As I got out of the truck, Zeb took his queue and bailed out also. Now, as you can imagine, my mind was very busy and I don’t recall even really thinking about Zeb or the fact that he had jumped out of the truck. He generally did it automatically and was always somewhere near me with his ever present need to be of service. Zeb did have a chain around his neck with a rabies tag on it and I subconsciously used that jingling sound from the chain to keep track of his movements. I was walking around slowly, studying the ground for lion tracks in the snow (there was some snow behind the wind break fence) while Zeb zipped around the area doing his thing.

There was a bunch of old junk and retired machinery piled on both sides of this fence, and as I was making my way around it, I heard the ever present jingling of Zeb’s collar coming my way at a very high rate of speed. Things happened so fast that in the blink of an eye Zeb was located just behind my knees. That wasn’t what bothered me. What bothered me was that as my gaze quickly swung to his location, I could see his hackles were raised and he was growling at something located just in front of me. It was at that point in time that I decided to re-direct my gaze in that direction.

HHmmmmm . . . . . . .

Yep…it was a full grown mountain lion. He was all bristled up, snarling, and showing me his pearly whites.

GOOD GOSH ALMIGHTY!!!!

I think that had it occurred to me at the time, I might have been able to reach out and tweak his whiskers. He was that close!

It did not occur to me at the time.

What I do recall is that in less than two fractions of a second my trusty revolver was in my outstretched hands and the sight picture was fixed on a spot right between the lions’ eyes.