While in Montana a couple weeks ago, we had the experience of having a nighttime visitor into our camp. It wasn't very late, maybe 9:30 or so, and as we were falling off to sleep, something started raking the bark of the trees extremely close to our tent.
The visitor started making loud squalling noises while continuing to rake several trees. To me, it sounded like two raccoons fighting over a trash can late at night (from back in my PA childhood neighborhood days). The scratching and squalling turned into more of a loud growling-purr as we stirred to got crocs on, lights, and pistol and bear spray in hand to check out what it was. By the time we slowly unzipped the tent and shined the small meadow, the critter was about 75-100 yards away and not happy as it continued to loudly growl-purr at our lights and voices. After some shouting and shining, we finally fired the .44 into the ground and it vanished, never to be seen or heard from again.
It's eyes glowed green in the light and seemed to be about 24" off the ground. It was a dark rainy and foggy night so we couldn't tell what size or shape or color it was. The next couple days were very rainy and we didn't get to look very hard for tracks (we were leaving and returning to camp in the dark), but couldn't find any tracks or scat.
The critter also approached (and fled) camp from the up-wind side, which I thought was odd.
We were thinking mountain lion? There was lots of grizzly scat a mile or so from camp along one ridge. We also saw lots of black bear sign in several of the bottoms we hunted through.
It wasn't as if it was after our food or trash, but more like it was ticked off that we were in it's territory. Maybe the smoke from our small cylinder stove made it mad/confused?
Any thoughts?
The visitor started making loud squalling noises while continuing to rake several trees. To me, it sounded like two raccoons fighting over a trash can late at night (from back in my PA childhood neighborhood days). The scratching and squalling turned into more of a loud growling-purr as we stirred to got crocs on, lights, and pistol and bear spray in hand to check out what it was. By the time we slowly unzipped the tent and shined the small meadow, the critter was about 75-100 yards away and not happy as it continued to loudly growl-purr at our lights and voices. After some shouting and shining, we finally fired the .44 into the ground and it vanished, never to be seen or heard from again.
It's eyes glowed green in the light and seemed to be about 24" off the ground. It was a dark rainy and foggy night so we couldn't tell what size or shape or color it was. The next couple days were very rainy and we didn't get to look very hard for tracks (we were leaving and returning to camp in the dark), but couldn't find any tracks or scat.
The critter also approached (and fled) camp from the up-wind side, which I thought was odd.
We were thinking mountain lion? There was lots of grizzly scat a mile or so from camp along one ridge. We also saw lots of black bear sign in several of the bottoms we hunted through.
It wasn't as if it was after our food or trash, but more like it was ticked off that we were in it's territory. Maybe the smoke from our small cylinder stove made it mad/confused?
Any thoughts?
