by John Kulish
A week after his near-fatal ordeal, we were back in the woods. I was snowshoeing along the backbone of a minor ridge. Fifty yards below and paralleling it, was a narrow ravine where Jiggs was zigzagging in search of a track. My heart lurched. Seventy yards ahead, a huge porcupine was waddling across the ravine at right angles to the dog. Jiggs froze. His ears moved forward into battle position. He could see a creature moving but because a slight, downwind breeze was blowing, he could not smell its identity.
Once again I could see him on the operating table. Once again I could feel the agony. Only an instant remained before the attack. Both hands cupped my mouth. The silence was shattered by a shout, “DOC-TOR DON-O-VAN!”
Jiggs’s ears uncocked. His head dropped. Tail between his legs, he backed up slowly, looked up at me, then slunk up the knoll to get into my snowshoe tracks. Whoever the enemy, he wasn’t worth another Purple Heart.
In battle, Jiggs was a Sir Winston Churchill. The greater the odds, the fiercer the fight. Nor was he afraid to abandon a lost cause—temporarily. He had had a few Dunkirks of his own. They just made him hunt harder. This is where brains took over, for Jiggs could make decisions and follow them through. Each day, I knew what I could do, and I knew my partner would do even more. Because we were both willing to go until dark without stopping to eat or to rest, cats didn’t get much sleep.
Whenever tracks were scarce, the whole load shifted onto his rugged shoulders. After as many as six barren days, we’d stare down at snowed-in spoor. Jiggs would study me while I studied the evidence. Big Kitty was many hours and miles ahead, but suppose a fresher track crossed this one up ahead? Should we gamble? If we followed the trail together, I would set the pace. But in cat country, four-wheel drive is better than two.
“Go get him, Kitty Guy,” I’d decide. “Shift into high. I’ll back you up.”
One could not do this with an ordinary dog, but I trusted him completely. By sight, he could tell the difference between a cat track and one made by any other creature. Even the gray fox couldn’t fool him. If, after a half-day, our gamble paid off, he would take the better track without hesitating. He made decisions on his own exactly as though I were there, using my own knowledge, based on my own experience.
A ten-mile scouting trip into enemy territory was not unusual for him. He gave up only when he found his quarry already bedded down in a ledge, or when it had crossed a frozen lake that the wind had swept clean. Terrain and weather made no difference to us. We just modified our tactics.
Some winters were worse than others, for Mother Nature makes many different kinds of snow. The heavy, wet variety that packs as it falls, is a snowshoer’s delight. Thaw brings crust. The breakable kind shatters like glass, drawing blood from men, dogs, and snowshoes. Occasionally, we got buried with powder. For weeks on end, zero temperatures revived only long enough to dump another foot or two of feathers onto a base that was already impossible to hunt in. It was like wading hip-deep through down. Jiggs would plunge in and swim, leaving a trail as though a prime log had been dragged through, except for the tail marks that flopped from side to side. Finding a track was impossible. Cats had as much trouble snowshoeing as I did. But, day after day, we would persevere. I had an A-1 dog, legs like a mountain goat, and a mortgage on my house.
One time, it took us three days to pack down a three-mile-long trail into a rabbit swamp. Each morning we took up our highway construction where we had left off the night before.
“Stay in my trail, Kitty Guy,” I urged. “Save your strength for what’s ahead.” But, giant that he was, he chose to shack on either side, his rime-covered muzzle a periscope in the sea of snow.
Late on the third day, we plowed into snowshoe hare country, where rabbits were born, lived their two-year life spans, and died without ever seeing a human being. This was also the hub of bobcat universe. In the tangled alders between spruce-covered knolls, the hare had beaten down troughs a foot deep along their feeding trails. The day before, a cat, walking gingerly in them, had sunk but an inch. I could almost feel cat close by. Jiggs began to bay. Back and forth he crisscrossed the supermarket, with me weaving about in the aisles trying to intercept the customer. Before long, both dog and cat tracks were appearing where I had been only minutes before.
“Well, John,” I thought, “it’s time to pick a checkout counter.” I climbed a likely spruce knoll and listened as Jiggs drove closer and closer. Suddenly a cat, using the trail I had just made, darted toward me. The blast almost singed Jiggs’s whiskers. Our three days of road building had paid off at $6.67 a day.
During the fourth year of our partnership we hit our stride. One morning we were up, had driven fifteen miles, snowshoed three, and had jumped our first cat, by the time most other people were thinking about having breakfast. High up on Osgood Mountain, the pulse-quickening sound of Kitty Guy’s “I can see him, John” bark, urged the safety off my gun. And not a moment too soon, for a twenty-five-pound bounty leaped up through the rubble toward me. The gun spoke, once, then twice, and both times with authority. The cat disappeared behind a boulder. Turning to welcome Jiggs, my eyes popped. A second cat, as big as the first, dashed toward me. One shot dropped it, and before another round could be pumped, Jiggs appeared. To my amazement, he ran by the still quivering cat and out of sight behind the boulder where the first one had disappeared. I scrambled up the rock pile. Jiggs and the cat were locked in a death struggle. The dying cat had wrapped its claws around the dog’s head. As they thrashed about, snarls and fangs intermingled. It was too risky for me to shoot. No club was available so, raising the stock of my shotgun, I waited my chance. The weapon crashed down on the cat’s skull. Spattering blood, Jiggs shook himself free. Except for an ear torn in the struggle, he was intact.
“Kitty Guy,” I apologized, “next time, I’ll either shoot straighter or run faster.”
Full-grown cats don’t usually run tandem. Unknown to each other, these two had been hunting the same swamp at the foot of the mountain. Soon after Jiggs had jumped one, it headed for that rock pile. When the chase threatened the second cat, I discovered that scared cats run in the same channels. Because cats have such poor noses, they couldn’t smell each other. Barely out of one another’s sight, they sought safety in the same sanctuary.
To a hound, each kitty has its own special perfume. As far as Jiggs was concerned, there was but one cat to chase—the one wearing Chanel Number 5. The second cat surprised him as much as it did me.
By one o’clock the two bounties were cached in the truck. Blood still dripped from Jiggs’s ear.
“Well, Kitty Guy,” I suggested, “how about tackling their third cousin up on Thunder Mountain?”
When we caught up with the relative, visible flames shot out of the barrel of my shotgun into the night. As a crow flies, I was nine miles from Osgood Mountain. I wasn’t a crow, but a man in a hurry with a pack, a gun, and a third dead wildcat. Above me, the tip of the mountain punched a hole into the clouds; snow spilled out. Now came the chore of finding my way back through the dark to my truck, four miles away. Human eyes that are used to the out-of-doors develop antennae. A couple of hours later, with the help of my compass and a reassuring muzzle thrust regularly into my mittened hand, I reached the highway.
My wife ran out of the house to greet me. “I’ll bet you don’t even realize it’s nine below. As a matter of fact, it never got above zero all day; the wind blew so hard I had to fight to open the shed door.” Her eyes widened when she saw a month’s groceries stretched out in the pickup. She hugged Jiggs. “John,” she chuckled, “when it comes to picking women and dogs, you’re in a class by yourself.”
After supper, as late as it was, I called the local conservation officer. State law requires that dead cats be turned over to a game warden within forty-eight hours. I wanted a few hours’ grace. Three inches of powder had already erased today’s writing. It was still snowing. I wanted to start tomorrow’s story early. The next morning I surprised the sun above timberline as it popp
ed over Mt. Monadnock, making it blush so hard the snow fields turned rosy pink. Before noon a thirty-pound tom was stretched out behind the truck’s seat. Then, after a thirty-mile drive north, Jiggs and I raced the sun to reach an isolated swamp offering fresh rabbit à la carte. Two hours after dark our fifth cat in two days joined a relative in the pickup.
The next day the conservation officer arrived. I helped him carry 135 pounds of cats from my garage into his car. Jiggs and I had stretched our sinews that weekend.
Kitty Guy’s fame spread and, when he was seven, I refused a thousand dollars for him. “Would you sell your wife or your children?” I asked the would-be buyer. My wife summed it up cheerfully, “If Jiggs could cook, I’d be out of a job.”
For me, one trademark of a true cat hunter is the improvised rawhide sling on his shotgun. Inching up over icy rock piles or hauling oneself up mountainsides so steep the butts of the trees one clutches are almost horizontal, requires both hands. So does grabbing tree trunks to break one’s plunge back down over the ledges.
That morning, I thought wryly of my clients who gush, “Boy, John, are you lucky to earn your living the way you do!” Ten inches of fresh snow covered the frozen ground—not quite enough to use snowshoes comfortably; a little too much for walking without them. In the half-light I looked up at the shadowy string of mountains looming north and south four miles ahead. Hopefully, a cat track waited near one of the half-dozen peaks. A couple of hours, two swamps, and three blowdowns later, I started toward the fourth blowdown, which, in previous years, had often produced the spoor I was looking for. I had picked my way up a quarter-mile of cliffs when Jiggs looked down at me from a ledge. Cocking his ears and stiffening his muscular body was his way of telling me he’d found a good track. By grabbing the stunted trees growing aslant out of the steep slope, I hoisted myself up to his level. He had indeed found a cat track, one barely an hour old.
“Get him!” I exhorted.
Within minutes, he began to bay in the blowdown above. Up and down the mountain they went, traversing the base four times before racing out of hearing. Soon the baying came back, to veer away once more. I moved further among the windrows of fallen trees which crisscrossed the slope. Through the latticework beneath me, I could see a mosaic of cat and dog tracks. This was the place to grab the brass ring on this merry-go-round.
Suddenly, not more than twenty yards away, the cat jumped noiselessly onto a fallen tree, head turned in the direction of its pursuer. The moment I moved, it would see me. My hasty shot blew the cat off the log, just as Jiggs arrived underneath the blowdown to claim his prize. I expected to hear the thrashing sounds of him shaking the cat. Instead, he yowled and plunged down the steepest side of the mountain. I hop-skipped-and-jumped to where the cat had somersaulted off the log. The snow was spattered with blood. The victim had dragged itself down toward some glacial rocks, piled boulder upon boulder, two hundred yards below. Jiggs had stopped baying.
At the upper end of the half-mile-long rock slide a frantic dog met me. He was running round and round the bloody trail where his quarry had dragged itself under the foremost boulder. I could hear the cat’s labored breathing, then the death rattle.
Now only silence. To me, this wasn’t just a cat; it was my day’s wage. I had a wife, two children and payments to meet on my house. I knew Tom wasn’t far underneath, but the opening was too small, the rocks covering it too big. For more than an hour I tried in every primitive way available to get at my day’s pay. With my jackknife I cut down a long green sapling, trimmed off the branches except for a single sharp hook on one end, and pushed this into the crevice under the boulder, hoping to snag the cat. It had been done on other rock piles under similar circumstances. The sapling bent underneath the boulder. I located the obstructing stone, but because it held a much larger one on its shoulders, there was no chance of getting at the bounty. If this one stone could be removed, I could hook onto Tom. I finally gave up—but only for that day. I didn’t intend to throw in the towel after the first round.
It was midafternoon of a January day and I had left my pay in a rock pile. How to get it? During the summer months, road agents in our small New Hampshire towns have a use for dynamite. In winter, whatever is left over is a nuisance because, once frozen, it loses its effectiveness. My own town was larger than the average village and had a correspondingly well-equipped highway department. It must have a surplus of dynamite. I understood explosives, because, during summers, I had done blasting for a living. My spirits soared. I knew what to do. But Jiggs was disappointed. He had failed to sink his fangs into the warm body of a bobcat—a big one at that.
“Good Kitty Guy,” I comforted, patting his canny black head. “Not today. Maybe tomorrow.”
At dusk I knocked on the road agent’s door. Henry had twenty-two sticks of dynamite. He was delighted to have me take them off his hands for a dollar. That left nineteen dollars in the rock pile and furnished me with a big surplus of power. After supper I visited a friend who has a complete workshop. Alfred was as interested in tools as I was in animals. With his know-how and my specifications we produced a rod about six feet long and a quarter-inch in diameter. Holding it in a vise, he fashioned a pointed hook on one end and then twisted the other into a looped handle. Now I was fully prepared.
The next morning, it was still dark when I waited while Jiggs went through his before-the-hunt, tree-to-tree ritual. Two sweaty hours later we reached the rock pile. I took the dynamite out of my pack, wrapped a cord around the sticks to form a solid bundle, took out the fuse, inserted it into the blasting cap, punched a hole into one of the sticks, pushed the cap in, and folded the dynamite gelatin over the rupture. With a long pole the package was pushed under the blocking boulder. Jiggs had been eyeing me all the while. I snapped a leather leash onto his collar and hooked the loop onto a sapling to make sure he would stay with me. This was no time to take chances.
The twelve-inch fuse was lighted. It started to sparkle. I scooped up my gun and pack, grabbed the Ol’ Guy’s leash, and sprinted three hundred feet. There, parallel to the rock pile, I crouched behind a two-foot-thick beech tree, making sure that Jiggs was firmly between my legs.
A roar shook the ground. Even the beech tree trembled. Waves of sound banged around the mountainsides. Large and small stones rained in an angry shower. Jiggs delighted in the blast of a shotgun. But he’d never heard a noise like this one! Released, he raced toward the disrupted rock pile. A halo of blue smoke hung over the hole. Rubble lay scattered everywhere. The big boulder had splintered and rolled away, opening the cat’s tomb. I got down on hands and knees to push aside the broken stones. It was still not possible to see our quarry. The iron rod was guided into the opening, and moved around at arm’s length until it touched something which wasn’t stone. Now came the job of hooking onto the body and dragging it toward me. It slipped off. I lay prone to reach with my arm up to the armpit. Fingers touched the hind leg of a twenty-dollar bill, minus that dollar for dynamite.
10. The Longest Day
Most hunters envy a guide’s ruddy complexion, covet his flat belly, and delight in his earthy, backwoods philosophy until an easy shot is missed or an animal wounded. Then they learn that the woods hath no wrath like a guide listening to excuses. Guiding taught me much about human behavior, especially my own. I’m still not sure whether I learned to understand people because they are so much like wild animals, or wild animals because they are so much like people.
All the men I guided shared a common emotion about my way of life, even though some of them earned more in one month than I did all year.
“Boy, John, do we envy you! You don’t know what it’s like to be frustrated. How can you understand days in an office when nothing goes right?”
Move over, gentlemen. There are days when a professional woodsman also wishes he had never gotten out of bed. Consider that day on Surry Mountain.
It had started out like any other day. As I struggled to strap on my snowshoes, there wasn’t
enough light to see the buckle holes in the harnesses. Shotgun loaded and slung over my back, the three of us started up the only gradual approach to the summit. There were three, for this morning, Kitty Guy’s son, Chocolate, accompanied us. Though only sixteen months old, he had all the makings of his sire. Father was going to teach son. There’s no better way—if Ol’ Dad knows his stuff.
The presence of a younger partner roused a typical male reaction in the older dog. Casting on either side of me, the dogs ranged farther than usual. The morning was middle-aged when they “opened up” on a track so hot they had vanished out of hearing by the time I reached the jumping-off place. In the snow were the tracks of a pair of rutting cats. A quarter of a mile up the mountain, the two separated when survival had overcome sex. Both hounds stuck to one kitty. I looked at my watch. It was nine-thirty. My chances of bagging cat number one were good. Once treed, there would still be time to retrace my trail to try for the other. Confident of a forty-dollar day, I took off, whistling under my breath and with an extra spring in my stride.
For the next two hours, the hunt took me over ridges, down gullies, through swamps, over the crest into a valley, back over my own trail, and finally, to the brink of big Surry Reservoir. A grin wrinkled my cheeks as a west wind blew the sweet sound of hounds baying “treed” toward me. It was midday and the first bounty was up a tree. Eagerly, the descent began, but because the ridge was so steep, my snowshoes became a hazard. Long, narrow, with turned-up toes, they responded to the pitch like skis. Off they came, to be upended in a snowdrift.
I slid down the precipice to reach a narrow shelf running across the face of the slope. Moving cautiously along ice-encrusted rock, I reached the dogs. Bawling and bounding, they were trying to climb a tall, straight pine tree. From forty feet above, a large cat’s tiger eyes glared down. Because the first shot is the one that counts, careful aim was taken. I squeezed the trigger. A flat click startled me mote than the accustomed roar. Berating the inspectors in a shell factory, I worked the pump, took deliberate aim and pulled. Click. Frantically, I pumped the action and yanked the trigger. Two more shells flew beside the first three. Groping in the snow, I picked up two of them. No impression from a firing pin indented the primers. The breech flew open; the bolt was examined. The firing pin was gone!