B&C Cougar shot in Logan Canyon, Utah

[BearLakeMack]

[font "Comic Sans MS"][size 3]Thought all you hunters might want to see this Boone & Crocket Cougar. It ranks about 6th and was shot this winter. When I first saw it I thought it was an African Lion![/size][/font] [center][/center]
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[lou]

hey guy he is beautiful!!! he is HUGE!!! HOW MUCH DID HE WEIGH? OR DO YOU WEIGH EM? HOW DO THEY DO THE BOONE AND CROCKET FOR THEM? LENGTH WEIGHT? PROBABLY HUH? [cool][laugh][] YOU HAD YOUR ARMS FULL HAHA!!
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[Hellsangler69]

Nice Cat . We got some out where I work , but I still haven't seen one . Only there tracks .
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[lonehunter]

we've seen them here too ( i myself have seen two ), up untill last year the d.n.r. said there wasen't any . now they have them in our hunting guides as a protected species . farmer tim has had them in his yard . they will need protection if there population increases around here , too many sheep , cows and horses are disapearing . but thats one big kitty cat ! watcha think , wall to wall rug or full leinght coat ?
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[lou]

HAHA GOOD ONE LONEHUNTER, I,D SAY COAT HAHA IT IS GEORGEOUS!!! I KNOW WE HAVE ,EM ROUND HERE. I WENT HUNTIN FEW YEARS AGO SAW THE TRACKS AND THEY LIVED DOWN BELOW MY FRIENDS BROTHERS HOUSE BOUT 5=6 YEARS AGO WHERE I WENT.HUNTIN. SHE HAD 2 CUBS. AT THAT TIME. WOULD OF LOVED TO SEE HER AND THE CUBS. ANYWAYS THEY SAY WE DON,T HAVE THEM UP HERE TOO HAHA THOSE PEOPLE DON,T GIT OUT IN THE WOODS MUCH HAHA ANYWASY I TOLD YA ONCE WHEN I WS RIDIN BOMFIRE ONE JUST ABOUT DUSK NAD GOT LOST UP IN SHEDSVILLE MY LITTLE GIRL STARTED DANCIN AND WE LOOKED UP ON THE SIDE HILL AND THERE WAS A BLACK PANTHER BIG BIG BIG AS BIG AS THE ONE IN THIS PICTURE!! AND I MEAN IT!!!!!!! BOMBFIRE DIDN,T DANCE NO MORE SHE WAS GONE GONE GONE!!!!! AND ME TOO. I HAD A --OF A TIME STAYIN ON!!! HAHA WE DIDN,T CAMP OUT UP THERE THAT NIGHT!! HAHA LATER MARE[cool][laugh][]
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[danzilla]

Local News Stories Wednesday, May 07, 2003



Huge lion taken locally - or was it? By Lance Frazier

outdoors editor

First off, let's debunk this myth about the enormous mountain lion pictured here being killed in Logan Canyon.

It was actually killed in Franklin County by a local man who was hunting with a guide from Washington state.

Just kidding. In spite of what you may have heard, this cougar, which ranks in the top six in the world, was killed north of Coos Bay, Ore.

No, wait. It was taken in New Mexico. Or was it Alaska; where else could lions grow to the size of Shetland ponies?

The only thing more amazing than the size of this mountain lion -- which was, all kidding aside, killed near Bellevue, Wash. -- is the plethora of stories that have popped up in conjunction with the photo. In the five months since Roy Hisler shot the big cat and fellow hunter Jim Hackiewicz e-mailed this photo to a couple of friends, it has become something of a rural, urban legend in hunting circles, and Cache Valley is at the epicenter of one of the spinoffs.

Some friends of Kim Frederick who work at Morton Thiokol got a hold of the photo and, knowing of Frederick's passion for hunting cougars, replaced Hackiewicz's mug with a snapshot of Frederick. That version circulated locally and may have spawned the following e-mail message: "The next time you are walking in Logan Canyon, think about this. ... This big cat was killed up Logan Canyon this year."

The message, first brought to The Herald Journal's attention by Devere Hansen of North Logan, is accompanied by the photo of Hackiewicz hoisting the massive cougar and claims that the beast ranks No. 6 all-time in Boone & Crockett.

"This thing has been totally blown out of proportion," says Frederick, a resident of Providence who has received 100 calls on the photo since Christmas. He says he's never seen such a story achieve national attention so quickly.

The big question is, is the photo legitimate? Frederick wavers on that judgment.

"I do believe the cat, as far as the picture is concerned, is close," he says at first. "I think it's real. He's just holding it in a position to make it look bigger."

Frederick bases that judgment on his own 25 years of chasing mountain lions, and his assumption that Hackiewicz is shorter than average. When told that Hackiewicz stands 6-foot-1, Frederick has second thoughts.

"I'm six feet tall and weigh 165 pounds, and I have pictures of me holding cats just like that, and they don't look that big," he says.

But Hisler, an arborist in Duvall, Wash., and an avid hunter and fisherman, swears by the photo's authenticity. His story, given in a telephone interview last week between tree-cutting appointments, is this: Hisler and occasional hunting companion Hackiewicz were predator calling on the middle fork of the Snoqualmie River on Dec. 22, 2002, hoping to bag "some coyotes, maybe a bobcat."

As they sat and called, and Hackiewicz's attention was elsewhere, "all of a sudden I got this feeling and turned around, and this lion was looking at me."

Startled, Hisler swung around and triggered a single shot from his 30.06.

"I didn't even have enough time to think," he recalls.

By the time the echoes died and Hackiewicz looked to see what his partner had shot at, the cat had disappeared. The pair found a blood trail and followed it until dusk, when they found the dead animal at the base of a tree. Both stared in shock at the huge cat.

"When I walked up to that thing when it was dead, it scared the living heck out of me," Hisler says. "His head was the size of a basketball."

Turns out the skull did qualify for Boone & Crockett (which bases records on skull size instead of weight or length), with an early, unofficial measurement of 15 12/16-inch, good for a six-way tie for No. 7 all-time, a record shared with B&C Club founder Theodore Roosevelt. As the skull dried and shrunk, the score dwindled to 15 7/16, as recorded by an official measurer.

The big tom was missing four toes on its left forepaw, Hisler says, but the skull was unmarred, unusual for an adult cougar. Hackiewicz recalls the hunt slightly differently, saying he guided Hisler on a "track and call" hunt.

"I'm a professional hunter," says Hackiewicz, who is a guide and owns a company that uses dermestid beetles to clean skulls and bones. "I've taken a lot of lions this way."

Hisler says the cougar weighed just under 200 pounds. Neither man had a camera in the field, so once they got home they snapped some digital photos in Hackiewicz's garage. Hackiewicz ended up posing while Hisler snapped several shots with a digital camera because, says the 5-foot-7 Hisler, the cat "was so heavy I couldn't pick it up to get the picture. He (Hackiewicz) had a hard time picking it up."

Hackiewicz, who also writes for hunting magazines, asked Hisler not to talk to anybody about the cougar. But then Hackiewicz himself opened the floodgates by e-mailing the picture to several friends.

"It's amazing what the Internet does," Hisler says now. "In a matter of weeks that picture, which he sent to two or three people, was everywhere. Every state in the country probably got a picture of that mountain lion."

People co-opted the photo and added their own messages, usually localizing the story, although one note alleges that the cat is actually a female African lion. It wasn't long before a friend of Hackiewicz's from Texas sent him the photo with a note saying, "Look what was taken near Ft. Worth."

Hackiewicz wrote back: "Look at the photo, Bozo -- that's me."

For some reason the belief that the photo might be a hoax gave it wings that carried it from East Coast to West, and Hackiewicz, for one, is sick of hearing about it.

"I get like 20 e-mails a day," he snorts. "It's getting to be stupid."

For his part, Hisler "just wanted to go away" when the publicity hit. Neither of them stepped forward to correct the misinformation, and the legend grew. Eventually the picture found its way onto Boone & Crockett's Web site, giving it legitimacy even as it misspelled both men's names and initially credited Hackiewicz with the kill.

"Why is there so much stress over this one lion?" Hackiewicz wonders. "It's no big deal. I'm baffled as to where the big hoopla is. I have one bigger than that in my living room."

Then he softens a bit: "The fact that people think this is a fake is a form of flattery. It's so big that people don't believe it. This Internet chat just starts snowballing and, holy smokes, it's insane."

Hisler insists the photo is real, but Dave Cole, a lifelong hunter from Preston, suspects that "somebody's having fun with this."

"I looked at it as more of a novelty picture, a prank," says Cole, who would have guessed the cat's weight at an unheard-of 300 pounds based on the picture. "The more I looked at it, it looked too big. I'm not buying it."

If the picture was faked, it will join a growing pantheon of Internet-boosted wildlife hoaxes like the photo that shows a huge shark leaping out of the water to attack a soldier dangling from a helicopter on a ladder. (The composite image, which claims to be National Geographic's "Photo of the Year," was spliced together from a U.S. Air Force photo taken near San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and a photo of a shark from South Africa.) Another well-known picture claims to be a world-record grizzly bear, but that was also proved to be a fake.

As Frederick says, "Everything that comes over the Internet has the possibility of being a hoax."

Herald Journal photo editor Mitch Mascaro examined the grainy photo of Hisler's cougar and couldn't find clear evidence of tampering.

"If it's a fake, they did a dang good job," was his conclusion.

It doesn't help Hisler's case that the photo was taken in a garage instead of the traditional fresh-killed pose. But some have bought in nonetheless. One Web site carries a second-hand story from a guy named Jim about the cougar, killed in "the coastal area north of Coos Bay as I understand it."

The story goes on to say that Hackiewicz "spot-stalked him until he (the hunter) was too tired to continue. Then the varmint called to turn the big tom around for the shot."

The cougar grew like the fish that got away, says Hisler, and "in a matter of three weeks we started hearing about a cougar with a 17-inch skull that weighed 300 pounds."

Such tall tales have drawn interest from others, and hunting message boards flicker with messages like, "Has anyone heard of a huge mountain lion shot in Washington?"

Hisler, who recently took a top-30 mountain goat and enjoys hunting Utah mule deer in the Book Cliffs, says that after holding his for five months he decided to set the record straight. It's simply a case of a big cat (an average mountain lion weighs about 115 pounds) showing up in the right place at the right time (depending on your point of view) and a photograph that emphasizes its massiveness.

"If you're in the woods and you're hunting, you've got a chance to kill something," he says. "This was the biggest lion I've ever shot and probably ever will.

"This was a giant lion."

If you want to call Hisler, don't bother. Two days after this interview, he left on a bear hunting trip to Alaska.

And Hackiewicz? He left for South Africa on Wednesday.

Even the cougar's whereabouts are unclear. Hisler says he's having the lion mounted. Hackiewicz, who boasts that "nobody in this country cleans and mounts more lions than me," says he stuffed the cougar and returned it to Hisler last week. That is disputed by North Bend taxidermist Bill Albrecht, who says the cougar's skin is sitting in his basement.

"Jim's a friend of mine, but he B.S.'s at times," Albrecht says.

In the case of the colossal cougar, wading through the B.S. can be pretty slow going.
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[lou]

WELL I JUST NOTICED SOMETHIN, TO ME I,VE NEVER SEEN A MOUNTAIN LION COUGAR, HAVE A BLACK TIPPED TAIL. THE ONES I,VE SEEN DON,T HAVE HERE IN VERMONT??? [crazy]
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