by John Kulish
Although their tracks seem to zigzag aimlessly, cats do not meander. They know where they are going and how to get there. One of their peculiarities, while traveling in deep snow, is the way cats take advantage of any available means to keep from sinking. Suppose there is a stand of large spruce trees fifteen or twenty feet apart, whose branches hang close to the snow. The cat will climb onto the outer end of a suitable branch, claw its way to the tree trunk, and then continue its chosen direction by tightrope walking down another propitious branch on the opposite side. Thence on to the next tree via mountain monorail.
Any cat will follow the top of a long windrow of brush left by loggers in a chopped-out area. Naturally, for many years after the 1938 hurricane, they took advantage of the blowdowns covering thousands of acres of mountain slopes. Whenever I approached a blowdown of forty-foot spruces, bare of small branches, and lying tip to trunk, the plural cat and dog tracks would end. The hound’s tracks would go on alone. After walking on the fallen trees for more than a quarter-mile, I could still look down and see only his trail weaving through the brush. When the blowdown ended, the track of the cat would suddenly reappear. Like me, it had crossed on the tree trunks, taking the elevated, while the dog struggled in the subway, his nose telling him only that the other traveler was somewhere above and ahead.
In ordinary travel the measured step of a cat is approximately eighteen inches. Whenever snow is more than four inches deep, Tom has a tendency to slide his paws in at an angle, quite unlike a fox, who puts one paw directly ahead of the other. In deep snow, where only the indentation and not the pads can be seen, a large cat track resembles the hoofprint of a deer, partly because their strides are similar. When danger threatens, we run faster, leap farther, and climb higher. Cats react the same way.
Like all wild creatures, bobcats are unique and consistent in their personal habits. They usually defecate near ledges, atop boulders, and along the high land of abandoned tote roads. The droppings consist of bones and fur, an occasional broken or bent porcupine quill or two, the fur of both red or gray squirrels, and sometimes, during the winter months, the coarse hair of a deer. A wildcat has many of the same instincts as his half-domesticated relative, particularly in the area of hiding the evidence. It tries to cover its scat with disorderly swipes which are naturally more casual than those of its more cultured kin. I once met a bobcat who considered a more sophisticated approach.
But to begin at the beginning. It was still dark when I edged my rubber-bottomed, leather-topped boots into the resisting leather of snowshoe harnesses, stiff with cold. Leaning over to fasten the buckles, my unmittened fingers were begging to be housed again. It wasn’t going to be a day for dilly-dallying. I had barely limbered up when I came across the spoor of a large cat. Like many tracks, it had been made in the early part of the previous evening. It was hours old. Should I take it? The size of the pad helped me decide. My four-legged business associate approved wholeheartedly and together we began to “work out” the trail.
“Working out” is a literal phrase when applied to tracking a cat, especially when, like this one, it led over one steep mountain range, several dense, snow-neck-filling swamps, and too many trouser- and temper-tearing blowdowns. The sun had slipped behind Nancy Mountain when the trace finally zigzagged into a small clearing behind an isolated camp on the shores of a forsaken pond. Seeming to sense that the premises had been abandoned for several months, my bewhiskered will-o’-the-wisp made its way through a small thicket and, as if by intent, came up to the camp’s outhouse. For some reason the latch was up and the door partly open. The winter’s snows had built up around the building, and a dusting of snow had been blown onto the floor. The tracks approached the door with no apparent questioning. They showed it had been opened wider and the facilities scrutinized with crude excitement, before the animal regained its dignity and went on its way. It was worth the twenty-mile excursion on snowshoes to find out that a man-made two-holer didn’t quite fit Tom’s standards.
In the area of oral communication, wildcats are oftentimes given credit for speeches they don’t deliver. Rabbit hunters tell me they have heard bobcats snarling in swamps. Some farmers insist they have heard bobcats screaming behind their barns at night. The nocturnal vocalizing is real enough, but it emanates from the throat of a fox. From the spring melting to the fall ice, I have heard their yapping countless times. I have heard it summer nights while training fox hounds. I have heard it on a frosty evening while pout fishing. Most people associate the verb “yapping” with barking. Both words are woefully inadequate when describing the goose-bump-raising sound made by a fox at night. It is a scream a maiden in dire distress could use or a banshee could boast about.
I am particularly intrigued by the claims made by responsible biologists and naturalists, who assert that wildcats prowl around the woods yowling and screaming. Surely, eyes must twinkle when the statement is made that cats squall while stalking a quarry in order to paralyze it with terror. Have you ever watched a house cat stalk a chipmunk or a bird? Silent as a snake, it slithers forward on its stomach, and Tabby isn’t even hungry. Consider its wild cousin. For half of each year, nature locks the door to her larder and buries the key under several feet of ice and snow. Food is hard to find. Keeping one’s belly full is a bond we share with wild animals.
Suppose you were lost in the wilderness. It has snowed for three days. You have not eaten in six. When the storm abates, you begin to stalk a deer. Would you shout, “Look out, up ahead, here I come! I’m going to kill you!”
Accepted authorities on nature have written that, when mating, wildcats screech and scream. Thousands of hours of my life have been devoted to studying the bobcat. I have spent many months, of many years, hunting it in its own element. I have yet to hear a sound from a cat that was free, whether sexually stimulated or not. I believe the cat’s mating is compulsive, quick, and silent.
I remember an early March day after a prolonged period of bitterly cold weather when the rutting season was at its height. When I had entered the woods at daybreak, the dry, frozen snow had carried on a conversation with my snowshoes for the seven miles up onto Willard Mountain. By ten o’clock, the sky clouded over and the temperature spurted upward. Within an hour, the snow was soft and porous. While descending the northwest slope I came across cat tracks of various sizes made since the sudden thaw set in. A closer examination revealed that a quartet was traveling together. During the rut, one naturally expects to see two bobcats together, occasionally even a trio, but never four. Experience and common sense told me it must be a single female being courted by three males. The tracks were only minutes old. We were in a large chopping, covered with long windrows of snow-covered brush from which occasional dead branches protruded. Threatening black clouds rolled over the peak like cannonballs. Suddenly, the world was small and dark. What an opportunity for a sighting!
For nearly an hour I stalked the quartet. I am sure they heard me, but they did not panic, nor did they head in any definite direction. Around and around we zigzagged, many times so close to one another that I could almost smell cat. I never caught a glimpse of one. The only sound was that of my own breathing. How I wish the cats had squalled!
Trapped or wounded, and forced to fight for its life, a cat will snarl and spit while making savage swipes at its tormentor. Under natural conditions, though they are many things, bobcats are not vocal. I welcome an invitation from anyone who has observed a squalling cat. I am willing to spend several midwinter nights in a sleeping bag to be proved wrong or right. It seems to me that too many assumptions are made about wild animal behavior. Or could it be a matter of geography? Influenced by a dour environment, the New England Yankee tends to be a taci-turn cuss. Do you suppose it could apply to New Hampshire cats as well?
All wild animals, except the beaver and the otter, have a real struggle to survive during the long winter months. Unrelenting, constant cold triggers thermostats. Hard-pressed boilers demand more and more fuel. Most of summer’s
snack bars are closed. Several feet of snow covers the communal pantry. Cats have an especially rough time. The gullible young partridges and rabbits have grown up; the chipmunks are sleeping and the woodchucks hibernating; the varying hare is harder and harder to find.
The varying hare, commonly called the snowshoe rabbit, is the wildcat’s chief source of food. Cats get a rabbit dinner only by surprise, never by pursuit. If hunting conditions are ideal, they average one hare a night. They eat it, head and all, leaving only the last two inches of the hind feet. Evidently, they don’t like the snowshoe harnesses. Tom’s menu also includes red and gray squirrels. Cats do not catch these creatures in trees, but stalk them as they do hare at their usual hunting pace: walk silently . . . freeze . . . wait . . . steady . . . one paw · in front of the other . . . stop . . . freeze . . . wait . . . bound, bound, clutch.
Occasionally, before the freeze-up, a cat will pick up a teenage beaver cutting logs on a side hill away from the pond. In midwinter, cats often torture themselves by climbing onto the melted south cones of beaver lodges, to stare down, blunt noses pressed against frozen mud and sticks, at the delicious tenants below.
The bobcat also fancies porcupine fillet and, when pressed for food, will kill a small one. Someone else has to do the dirty work where the big ones are concerned. Any man with hunting dogs has a personal vendetta with all porcupines. They already owe him at least the cost of one trip to a veterinarian’s. So he shoots any “porky” on sight. A cat will never pass by a dead one, but will approach these free dinners carefully. After turning the carcass over onto its pincushion back, it tackles the soft under-side with gusto, eating all but the hide and quills. I often find quills deeply imbedded around a cat’s mouth. Like me, they have learned the hard way that no one gets something for nothing.
Many sportsmen believe that the bobcat menaces our deer herd. This is not true, even though they enjoy deer meat as much as I do. On the contrary, as charter members of nature’s Survival of the Fittest Program, they help to maintain a healthy herd. Full-grown, healthy deer may be half-starved, but can still keep out of Big Kitty’s reach if they don’t do anything foolish. Evidence of such foolishness is seldom found in cat scat. When coming near deer that have not yet yarded up for the winter, a cat’s hunting walk will suddenly change into eight- and nine-foot bounds. Anywhere from five to a dozen leaps will end at a still steaming deer bed. Have you ever watched “sleeping” deer through binoculars? They tuck their lean legs under their bodies, which remain motionless. Not so the head. Rarely down for more than a few seconds, it jerks up to scan every inch of its bedroom. A startled deer takes leaps fifteen feet long. It lifts up with a thrust that rockets it into action. A marauding cat finds only the still hot takeoff pad, enveloped in clouds of rotting leaves and snow.
On rare occasions a good-sized cat does pull down a deer, but only during the bitter end of a bad winter. By then the whitetails have lived in their yards for almost two months and have browsed all the available food, even to the point of standing up on their hind legs to reach higher branches. Because size limits the reach, the yearling deer suffer the most. Malnutrition weakens them mentally as well as physically. Panicked by a prowling cat, they will sometimes leave the comparative safety of the yard, where the snow has been trodden down. To leap into the deeper snow beyond is to wallow helplessly. Whether walking on melting crust or on four inches of fresh powder atop three feet of packed snow, a cat can improvise snowshoes by spreading out its toes; whereas, betrayed by its hooves, the enfeebled deer is belly-deep in agony the moment it leaves the yard. Now the cat has the upper paw.
After the kill, a cat gorges itself on the fresh meat. A good-sized tom will eat six or more pounds of deer meat in a single night. Following the banquet, it straightens out the dining room by getting on top of the carcass to scrape snow, hair, and blood over the messy remains. It thinks it has done a perfect cleanup job so that no one else can recognize its meat storage. As far as other cats are concerned, the camouflage is perfect. From seventy-five yards away on an open, windswept ridge, I have identified one of their caches: white snow, red blood, brown hair. The evidence convinces me that bobcats, like all other furred creatures, are color-blind.
After dinner, the gourmet searches out a close-by rock shelf facing the sun, to sleep there in true tiger fashion. It is “eat and sleep” in delightful rotation until only the deer’s chassis remains. Then the cat will resume its roaming. But it always revisits the skeleton. The memory lingers on as Big Kitty regnaws a skull, picked clean several weeks before.
Cats never dine together. I have found deer on which two had been feeding. The sign told me they were from the same litter, but they never ate supper at the same time. The snow revealed the Cain and Abel struggle. The stronger one couldn’t stand to share a steak, even with its brother. “Cain” gorged himself while “Abel” hungrily paced around and around just outside the steak house. Hunger sometimes overcame fear long enough for “Abel” to attempt a lunge and a quick bite. With exacting peevishness, the bully drove him away. Finally, glutted into a stupor, “Cain” will curl up on a nearby ledge to sleep. The waiting “Abel” soon learns that only time and intemperance are his allies.
For bobcats, a happy by-product of deer hunting season is gut piles. They find frozen deer plumbing irresistible. To cats, these visceral mounds, strung out through the woods, are a chain of Howard Johnson’s, recommended by Tabby Hines.
Because most wildcats hate to get wet, they will take a long detour to avoid even crossing a brook. They swim only when forced to choose between life and a big, black hound hot on their tail.
It had been an unusually cold day in the Somerset country of southern Vermont. All morning I had been snowshoeing hard, with the double-barreled purpose of finding a track and of keeping warm. The results on either score were meager. Ahead of me, my four-legged business associate jerked up his head, then thrust down his nose. The snow was pockmarked with prints. Obviously, more than one cat had been responsible for the “fox and geese” design. From all directions the tracks converged into a balsam thicket. Even before pushing aside the sharp needles, I knew what was there. Just as in New Hampshire, all roads led to Ye Olde Steak House.
The chase was as short as the cat’s breath ; within twenty minutes Jiggs was barking “treed.” Stretched out on the broken-off top of a tall dead spruce, a snarling cat glared down at its enemies. The shotgun spoke and the dead cat’s wide downward arc ended on the snow. Jiggs leaped to grab his prize. I hung the limp body in a crotch of a nearby tree. Its rival still lurked in the vicinity, so we made our way back up to the cafeteria. The state of Vermont pays a ten dollar bounty. In order to maintain my minimum wage, both cats were necessary.
Within minutes, the dog “jumped” the other cat. Judging by the way it took off, it must have been “number two” at dinner. Running in a line drawn straight by panic, the cat tumbled pell-mell down a mountainside. My snowshoes substituted for skis to slide down the steepest dropoffs. When the baying signified “half-treed,” curiosity spurred my stride. The dog was running back and forth on what appeared to be the edge of a cliff. Edging head and shoulders over a sheer cornice of solid snow five feet high, I stared down at the black current of the Middle Branch of the Deerfield River. It was like looking into a huge vat full of boiling ink. Three miles above, at Somerset Reservoir, tons of water gushed out from under the dam, generating a current too swift to freeze. But where was the cat? Then I saw it.
Sometime in the past, a large tree had toppled into the river and the angry current had swiveled it diagonally downstream. The frantic bobcat had leaped onto the bobbing trunk, scrambled out to the very last branches, and while still forty feet from the opposite shore, it dove into the icy water. From the end of the fallen tree the current carried the cat seventy feet downstream before it could clamber up the opposite bank to safety.
The hound’s big body quivered as he waited for my “Get him!” Next to hunting, he liked swimming best. He was ne
ither as agile, as light, nor as well equipped with claws as his adversary. He might drown trying to climb that opposite bank.
“Good Kitty Guy,” I said, turning away and patting his brainy black head. “Not today . . . maybe tomorrow.”
7. Such Hounds, Such Headaches!
Hounds are the workhorses of dogdom. They put in long hours, endure rugged conditions, expend great amounts of energy, often experience frustration. The bobcat hound works longest and hardest of them all. He must contend with snow, ice, blowdowns, swamps, exhaustion, and sometimes with boredom as well as excitement. When it snows, he doesn’t roll over and go back to sleep. He’s up and ready before his master’s belt is buckled.
When Mr. Average Hunter buys a hound, he thinks his dog is perfect—just like his kids.
“John, I got a helluva good cat dog!”
“That so? How many cats did you get last winter?”
“Two.” (With a dog like that, a professional hunter would starve.)
For some reason, few men can face the truth about their hound dogs. They may confess disappointment in the woman they married, or in the children they fathered. Never in a hunting dog.
As a hound-dog man, I have trained many, cussed a few, and loved and respected two: Tim and Jiggs. You can always tell a good hound. Like a good man, he earns his keep. He knows what he’s supposed to do—and does a little more. In many ways, dogs are like people. There are many breeds, many colors, with every one a surprise package—or a Pandora’s box.