Old Missoula

Day of the Cat

Lion livens up South 11^th St. neighborhood

By Michael Moore of the Missoulian

Katie Olson thought she’d seen it all in her six decades of living in the 1500 block of South 11^th Street West, but that was before the mountain lion curled up in the well of one of her basement windows.

“I’ve lived in that house all my life, and that’s a long time,” a highly excited Olson said Monday morning, as law enforcement and game wardens swarmed over her yard mulling what to do with the cat. “It’s not every day you get mountain lion in the house.”

Especially in a home that sits just one house away from Russell Street, one of Missoula’s busiest thoroughfares. But there she sat, 80 pounds of lion squeezed into a window well less than 3 feet long and 2 feet high.

“Damned if I know,” said Randy Smith, warden captain for the state Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, when asked what the female cat might have been doing in the middle of town. “Russell’s usually a little out of their range.”

Smith speculated that the cat, which was at least 3 years old, was prowling the edges of the city and got chased cross-town by one or more dogs. The cat then took refuge where she could find it.

The scene began just before noon Monday, when Katie Olson’s grand nephew, Kent Morin, decided he would vacuum the basement stairs. Olson directed Morin to a basement room for the vacuum, but Morin found more than he bargained for.

“I was looking around and all of a sudden I heard this growling,” he said. “I looked up and this cat is in the window spitting at me.”

Morin barged upstairs and told Olson what he’d seen.

“I told that boy to go back downstairs and do that vacuuming like he said he was going to do,” Olson said. “But he kept on about how it spit at him so I went down there and there it was bigger than life,” Olson said.

Olson called 9-1-1, which sent a host of incredulous officers to the scene, along with Smith.

“When I first told the police, they didn’t believe me one bit,” Olson said.

Soon enough, however, everyone got a good look at the frightened cat. Then the problem became what to do with it. By this time, the neighborhood was abuzz, though many weren’t sure what it was they were so excited about.

“This is great, whatever it is,” said one resident.

Olson figured that her neighbors were speculating wildly when they saw her house crawling with cops.

“They probably figured that, by God, John (her husband) had finally had all he could take of me and did me in,” she said.

But back to the cat. Officers took their shotguns out of their cars as Smith plotted how best to extract the cat from the window. Everyone seemed committed to taking the cat alive, but the cops were ready to act if the cat responded aggressively. The decision was made to tranquilize the cat.

Smith, armed with a dart gun firing the tranquilizer Telazol, and city officer Doug Hartsell worked their way to the basement, using furniture to block off the cat’s path back to the main floor of the house.

“I was a little concerned about what might happen if the cat came into the house,” Smith said. “There weren’t a lot of places for us to go down there.”

Fortunately, the cat had knocked out the window, leaving only a screen between the cat and Smith and Hartsell. “That was a lot better for us, because I could just shoot right through the screen.”

Tranquilizers don’t always work the way they’re supposed to, but this time the shot worked perfectly. The dart struck the cat in the hind leg, and she jumped out of the window well and took refuge along the back side of the garage, near the alley. Five minutes later, the cat was out. Smith and Hartsell hoisted the lion into Smith’s pickup as the neighborhood crowd closed in for a close look. A few oohs and aahs later, the cat was on her way, with Smith riding in the bed of the truck to make sure the lion didn’t come to and escape.

Smith said later that he checked the cat and found no sign of injury or disease, but he planned to have a vet check the animal. He then planned to release the cat in an unpopulated stretch of mountains on the Montana-Idaho border near Fish Creek.

“This one turned out really well,” Smith said. “Just another day at the office.”

Maybe so, but it wasn’t just any other day on South 11^th Street.

“I tell you, I will never forget this as long as I live,” Olson said after the cat was driven away. “I don’t think anyone in this neighborhood will.”

 

The above article appeared in The Missoulian on September 14, 1993.