Lion Tracks?

I live in mountain lion country.  No doubt about that.  I have seen sign of their presence over three decades of living along the lake.  Back some years ago, my neighbor, Leo, called me on the phone.  “We have a lion,” he informed me in his ever-laconic way. “I found what looks like evidence of a kill down at your side of the place.”

I met Leo down near the lake later and he showed me the messy remnants of what appeared to be deer kill.  

While walking around down at my neighbor’s place yesterday (Leo’s son is living there now), we came upon some tracks in the snow that appear to be lion tracks.  The tracks were stitched straight through the crisscrossing tracks of mule deer.

In the snow, differentiating between dog prints and mountain lion prints can prove tricky.  But these were pretty big for a dog and spaced pretty far apart.  In one of the photographs posted below, you can see my footprint alongside the suspected cat prints.  

We found the tracks virtually everywhere we looked in the receding snow along the lake.

—Mitchell Hegman