Someone at the sawmill had found a bobcat kitten and put it into a small cage. When Audrey, mother and I came up to the cabin in June, after school was out, Oakley Horne, who ran the sawmill, said to us, ”Why don’t you take this bobcat down to your place and see if he’ll be calmer? He’s really violent and the guys tease him and pound on his cage and things like that and the poor thing’s a nervous wreck.” Which was pretty sensitive for Oakley.
We took it down to the cabin. Its cage had a little flat bottom with a sloping roof on each side. It wasn’t three feet wide, I don’t suppose, by a foot-and-a-half, maybe two feet high. There really wasn’t much room for this poor cat. We built a bottom for a new cage and added something about four feet high and just as wide and covered it with wire. I don’t know how we did it, but we managed to get the bottom off of the old cage and drop the cat into our cage. We left a part of the bottom of the old cage so that it was kind of a loft. We then had the bobcat.
At night it used to howl and jump at the wire. I slept through all of this, but mother didn’t. It got calmer and calmer. We never teased it, and we were just women. Our main problem was trying to feed the thing. We weren’t allowed to shoot around the cabin. We had a rule on Paiute -- if you shot it, you ate it. This discouraged our guests from taking pot shots at what Daddy called the filly loo birds, whatever they were . Anyway, we had to hunt for the cat’s food.
If we got a quail, we weren’t going to feed it to the bob cat. We ate it. We tried shooting bluejays. God, bluejays are hard to shoot. There’s a lot of feather and very little bird in there. We tried to shoot rabbits. This poor bobcat was not eating well, and it was really, really mad at us because we were trying to give it human food, which it wouldn’t touch. So we hunted.
I snuck up to a little place at a bend in the creek near the meadow and there was a rabbit sitting in the grass near the willows. The willows were so heavy that it was difficult to cross the creek. I shot at the rabbit. I didn’t know whether I hit it, but I thought it went into the willows across the creek.
I worked my way across the creek on a fallen log. This was the way we usually crossed the creek, on fallen logs. I walked across looking for the rabbit, studying the willows in case it was in there. You know, it’s funny sometimes, but I just got the feeling that I’d better turn around and look.
I turned around and looked. And there was a bobcat sitting on a rock about 150 feet away, watching me. I shot immediately. We didn’t allow predators near the cabin. We were the predators. So I made a quick shot with the .22 and the bobcat did a somersault off the rock and lit on the ground. Then it sat up and looked at me. So I shot it again. It dropped down, but then lifted its head and looked at me again. So I shot it again. Then it stayed down.
When you’re hunting, you never walk up to something you think you’ve killed unless your gun is ready. More people have been maimed and killed by animals they thought were dead, and a bobcat is a nasty creature when upset. And this one might have been upset. I got up there, poked it with the gun, and soon determined it was dead.
All three of my shots had gone into this bobcat’s forehead. The .22 has such little shock power. The animal was killed, I’m sure, from the first shot, but it just didn’t know it.
It turned out to be a very large cat. I dragged it home and skinned it out, and then we looked at all this meat. We thought, we would eat some, too. We would eat most anything. We thought we’d feed some to the bobcat, but we didn’t think we could feed it raw. So we kind of cooked it, boiled it a little bit, and gave it to the bobcat. Boy, he tore into it and he ate it all up. So we fed most of the bobcat to the bobcat. That was a big help.
This poor cat spent the summer, almost three months, with us, and it calmed down a lot. I could open the door, which was above the bottom floor, and put something in and it would take it and it never bite my hand. It never was vicious. Of course, it was in a cage.
When fall came we decided that we had to kill it or turn it loose. We thought the poor thing had never been on its own and didn’t know how it would make out, but we decided that we had to give it its chance. So we turned it loose. We opened the cage door and it kind of looked around carefully and stepped out of the cage. It didn’t take off at the run but ran to a big log beside the driveway and jumped up on it. It looked at us. It walked along the log a bit further, and then looked at us again. When it had walked all the way along the log it disappeared into a bunch of willows.
People said that winter the bobcat may have showed up at the sawmill a few times. That was the same year we had the pigeons. We thought that since the pigeons were roosting in the annex of the cabin, they could winter there. They could fly out from there during the day and be protected at night. But the following spring there were no pigeons. We had a sneaking notion that the bobcat ate them. But they probably wouldn’t have survived anyway, and it was the bobcat’s time to learn to hunt. It’s really difficult for an animal raised in a cage to go back to nature, even though many of us feel this is the right thing to do. They don’t have much of a chance.
