Details emerge after hunter's standoff with snarling cougar
A hunter has revealed details about his stare-down with a snarling cougar last month in the Montana wilderness – an encounter his (...)
A hunter has revealed details about his standoff with a snarling cougar last month in the Montana wilderness – an encounter his partner caught on video.
Janis Putelis, during a Meat Eaters Podcast episode, revealed that the cougar was a kitten, perhaps a year old, weighing 40 pounds, and that Putelis was concerned enough for his safety that he raised his shotgun to scare off the critter.
“That movement was enough to spook it, and then its sibling spooked, and momma spooked off, too,” Putelis recalled. (See the video below.)
Putelis and Zach Sandau had ventured into dense brush during opening weekend of Montana’s turkey hunting season.
“Down in the gully off to my right, I hear… in my mind it registers [simply] as air coming out of an animal’s mouth,” Putelis says in the podcast. “[But there] might have been a touch more grrr or growl to it….
“Right after that I can hear footsteps. Soft pads, but a little bit of crunching of pine needles and detritus.”
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Putelis, who was sitting beneath a tree during a break from calling turkeys, asked Sandau to document the encounter with his phone. He figured a bear was approaching “because that’s what I’m expecting in this landscape.”
But then he saw tan hide and guessed it was a deer. But the long tails were a dead giveaway: The turkey calls had apparently attracted a “three pack” of mountain lions.
Momma kept her distance but the kittens “caught our movements” and approached, softly growling. The cougar shown in the video was bolder, approaching to within 15 yards.
It crouched and snarled, and that’s when Putelis clutched his shotgun.
“At that point I’m like, ‘Alright, that’s enough of that,’ ” he says. “I then took my shotgun from my lap and I pointed it at it, and that movement was enough to spook it.”
Almost immediately the distant turkeys that had been so vociferous went silent, realizing a threat was in their midst.
Said Putelis: “There was no more clucking, no yelping, no gobbling, and we hiked around that mountain for another 30 minutes and they were gone.”