Maggie Was a Goofy, Distractible Mutt, and the Best Lion Dog I Ever Hunted Behind

This story, “Maggie the Magnificent,” appeared in the January 1953 issue of Outdoor Life.

Maggie never can make up her mind. Even her bark is indecisive, like a steam whistle that vacillates between two unpleasant notes. Indeed, everything about this peculiar hound is neither one thing nor the other.

Her ancestry includes a portion of bloodhound, another of black-and-tan hound, and just a dash of bluetick. As a result of these ingredients, Maggie looks bloodhoundish in front, with the other breeds struggling to express superiority in the rest of her body. The general effect is that of a reddish, drag-eared, nondescript hunting hound with the facial expression of a fourteen-year-old girl who doesn’t know the facts of life.

From the first of her training in New Mexico, life became a nagging series of awful decisions to this dog. Cass Goodner, her owner and first friend, started Maggie out with a male running mate named Jiggs. These two young hounds chased the house cats around the San Ysidro ranch house together. It was Jiggs, however, who was the aggressor in these forays. Maggie pursued a cat until the fleeing animal was almost in her mouth. Then, at the crucial moment of the capture, something switched in her mind. Inexplicably she would dash off after a butterfly or simply come back to see what her owner was doing.

“That hound blips around like a bat,” Cass often said, but he kept her just the same.

Jiggs, the aggressor with the one-track mind, had his nose parted by the claw of a bobcat and almost died from a porcupine disaster which left his jaws and throat studded with broken and deeply imbedded quills. Maggie and Jiggs together ran a ten-point deer out of the Jemez Mountains near Cass Goodner’s ranch and it came to bay under the bridge where the highway crosses the San Miguel wash. For this escapade, Jiggs received a thrashing. Maggie escaped punishment only because she had gone off to look at prairie dogs in the middle of the chase.

At two years of age, Jiggs, a persistent and enthusiastic deer runner, was banished from the pack. Maggie missed this fate simply because she never did anything, right or wrong, long enough at one time to merit either praise or blame.

“She’s like a society woman with the hives,” Cass remarked when I asked him why he hadn’t banished Maggie. “But she has a good nose. Maybe one of these days she’ll make up her mind.”

As the intermittent snows of Maggie’s second winter deepened on the mountains, a rancher named Snooks Burris telephoned us from Socorro that he had seen lion tracks in the Mule Shoe.

Some miles west of the Rio Grande, below Socorro, the lava ridges arc out in a broad sweep that has long been known as the Mule Shoe. Here the piedmont of the mountain is almost completely encircled by “There they go!” yelled Cass, as the two lions leaped from a hole hidden in the curve of the rock sharp ridges and jagged cliffs of dark-colored lava.

It has been many thousands of years since the volcanic rumblings and fires that formed this country died away. In these subsequent ages, green forests have clustered in the rocky canyons where the moisture was sure. Above, on the upper slopes in those places where their roots could find a purchase, are scattered stands of brush and trees.

In these same canyons and along the ridges that ring the Mule Shoe, the deer long ago found sanctuary from man. Such verdure as there was in the volcanic richness and the roughness of the terrain made it difficult for hunters to traverse the area.

But for mountain lions the Mule Shoe is paradise. Cougars take their pick from the herds of venison they catch on the rimrock and afterward lie secure among the many rincons while they digest their meals.

At this particular time the snows of January had painted the highest volcanic peaks with a tinge of white. Water ran in even the usually dry canyons, and over most of the slopes where the sun did not strike directly there were layers of snow. It was melting-thawing weather, the most difficult kind for hunters who depend upon the scenting power of dogs for their tracking.

Even as Cass and I labored up the old mining road in our pick-up truck, the wheels skidded occasionally over frozen patches in the shade of volcanic boulders that had fallen from the cliffs above. We made camp in wet snow at the mouth of Cobre Canyon. As we unloaded our duff el the clogs danced around us in anticipation of the hunt. Cass Goodner, in his wisdom, did not share their enthusiasm.

“Sure going to be tough, with all these bubble-headed pups,” he decided. “I wouldn’t bet we’ll catch a three-legged rabbit with this bunch.”

“But we’ve got Maggie,” I answered defensively. I always seemed to take her part for some reason. “She’s got a wonderful nose–“

“Yeah! And doesn’t know which way to turn it,” Cass retorted as he tied up the dogs for the night. I couldn’t think of any answer to that.

Stars were still bright in the winter heavens when we stirred the hounds from their beds of leaves and necked them together for the morning hunt. There is something amazing about the consuming urge that routs hunters out of warm sleeping bags in the cold hour before dawn. This morning, as on many a. morning before, it all seemed worth while, though the wind that blew down the length of Cobre Canyon seemed to bear a direct message from the north pole.

We hunched our necks into the collars of our jackets and started up the rough floor of the canyon as we whistled the dogs around us.

Only two of the hounds that were to be our companions in this venture could be called veterans of the chase. These were Midnite and Jumbo, two stalwarts that showed by their battle-scarred ribs and frayed ears that they had survived a dozen lion kills and as many bear hunts in their time.

Maggie had been necked to a younger dog named Barney. This precaution was a concession to the uncertainty which Cass always felt where Maggie was concerned.

“If Maggie isn’t sure, how can I be?” was the way he put it.

We had not climbed a mile up the winding bed of the frozen canyon before we saw lion sign. There was a large scrape in the crusted snow among the boulders. Apparently a male lion had come down a rocky point from our right and crossed the canyon at this spot, leaving a scent station to mark his passing. However, the round imprints of tle big cougar we’re melted and indistinct. The dogs, which thrust inquisitive muzzles into the impressions, apparently could derive no lingering whiff of lion odor from the tracks. But Snooks Burris had been right — there were lions in the Mule Shoe country.

We quickened our steps. The dogs sensed our excitement and tried to press ahead as Cass constantly waved them behind us so we could read the sign in the snow on the canyon floor.

The sun had just risen when we found fresh sign — made so recently that the snow crystals, disturbed around the edge of the imprints, danced in the first slanting sun rays of the morning like piles of diamonds.

“Female, I guess, this time,” Cass said as he knelt over the track. “Came out of that side canyon there.”

Whatever other information Cass was going to derive from this lion trail will never be recorded, for at that moment one of the hounds thrust its nose beneath Cass’s arm as he sought to hold the dog back. Into those black dog nostrils there came the exhilarating smell of lion scent. This dog threw back his head and the long-drawn howl of the hunting hound on the track reverberated through the canyon.

In a second, every dog in the pack was milling over us like an irresistible flood over an inadequate dam. We barely had time to swing the dogs to the left in the direction the track had gone. By swift lunges and football tackles, we managed to catch the dogs that were necked and undo the swivels that bound them together in pairs.

In three jumps and a couple of barks, the entire crowd of yelping dogs was up the opposite wall of the canyon and running strongly. As the pack appeared for a moment, on the crest of a raking ridge above us, I could make out the red form of the irresistible Maggie running in the lead. Her tail was upcurved at a saucy angle and down over the snow-covered distance the squeal of her excited bark sounded like the hysterical giggle of a silly girl. For only a moment we glimpsed the melee of the hounds above. Then they were gone. And the babble of their dog voices was muffled by the distance and the folds of the canyons.

Perhaps halfway up to the crest which forms the ramparts of the Mule Shoe was a jutting bastion of orange-colored rock. The huge piece was pitted like a Holland cheese and carried on its irregular surface some splotches of green and snuff-yellow where the lichens clung in spotted patterns. Toward this rocky outcrop Cass and I climbed with the recklessness often displayed by men who follow hunting hounds.

The blood pounded in our necks as we thrust ourselves up the slippery slope. We hurried our ascent by pulling on the resinous stumps of the piñon trees that studded the incline. Still it was not fast enough. We feared the fresh dogs, with light-footed Maggie in the lead, would top out over the orange-colored cliffs long before we reached the top ourselves.

But there they were. We could see the hounds’ milling forms and thrashing tails on top of the pockmarked cliff. Their barks were scattered and indecisive. Something was wrong. As we climbed around the orange rocks from the side, Cass and I could see that the dogs were searching in all directions.

“How could they lose a track as fast as that one?” Cass gasped between labored breaths. “Look! Here it is here!” He pointed to a cleft between two slanting rocks where the snow was deep. Through this narrow crack the lion had passed, leaving clear, round impressions to show where he had gone.

“Over here!” I yelled excitedly as I dropped to my knees. “Here’s a set of lion tracks, too! There are two lions!”

There was no doubt of it. Two adult cougars had passed that way and, from the looks of those tracks, it had been minutes before. Suddenly one of the hounds on the edge of the cliff ahead barked treed! It was the staccato yelp of a dog that has brought the quarry to bay and is telling the world.

“Come on!” yelled Cass as he turned a grinning face back over his shoulder.

The aching muscles in our legs were twitching with fatigue and our breath wheezed in our throats with the noise of a couple of wind-broken horses. But with the din of the dogs above to spur us, we somehow crawled up the rocks and came out on the top of the cliff where it hung out over a side canyon.

Three of the hounds were barking treed now. I must confess that my favorite, Maggie, was standing to one side with a stupid look on her countenance. But this was only a fleeting disappointment in the excitement of the moment. The dogs crowded at the edge of the cliff, barking around a small piñon that grew from a crack in the rocks. The tree was of no great size, apparently being able to derive but a precarious living from its tenuous foothold in the unyielding stone. Cass and I brought our rifles forward together and drew back the hammers. Two lions—

As we came close, we couldn’t make ft out the form of the cats in the thick needles of the piñon. We walked right among the dogs that danced so eagerly on the edge of the cliff. We looked up into the tree from below.

Every limb and twig was empty.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Cass spluttered as he dropped the muzzle of his rifle. Even while we looked at each other in perplexity, the hound pack continued to give the treed signal and bounced around us as though trying to tell us to shoot before it was too late.

“Cass, those hounds actually smell the lions,” I yelled over the noise as I watched the dogs. Each hound raised his muzzle toward the trunk of the accursed pifion and then broke out anew in yelping barks.

We noticed for the first time that a gentle wind blew up from the canyon below and formed an updraft along the face of the cliff.

“The cliff!” Cass shouted then. “They’re smelling the body scent of the lions up the face of the rock.”

Cass and I leaned together over the edge of the outcrop. We could see a ledge or two below, and here and there another twisted tree hung drunkenly from the crevices. That was all. On the rocks beneath there were no tawny lion forms whose odor would cause our dogs to lose their sense of direction.

Suddenly a new hound barked, adding its high-pitched insistence to the dog chorus. I would know that noise anywhere.

“It’s Maggie,” I yelled. “She’s down there somewhere.”

It was indeed Maggie. She was on a ledge just below the lip of the cliff. Again her feminine hound voice came to us. Strain as we might, we could not see, over the irregularities of the rock, exactly where the hound might be. As we looked, there was the flip of a black-tipped tail — the hind end of a lion.

“There they go!” Cass yelled. The two lions jumped together from some cave-like hole hidden in the curve of the rock. We had but a glimpse of a hind leg as it crouched for a spring, the flick of movement from a graceful back, and both the lions were gone.

Cass and I drew back together. Our veteran hound pack still barked stupidly at the top of the cliff as the lion odor came up to them over the rock.

“We’ve got to get the rest of these dogs after those lions,” Cass bellowed. Each of us grasped a hound and started off along the edge of the cliff to take the dogs to where the two lions had jumped. But in those dog minds there was a resistance with which we had not reckoned. We were dragging them a way from the scene of excitement.

Jumbo, the dog I was leading so unceremoniously along the rock, fought against my grasp on his collar and struggled to turn around and rejoin his fellows. If the rock and earth of that elevated place had been dry, I might have dragged Jumbo bodily to where the two lions had jumped off the cliff to the slope and fled. But the place definitely was not dry, and Jumbo was strong and bullheaded. With a tremendous effort, he pulled with all his strength against my hold. One of my feet slipped — and I was down with my face in the show, holding Jumbo’s broken collar in my hand. As I raised up, I saw Cass was having trouble too.

“Of all the dad-blamed, hard-headed, narrow-minded, black-bottomed dogs!” Cass was saying to nobody in particular.

“Don’t worry, Cass,” I said as I scrambled to my feet. “Maggie is after the two lions.”

There was a whining squeak behind me. I turned in alarm. There was the triumphant-looking Maggie. She was breathing hard, but her beaming self-satisfaction reached clear across her face. “Sure was exciting!” she seemed to say as she bounced up to me.

Same old story — quitting right in the middle of the situation. And she was the dog I’d championed!

But Cass is not the man to beat his head in bitterness over female caprice. He seized the nearest hound bodily in his arms and again started off across the rocks to the slope beyond. I too grasped a dog, after only a single bitter look at Maggie.

Perhaps the cat smell which had drifted over the face of the rocks had disappeared after the lions had fled. Or maybe at last the hard-headed hounds realized something was wrong, for they followed uncertainly after us.

On the steep slope beside the orange-colored cliff Cass fairly threw his dog at the tracks that led straight away toward the head of the canyon. Almost as the dog struck the ground, he caught the scent. This was something like it!

In a moment the rest of the dogs streamed past us — with Maggie running last.

As Cass and I staggered through the melting snow toward the head of this unnamed canyon, the gleam of sure success was in our eyes. We glanced at each. other confidently and struggled up the steep slope like schoolboys racing for a picnic.

Where this side canyon originated on the slope of the mountain was a hollow of generous dimensions. It was covered with a thick stand of ponderosa pine, mixed with scattered groves of aspen to mark where the soil was wet and deep. This beautiful spot was like an exaggerated version of the Hollywood Bowl, with the close-packed trees as the spectators and a rocky rim at the lower incline of the slope as the stage.

An exciting drama in this natural theater was rising swiftly to a climax even before we came on the scene. As we breasted the last slope, we could hear the whole hound pack giving tongue. Indeed, as we topped the rim there seemed to be hounds everywhere, all barking at once — and for good reason.

We saw before us in the snow a set of lion tracks, then another, and then still another line of round cat imprints on the white carpet between the boles of the trees. There also were marks of the frantic feet of the hurrying hounds that had passed that way, following the exhilarating smell of lion paws. It was little wonder that the hounds barked so excitedly and ran so uncertainly in several directions.

“Look at those lion tracks!” Cass exploded. “They’re everywhere!” There was a ring of disappointment in his voice.

Some yards up the slope there were cougar tracks beneath every tree, and they seemed to lead toward every point of the compass. As we paused in consternation, a hound passed me going uphill and another equally determined dog whizzed by going down the slope on a hot trail.

“Either there are a jillion lions in this hollow, or each one is a centipede,” I moaned.

So many lion tracks were as bad as none at all and far more confusing. Some were older than others, perhaps made the night before. There must be a kill near by. It might take us hours to unravel the mess.

To add to our sorrows, the snow upon which we depended so heavily for indications of the previous acts in this drama now was disappearing rapidly beneath the late-morning sun. As Cass and I ran back and forth frantically through the amphitheater, the steady drip and plop of melting snow came from the limbs overhead. Half an hour more of this splendid confusion and our lion hunt would be a complete and unqualified bust.

We’d been paying scant attention to that scatterbrained female, Maggie. From time to time she would run shrieking through the middle of the melee in the upper canyon and then vanish for a while. This did not seem particularly odd at the moment; the hounds were trailing at a dead run in every possible direction.

Then, through the clamor, I heard Maggie again, off to one side of the hollow. Her high-pitched yelp was short and staccato.

“Sounds like Maggie has treed,” I yelled down to Cass below me.

The reply of my friend and hunting companion was one of those quaint, rasping epithets which only a cowman can manage when everything has gone wrong.

And Cass was doubtless right — Maggie had treed a chipmunk and wouldn’t stay even with that. But again her yelp came, this time with such insistence that I turned up the slope toward the sound.

Cass was yelling something behind me that sounded like “Circle out wide for tracks.” The other hounds had broken into a renewed crescendo of barking and howling. Even over this bedlam, however, I could hear Maggie’s high-pitched voice, squealing triumph up on the edge of the wooded basin.

Almost on the lip of the incline I saw a movement among the dark trunks of the wet trees. There was a flash of red and a curved tail. Again the squealing yelp broke out. Maggie was coming toward me. In a second, her front paws were raised as she reared up in exuberant greeting.

“Shall I choke the dratted dog now? ” I asked myself, “or leave the job to Cass?”

Even as I asked, Maggie was away among the trees again, yapping hysterically. She had not gone down toward the other dogs or toward Cass, but was running still farther up the slope. About 200 or 300 yards away I could hear her barking urgently again.

I turned down the slope in disgust. The snow now was slushy under foot. I kicked at the wet stuff in a show of temper.

“Practically on top of two lions, and let them get away! Some bunch of hunters—”

I stopped so suddenly that I slid to one knee in the soft snow. There was a well-beaten trail that went beneath the trees. It was tramped out by many feet. For a moment I thought that this might be the way the lions had gone. But these were hound tracks, stretching off through the snow in a strange, dark line. It would take twenty or thirty hounds to make such a trail, and every track was fresh, even in the rapidly disappearing slush. A trail beaten out by dogs’ feet? Why, it made no sense at all.

As I knelt there, stupidly looking at the line of imprints, there was another shrill bark above and again I saw Maggie coming down through the trees. She whisked past me in a splatter of wet snow. So she had made this trail! Of all the fool procedures!

At least it would be intriguing to discover what the moron hound was up to while the other dogs were trying to find the lion track. I turned up the well-beaten path through the snow where Maggie had gone. I climbed only a few yards when she passed me again, going in the other direction. She lolled her red tongue at me and her eyes danced with excitement.

In a few yards the dark line of dog tracks led around the bole of a great pine tree that grew on the very edge of the amphitheater. With this post as a turning point, the inexplicable hound tracks led back the way they had come. It was obvious that Maggie circled this tree on each round of her peculiar maneuver.

I glanced into the branches of the old pine. There were clumps of diseased needles and black limbs killed by lightning long ago, but nothing else to arouse any interest.

“Must be worms, making Maggie act that way,” I said to myself. Then, louder, I yelled: “Cass, Maggie’s having a fit up here.”

The noise of the yelling broke off a piece of dead limb or bark, which rattled down through the tree above me and struck my shoulder. I glanced casually up to see if some widow-maker limb was about to fall. Then I turned away once more.

But even as I did so there was an afterimage of something green I had seen in the tree. I took another step. Green is quite natural in a tree, even a half-dead one. But this green thing was round, with a dark slit in the center. No clump of pine needles looks like that. Swiftly I looked up again. There it was, a round thing of emerald-green with a black line through the middle. As I stared in fascination, an eyelid flickered over the bright-green object.

The hair on the back of my neck prickled at the nearness of the movement, for I could have reached the green eye with my outstretched gun barrel. Now I made out a black nose and a salmon-colored muzzle. Another emerald eye was almost obscured behind a thick clump of needles. The body of the lion lay concealed among the thick-growing needles of the pine limb.

 “Lion,” I said hoarsely to the tense form of the big cat on the limb. Then, running half a dozen steps down the slope, I bawled at the top of my lungs, “Lion! Cass! Lion!”

As I yelled, Maggie came up through the trees on one of her mysterious rounds. She circled the bole of the big pine where the cougar lay hidden. She looked up once at the foliage which concealed the cat. Yelping in a satisfied manner, she then started off again down the trail which she had beaten through the snow.

That was it! There had been two cat tracks and two cougars on the orange cliffs behind us. “Lions, Cass!” I bellowed as I started off along Maggie’s trail through the snow. “Lions!” I bawled again. It occurred to me afterward that I was behaving as hysterically as Maggie.

As I stumbled along in her wake, Cass came up from below with some of the hounds grouped around him expectantly. Cass and I reached the other end of Maggie’s trail together.

Maggie was ahead of us, bouncing around the bole of another pine. This was a younger tree with a clean trunk and high-growing limbs. On the first of these, some twenty feet above the ground, a long cat stretched full length. Its tail hung down, black tip twitching as Maggie circled below. While Cass and I stood staring, the cat face broke open in a snarling hiss to show the white teeth and the red tongue between.

But the lion was looking at Maggie and paying not the slightest attention to us. That little red hound already had circled the trunk of this tree and, with a single, giggling bark, was off down her trail back toward the first lion.

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“We may have to shoot her to get her to stop that damn running back and forth,” Cass commented. But I noticed that he patted her as she came past again on her next round. And a few minutes later Maggie’s circling was over for the day — Cass and I shot the two lions in short order.

“Maggie, you’re the only hound I ever saw who could hold up both sides of a dilemma at once,” I told her admiringly. “And it’s some dilemma,” I added to Cass, “when there’s a mountain lion on each side.”