Darrel Holliday has eight daughters.  That in itself makes him a remarkable man.  Even more remarkable is that he has not only survived them, but also an encounter with a cougar.

Darrel enjoys the outdoors and hunting and adventure.  His affinity for things wild was a natural byproduct of his upbringing in the beautiful, wild country around John Day, Oregon.  John Day is a sparsely populated ranching area characterized by dry hills, rimrocks, pine forests, cattle, and thousands of deer, elk and other wildlife.

Darrel and his brothers loved everything about their ranch upbringing and their lots in life.  As they grew up it was only natural that they would become ranchers like their father, and carry on the family traditions.  Leaving John Day and doing anything else simply didn’t occur to them.  It was an unthinkable thought.

It did occur to them, however, that there might be places in the world that were even more wild, and that might hold different outdoor adventures than those that could be found in their backyard.  Young men like the Holliday boys naturally dream of wilderness, and of sights seldom seen by human eyes.  Such young men dream of Alaska and the far north, of sights and adventure that few men experience.

Such dreams led Darrel to Canada’s Northwest Territories to see the spectacular

Alexandra Falls on Hay River.  The falls are bigger and more dramatic than those at Niagara.  The mists created by the falls reflect 50 rainbows. He’s been to Inuvik on the Mackenzie River, which is as far north as the road goes.  The river flows through a canyon that rivals the Grand Canyon.  The growing season there is so short that the grass has no time to get green.  It’s a different world.  Everything has a pink tinge.

Being hunters, Darrel and his brothers hired a bush pilot to fly them far into the Alaskan interior one fall.  The pilot flew them over a mountain range, and deposited them 480 miles from the nearest habitation.  That was on September 5.  They camped there and hunted for nine glorious, adventure-filled days.  When the pilot failed to show up to retrieve them on the appointed day, the Alaskan adventure became a matter of survival.  Food ran out.  Day after day passed with no sign of the pilot and his plane. No one but the pilot knew where they were.  Darrel and his partners had no way of knowing that the man had died in a plane crash on his way to pick them up.

On the 28^th day a government plane flew over, noticed the tents, and landed to tell the campers that they were very close to being where they shouldn’t be.  They were close to a game preserve, and might stray into forbidden hunting areas.  It was only by that stray chance that they were rescued.

Darrel’s wife was worried sick about her missing husband, but her worry might have been better saved for events closer to home.  Darrel had been in no imminent danger of dying in Alaska, but such was not the case when he went after a cougar on the home place.

A number of calves had been lost to the cougar’s depredations.  Getting the cougar and stopping the attacks was a top priority.  The opportunity arose one winter day when the temperature was near 20 below zero.  Cougar tracks were sighted in the snow of a field.  Darrel got his rifle, strapped on a .22 pistol, and set off trailing the cougar.  The tracks led into the rimrocks.  Darrel sighted the cougar on a fresh deer kill across the canyon from his position.  He fired.  The cougar dropped on the first shot, and rolled down the hill.

Darrel descended into the canyon where there was a jeep trail.  Before ascending the steep, slippery slope to the cougar, Darrel leaned his rifle against a tree so that he’d have both hands free with which to pull himself up the mountain.  He climbed up the mountain, came up over a rim, and looked over a rise to where the cougar should be.  There it was—sitting up and looking right into his eyes!  Darrel’s rifle shot had hit its spine, and disabled the cougar’s hindquarters.  Using its front legs, the cougar pulled itself toward Darrel.  Darrel drew his .22 pistol and fired repeatedly at the rapidly-advancing cougar.  Every bullet hit the cougar squarely in the head, but he kept coming.  Darrel was backing up as he fired, but could go no farther as he reached the edge of the rimrock.  With a sheer drop behind him, and a cougar bent on killing him in front, Darrel fired his last bullet as the cougar was no more than three feet away and reaching for him.  The cougar dropped, and moved no more.

Darrel holstered his pistol, looked over the edge of the cliff, trembled with the surge of adrenalin that was coursing through his veins, and examined the cougar.  It was a big male weighing 230 pounds.  He could see his brother coming up the jeep trail below him in a pickup.  With a great deal of effort, Darrel managed to maneuver the cougar onto his shoulders, around his neck.  The big cougar’s legs hung down past his knees on either side.

Carrying the cougar over to a chute that descended through the rimrocks, Darrel stepped into it, and slid rapidly on the slick snow all the way to the bottom.  When he stopped sliding, he stood up, walked over to the pickup, and dumped the dead cougar into the bed.

He was cold.  He got in the warm cab with his brother and began warming his hands in front of the heater vents while he related his adventure.  They sat there warming and talking for perhaps 10 minutes when one of them glanced into the back end of the pickup.  The cougar was sitting up in the bed, saw them through the window, and swiped at them with his claws drawn.  The claws left long parallel scratches in the pickup’s paint which stayed there for as long as they had the pickup.

Darrel’s brother waved a hat out his partially rolled down window to distract the animal, while Darrel stepped out the other door with his rifle and finally dispatched the cougar.

Back at home, as they skinned the cat, they found the .22 bullets flattened out like coins on the cougar’s skull.  They hadn’t been able to penetrate the bone.  The last one had apparently stunned the cat, and knocked him out.  Darrel had shouldered a live cougar and carried him all the way to the bottom of the canyon.  But for the fact that he’d rapidly slid all the way down, the cougar would have awakened while wrapped around his neck, and the end of the story would have been much different.

The cougar head and skin now occupy a prominent position in Darrel’s trophy room.  There’s a story behind each trophy, but none so dramatic as the cougar’s.