Bozeman, Mont. – You’ve heard of the sky opening up and raining cats and dogs?
Well, Arnie Duncan just got the cats.
“I turn off the street and come into the driveway and there’s a dead house cat,” the cattleman and lifelong Montanan said, peering down his long driveway.
“I thought, ‘Oh, the kitty cat got hit by a car.’ Then I looked to the side and there’s a dead mountain lion just a few feet away from the dead house cat and I thought, ‘Oh … . “‘
Duncan used a word that, in the language of the cattleman, often follows the word “bull.”
He got out of his car on that recent Friday and surveyed the strange gathering of deceased felines near his rural mailbox. He poked around at the bodies and the mystery didn’t get any clearer. No gunshot wounds. No tire marks. No trace of any kind of injury. But there they were: a 10-pound cat and a young, 65-pound mountain lion lying side by side in his driveway, as lifeless as your Thanksgiving turkey.
Duncan called the regional office of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, which is located just a mile or so down the road, near Montana State University. The receptionist said no one was available to talk with him. Duncan told her he had a dead cat and a dead mountain lion in his driveway. Game warden Mike Ross was standing over the carcasses about six minutes later.
A shocking discovery
The two men stood there awhile, stumped. Then Duncan looked up. Looming some 30 feet overhead were two power lines about 4 feet apart. Ross took out binoculars and looked at the wires. On the top wire was a clump of black fur. Same color as the dead house cat. On the botton wire was a tuft of yellow fur. Same color as the mountain lion.
The mystery had been solved. Duncan and Ross were shocked. Although, obviously, not as badly as the cat and the mountain lion.
“It was like ‘CSI: Bozeman,”‘ Duncan said.
The mountain lion, Duncan and Ross figured, had ambushed the cat in the nearby chokecherry bushes. The cat ran up the power pole. The mountain lion did too.
And there, high above the driveway alongside Duncan’s 160-acre Bozeman homesite – his 15,000-acre ranch is in central Montana – a standoff had occurred.
The cat had balanced, you’d imagine quite nervously, on the top electrical line. The female mountain lion had balanced on the bottom electrical line, thinking she was about to get a tasty treat, which she did not.
Unless you think of 20,000 volts as tasty.
“It was pretty plain once we saw it,” Ross said. “The cat was on the top wire, the mountain lion on the bottom wire, and when the mountain lion grabbed the cat it completed the electrical circuit. I imagine they both died of heart attacks. That’s what electricity does.”
About an hour or so after the smoldering cats had fallen, they were placed in separate body bags and taken to a local vet for further examination. Both had small burn marks from the electricity.
A tasty snack
For the next few days, Duncan and his wife, Bridget Cavanaugh, went door to door in the rural neighborhood, looking for the owner of the cat. No one reported such a cat missing.
“It was well taken care of,” Cavanaugh said. “But no one claimed it. I’d seen the same cat a few times in the hayfield across the street.”
The mountain lion was about a year old, Ross said. Born weighing less than a pound, they can reach 90 pounds within the first year, growing quickly by eating voraciously. An adult in good wildlife habitat can eat between 30 and 50 deer a year.
And when opportunity knocks – or runs up a power pole – they’ll go after much smaller animals too.
“They’re here, and they’re out now looking for food as winter moves in,” Ross said. “They eat cats and small dogs all the time. They grab them quite regularly. Although I’ve never even heard of a mountain lion chasing a cat up a pole. Until now.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
