Right when I sat up, the deer, or elk, whatever they were, ran through camp across the draw and up the other side. Just then I heard the worst scream I ever heard in my life. I know what blood-curdling means now, and I get goose-bumps typing this . Right on the rim, something screamed again, and I stood straight up, popped off 3 rounds right at where I thought the lion was, and started hollering for all I was worth. I popped off another 3 and hollered some more.
I built up the fire, after that.
Sycamore
I have a few stories related that
All happened when I was a teenager.
1. one summer night I was laying in bed. I had a sliding glass door going into my room and had the door open with the screen in place. I was jolted out of bed by what sounded to me like a woman screaming in terror. I thought my neighbor , who had some mental problems in the past, was beating his wife. Turns out is a Bobcat ( I assume) but that noise it made was terrifying to someone in a dead sleep. Had some relatives come visit that summer and they brought their camper. They were in the front yard in the camper and it did it again outside their camper. Its scared the [bleep] out of them. They were running around the yard in whatever they slept in trying to figure out what was happening.
2. My dad decided he was going to raise rabbits one year so he got 10 or 12 and built some pretty heavy duty raised hutches about 4' off the ground for them. They had screen fronts made of galvanized steel mesh -not chicken wire - the 1/2"x1/2" grid steel mesh.
One night in the late fall - I know it was cold enough to frost, something came thru and ripped open that mesh on each cage, killed every rabbit and drug off 2 or 3 of them with it.
We decided to leave things as they were and bring in a game warden to get an idea of what did but he wasn't available until a couple of days later. That night, whatever killed them came back and got another 2 or 3 rabbits.
After that we got rid of everything.
3. That winter my father was in the living room and he called out to me to grab my gun so I grabbed a double barrel 16 gauge I had and went to him. He told me he just saw a large black cat walk up the hill across the street from us, so I took off after it. Of course there was probably a 5 minute delay between when he saw it and me getting out of the house.
Now I know everyone has heard a "black panther/jaguar" story but I found its tracks in the snow and followed the tracks until they went into a field. I lost them after that but it was clear this wasn't some figment of his imagination.
What I do know is some dog couldn't have done that, and I doubt a Bobcat could have.
