Dukats Journal of Hunting

It's a fairly economical way to hunt a lion as he doesn't charge you until you kill the lion and you save the lodging and meal expense of the hunt.  For Layne, the hunting is more out of enjoyment than a way to make a living, which makes the hunt all that more relaxed and enjoyable.  Lion hunting is an expensive sport when you figure the cost of feeding the dogs and horses, the trailers, the tack, the barns, the pasture and everthing else that's involved.  You've got to enjoy it.

I finally got the call in April of 08 that my name had reached the top of the list, and it was my turn to chase a lion.  The first call was the night before the hunt due to a cancellation and I couldn't get things arranged to make it.  I called a friend and he filled in as a replacement and killed a lion in the first three hours of his hunt.  I'm never that lucky, so I decided it just wasn't meant to be.  Two weeks later I got the call again and scheduled an early morning rendezvous with a couple cowboys and their hounds.

I'm no cowboy, that's a fact, but I decided to pull out my wranglers and dust off my cowboy hat and at least look the part.  It's not that I've never ridden a horse, I was raised on a ranch, but my father didn't enjoy the cowboying part of the ranching and I followed his lead.  It had been about 20 years since I'd ridden a horse and 25 years since I did it on any regular interval.   I threw on some bird hunting chaps  and dug out my Carhart jacket and was ready for a day of riding.

The dogs got off to an early start and we were soon trailing off through the desert.  My cowboy guide and I had high hopes that we had lucked out with a fresh lion track as the sound of the hounds traveled up a distant canyon.  Unfortunately it stopped as soon as it started, and we found a dead skunk at the end of the trail.  How they managed to kill that skunk without being sprayed, I'll never know how, but they made it out scent free.

We found several scrapes in the dirt along cattle trails.  According to Layne, the male lions are more likely to leave scrapes and you can tell which way a lion is headed by the scrape.  The lion will push the dirt backwards, so the side the dirt is piled on is the opposite of the direction they are headed.  Males will often make a big loop and may take three weeks or more to return to a spot unless a female is in heat in the area or they make a kill.

For the next few hours we rode the hills and canyons trying to find a lion track.  The dogs did get on one more track and spent an hour and a half trying to sort out the trail.  The wind came up to nearly 30 miles per hour and everytime the track would lead to a flat, the dogs would lose the scent.  Several times they found it again, but we finally called them off to try to speed up the chase by moving into some better lion country in a nearby canyon.  They never did rediscover the trail and we had to call it a day once it reached 85 degrees and the wind was getting worse. 

My first day of dry ground lion hunting had come to an end with no lion, but a great day in the outdoors.  Horses are the way to cover country in Arizona and we had seen numerous deer and even had a baby javelina come check us out.  We saw a big lion track not far from the young javelina, and his mother may have provided a midnight snack for Mr. Lion.  We'll never know for sure, but hopefully we will meet one day and I'll ask him.