This story, although exciting, although fun, kind of almost takes away from my accomplishment because I ended up just having really good luck. But as they say, does good luck really exist? Or is luck just a combination of being prepared and being there at the right time? That was me. I was prepared, and I was there at the right time, and it worked out to be the perfect hunt. So let’s get into it.
The year is 1995. That’s a long time ago. I was 25 years old back then. I’m 55 years now. Anyways, it was, see, about February, I believe, of 1995. And I had always wanted to go cougar hunting.
Now, I had a friend who lived in the area, and he loved cougar hunting. He was into it in a big way. His name was Thomas Schrieber. He was an outdoorsman to the max. This guy could hunt, fish, camp, bike, trail, hike, anything. If it was outdoors, he was out there doing it. He was just a dedicated outdoorsman, really. Like almost like no other I’ve ever seen. A lot of success as well.
Now what he really wanted, what his greatest desire was or I believe what he had told me at the time, was to get a record book cougar. So he had a truck, he had a kennel in the back where he had his dogs. And he always kept a German short-haired pointer that usually sat in the seat right beside him. And now that was his buddy. That was his friend. But then he kept two or three other hounds, because as you run hounds for cougars, you need a number of them. So the cougar remains scared, doesn’t turn around and say, “Hey, I think I could take this guy?” No, you need three or four hounds and make sure you scare that cougar and make him run up the tree. So like I said, always a German short-haired pointer that really was his best friend. And then a couple of two or three other hounds. Two or three other hounds, usually like Walker or Redbone. I think these ones were maybe a mix, but they were a solid dark reddish sort of color, making me think the Redbone. So in any case, great dogs, they’re in the back of his truck. He comes to pick me up. Oh, no, I got to tell you, his goal was to get a record book cougar. So he had his hounds, he had his kennel, he had his truck, he had his rifle, he had everything in place.
But you can only get one cougar a year where we’re from in the Kootenays of British Columbia. So what he would do was he would take out other people, hunters like myself who didn’t have all of those things and weren’t able to just go out cougar hunting without having dogs and such. So he would take us out. And the deal was that once you got the cougar treed, he would come along and he would look at the cougar and he would size it up and he’d say, “You know, that looks like an average cougar. You go ahead and take that one.” Or he would look up there and he’d size it and gauge. He’d say, “You know what? That looks like? That could potentially be a record book cougar. So you’re not going to take this one. This one’s mine. I’ll take you out another time.” So fair is fair. I said, “Hey, no problem. I’ve never got a cougar before. I just want to get a cougar. Any size is going to be fine.” So we made plans. He’s coming to get me. Like I said, I think it was a day in February, cold day, lots of snow. That’s just what you want. You got to have snow so you can track him. He comes to pick me up early in the morning. It was just getting light, maybe around seven or eight o’clock when he comes to pick me up in the morning. And he is excited.
Now first off, I should explain, this fella is German. He came from Germany. I think he was a kid, no, maybe a teenager when he moved here from Germany. So he still, you know, he had a pretty good thick German accent. Spoke English perfectly, but had quite an accent, which you might hear me say. I just can’t help but speak his accents when I talk about Thomas. So anyway, Thomas shows up in the morning. He says to me, “Spencer, I just seen the cougar track crossing the road just five miles down the road. Oh man, I’m so excited. Oh, okay. This is our day. This is going to be fabulous.” So we hop in his truck, zoom down the road. No kidding. It was only maybe five, six, maybe 10 miles away to where these nice tracks had crossed the road. Obviously fresh. It had snowed just a little the night before. We were in some good deep snow already and you could see that these tracks were fresh. They were left sometime within the night. So we took the dogs out. We got them all the dogs on leashes, of course, because that’s the way a cougar hound hunt goes to begin with. You have your dogs on leashes keeping them close by, get them on the track, and then you can tell just how old that track is by the reaction of the dog. So he puts his dogs on the track and they are excited. They’re like, they’re starting to go crazy already. And so he’s like, “Man, he’s like, this cougar is close. These tracks are really fresh. I’d say within the last couple of hours or something for the dogs to have a reaction like this.” We led those dogs a little bit in through the bush, had our rifles strapped on our backs, and we led them in through the bush for a little ways. And the dogs are just going even more crazy. They’re starting to bark and really pull on that line. They want to get going. So we’re like, okay. He says, “Listen, I’m going to let the dogs go. I think
we’re close. If we’re close to that cougar, we’re going to tree that sucker. We need to let these dogs go so they can get them treed.” We run after them now, this is an exciting time. Like I said, I’m not a cougar hunter. I’ve hunted deer and elk and all of these things before, but I’m always sitting quiet, waiting for it to come out. Cougar hunting is totally different. You’re actually running through the forest, you’re making as much noise as you want. The dogs are kaying and howling and you’re actually running, trying to catch up to them, making all the noise you want. So that’s exactly what happens. He lets the dogs go. They’re gone, I think all four of them. One, two, three. Yeah, all four of them. They are gone after that cougar. So we’re running as fast as we can through the, but as fast as you can through bush and snow and up and down. This is Kootenay country, it’s not that steep. We’re in a level place but lots of snow, fall downs and such as well, so we didn’t have to go too far. We had maybe ran five or ten minutes when those dogs, you can tell that they had treed it because their howl changes, there’s like a chasing, baying howl that they make and then when they get it up the tree there’s another sound, their bay changes and we could hear them just howling fairly close too. Thomas says to me, “I can’t believe they treed the cougar already.” Off we ran as fast as we could, we get all the way to the tree. It wasn’t that far. And here it was. It was kind of a strange situation. We were on level ground but the mountain started right there like this and it was pretty darn steep. And out of that mountain had grown a tree. But the tree was at an angle like this, okay? It had kind of sloped down through the years and it was at quite angle. The cougar had run up and run up that and run up that tree like this, okay? So I’m telling you this because by the time we get there the cougar is hidden in some branches, a big cluster of branches up there. And we could just sort of see it but we can’t make anything out hardly. You can kind of see, couldn’t tell how big it was or not. We could tell it’s a cougar. We could tell where it was. We could tell it was there but we couldn’t really see how big it was yet. When all of a sudden one of the dogs climbs up the bank, gets onto the tree and the tree not being too steep, the dog runs up the tree right into that clump of bush that the cougar is in of those branches that the cougar is in. So then all of a sudden, not a word of a lie, that whole big bush goes as that cougar let out a snarl like you never heard and the whole thing shook. Well, that dog turned around and started coming back down the tree. Luckily it didn’t get the dog but my hunting guide was getting pretty nervous. He was scared. He was really worried that dog would get back up there and get killed by that cougar knocked out of the tree and wounded or killed or something. So without being able to see the cougar and with the danger of the dog and potentially getting killed by the cougar or injured. Thomas says to me, “Spencer, shoot the cougar. Shoot the cougar, and don’t shoot my dog.” So I did. I brought up my gun. This is what I had. Great old Winchester 94 30 30 I’ll tell you a little bit more about that later. But I brought up my gun. You put it dead center in their chest. Put the sights dead center in the chest. Boom. Pull that trigger, and down that cougar comes whomp. He hits the ground there, right in front of us. All the dogs are quickly right on top of it. Very exciting times. I’m smiling. I am grinning from ear to ear. “Hey, check it out. I got my first cougar.” I look over at my hunting guide and friend Thomas, and he’s standing there looking a little like this. I’m wondering what he’s thinking. And all of a sudden, he looks at me and he says, “Damn, Spencer, that is a big cougar.”
So although he was happy for me, I could tell his disappointment of his plan, of him always wanting to get a big cougar. And this had thrown that all off. So sure enough, we grab that cougar, we pull that first, he gets the dogs all off. We let the dogs have a little bit of time with it there to begin with as kind of a reward. And then you get the dogs off of it. And we dragged the cougar out of there. We brought him to his truck, and we drove off to Thomas’s place, clipped my tag, and we drove off to Thomas’s place to hoist it up and start skinning. And we’re also going to butcher this cougar up as well, because you have to eat what you kill. That’s the way it is here in Canada. And I was happy to do so. And happy to report the cougar tastes darn fine. It really does. We did them up. We cut them up into little steaks there, and we did them like in a schnitzel type of thing. Fried it up. You wouldn’t believe how good it is. It’s darn good. No kidding. Anyways, cleaned that cougar up, skinned them all out, butchered them all up during the day there. Had a fabulous rest of the day. And so then what you have to do is to skin the head out so that you can have the skull. You need to boil that skull down. Because how they measure the size of a cougar is just like how they measure the size of a bear. For the record books, it just goes 100% by skull size. So you have to clean that skull all completely out, boil it out, nothing, no remains on it. And then it has to sit for one month. Because there is some shrinking that occurs. So you don’t want to do it right away. Everyone has to let it sit a minimum of one month. Hey, I’ll show you the skull. All right. This is exciting. This is one of the things I was really excited to show you, actually. Look at that. Hey, isn’t that neat? And you wonder just how much a cougar can open his mouth. It’s that much. And if you see what that is, you ain’t going to last long if a cougar comes for you. Because that’s exactly where he’s biting. And his jaw and everything is made to be able to sink into that neck, twist and bite like you wouldn’t believe. Break the neck, tear it open. What it latches onto, it kills. Anyways, that’s the skull. I let that sit for one month. And then I brought it down to local guy a little ways away. But I found a guy who was a record score keeper for the British Columbia record books. And I had that one entered into the record books.
