
With two headlamps shining down the steep degreed slope my buddy zipped up his pants and we began to play ‘guess who’ with our uninvited guests. “You think it’s bears?” he asked as we both squinted 40 or so yards down the hill. “Maybe, " I responded. But, they don’t usually travel in pairs and they look a little too low to the ground.”
We did the ol’ “Hey, bear!” routine. Nothing. No blink. No twitch. Just those eyes.
That lack of reverence for our presence is when I encouraged my buddy to raise his rifle and fire that first warning shot. When neither animal moved, I went to retrieve my own rifle.
Not wanting to fire directly at a yet-to-be-identified target, we both let loose a few volleys of rounds at the ground a few yards in front of us. Yet, the bolts racked louder than the muted report of our suppressed rifles.
Feeling like a couple of kids with daisy BB guns, we were unsure of what to do. With over one hundred pounds of fresh meat behind our makeshift garrison we decided to take our next step in shifts. While Kyle stood guard, I hurriedly went to finish pulling the back straps off the carcass and quickly loaded up my pack with two quarters, neck meat, and the skull.
Midway through that exercise Kyle shouted over that the eyes had dispersed in separate directions and he could no longer see them.
Shit. That doesn’t feel right.
I took a moment to soak that statement in and looked in all directions around me. With some heightened nerves I tightly pulled the last straps and buckles on my pack before rushing over to tag Kyle in for his turn in the cleanup ring.
Listening to the sound of zippers, plastic bags, and other equipment that we had yard saled around our kill site getting tucked away was encouraging, but the unease I felt about the unaccounted for visitors led me to openly curse the lack of lumens being emitted from my Petzl headlamp. Scanning the area around us I began to think about what those animals may be… earlier that morning we had seen two large wolves on a nearby ridge and knew the area held some trophy black bear as well. But, in a moment of sheer “duh,” I took in the sparsely vegetated, rocky, craggy hillside that we were on and thought, lions.
At that realization, I heard Kyle say, “ready!” and I pulled back from my post to load my pack on my shoulders. We high-fived and said some quick internal prayers that whatever was watching us would stick around for the intestinal scraps and would choose not to follow us up the 700 vertical feet we were about to trek. Despite being weighed down, neither of us quite felt the burden on our knees as we cut our own switchbacks to the top of the mountain.
At the top, the erect hairs on my arms finally went limp and I shared my feline suspicions with Kyle. “Ya, that’s what I was thinking, too. Although I didn’t want to speak that into existence,” he said with a chuckle. With that, we tucked our chins and hauled our trophies the next mile or so back to the trailhead all while I pondered about the word pussy—and how it means a hell of a lot more when you're the one being stalked.
