Staring down a full-grown mountain lion at 10 yards can make a hunter edgy, even if he is holding a .300 Remington Ultra Magnum rifle.

“The thing I remember most is how big her eyes were,” said Helena, Montana, hunter Trevor Johnson. “Remember those weird kids’ toys with big oversized eyes? That’s what they reminded me of. Only they were beautiful.

“It was the craziest thing. She got low to the ground like she was going to pounce. She was so close I could see her huge forearms. Her forearms were incredible, like a body builder’s. Just huge.

“Her dang tail was going front to back, just going crazy, like she was trying to mesmerize me to distract me. I was really nervous at that point.”

Tough cookie

Johnson is a hardcore hunter, angler and co-owner with his father, Kit Johnson, of a tackle manufacturing business in Helena. He regularly regales readers of his blog posts with incredible and enthusiastic tales of hiking far into the mountains at zero-dark thirty to hunt elk with his dad. But on this trip he was all alone, deep in the craggy mountains north of Helena, well known for their likeness of a sleeping giant.

He’d gone out on that day before Thanksgiving in search of a cow elk. The fresh snow on the ground showed no recent elk activity. So after scanning a basin with binoculars from a ridge top, he began circling around in hopes of cutting a track. Instead, he found what he thought was a wolf track.

With no elk around, Johnson decided to follow the track. In about 300 yards the footsteps started up a rocky ravine, which struck Johnson as odd behavior for a wolf. It was then he found a clear-enough track that proved his theory. The tracks were from a mountain lion.

“I’ve only seen a couple in all of the time I’ve been out in the woods,” Johnson said. “Last year, I had one walk right in front of me, and it didn’t even know I was there.”

After that encounter, Johnson decided to carry a mountain lion tag with him. He was also enticed by the words of a fellow walleye angler, Jim Muscat of Bozeman, Montana. He had told Johnson, “Only the toughest guys track lions down without dogs.”

“So ever since then I wanted to track one down,” Johnson said.

Mountain rovers

Hunting mountain lions without the use of hounds to track and tree the elusive predators seems like an ineffective and even foolish exercise. As the largest members of the cat family in North America, cougars can have home ranges of 30 to 800 square miles. In other words, they cover a lot of ground to find prey — often deer — to feed.

That fact quickly became apparent to Johnson. Following the cat was no easy task on the steep, snowy hillside. At one point he slipped, smashed his face on a rock and considered turning around. Instead, the incident only fueled his determination. So for what he estimates was 15 miles Johnson followed the cat’s tracks up and down mountains, never getting a glimpse of the tawny, toothy carnivore.

Nearing the point of exhaustion and running out of daylight, Johnson came around a corner where he could see 60 to 80 yards ahead. Hoping to catch a glimpse of the cougar in the opening, he instead heard a quiet roar off to his left.

“Here’s the cat 15 yards broadside staring at me,” he said. “It caught me off guard. I didn’t expect it to be that close.”

Before Johnson had time to contemplate whether he wanted to pack a lion out from so far back in the mountains, the big cat quickly walked to within 10 yards. Mountain lions are known to have a capability of leaping up to 40 feet when they are running and can jump 15 feet vertically into trees.

Draw

Johnson had raised his rifle at the same time the cat decided to close the distance between them. Then the Mexican standoff began. Who would attack first?

“She started to lunge, whether it was to turn and leave or to go for me I don’t know. I shot and hit her in the chest.”

The lion didn’t go far. The .300 Remington Ultra Magnum’s bullet had struck her in the chest and exited near her tail.

Packing out

Johnson’s work was far from over. Now he had to pack the big cat out of the snowy mountains. Choosing not to gut the lion, he loaded the full cat on top of his backpack.

“I’d walk 20 yards, then fly down the mountain,” he said. “Eventually I broke the straps on the pack.”

Leaving the lion behind, he hiked out to his truck in the dark and called his father, who brought him a game sled to haul the mountain lion. With the temperature hovering at around 5 degrees, the lion was completely frozen by the time he got back to his truck three hours later.

Saying the cat meat tastes like sweet pork, Johnson had much of the lion made into cheddar-jalapeno-bratwursts.

“It’s very, very good eating,” he said. “The mental aspect of eating a cat was weird for me, though.”

Johnson later found out the cat was more than 7 years old and had an empty stomach. In examining the lion’s paws, Johnson said he was amazed at the size of its claws.

“They were over an inch-and-a-quarter long, just razor-blade sharp and not just the tip, the whole claw,” he said. “It was pretty intimidating and gives you a lot of respect for that animal.”