Adventures in mountain lion hunting

Jim Moore of Balmorhea rodeoed for 20 years then started taking people from the east coast mountain lion hunting in the Texas mountain country. “I had a good business,” says Jim. “I hunted with dogs. My hunters got about 30 lions a year. I made a good living off of the lions for 20 years.” Most of his hunts were in the Davis Mountains, an area he knows well and says he’s been to every nooek and cranny either on horseback or riding a mule. The breed of dogs he used is known as Running Walker Hounds. “These dogs don’t bark much. They could be on a lion even before he knew it. We call them ‘silent trailers.’ If you heard them yappin’ they’d have a lion cornered somewhere. I’d train them, but that ability to get a lion was bred into them also.” Mostly he rode mules to hunt the mountain lions. “I had about a dozen head of really top mules. I trained them myself. I put on a good hunt. My hunters didn’t leave here without a lion. Those hunters would fly into Midland or El Paso and rent a car. They’d come into Balmorhea and get a room. I’d pick them up in my pickup pulling a trailer with the mules and dogs in it. We’d go to where we were going to hunt, turn the dogs loose and away we would go. The largest lion I ever got was seven feet, six inches.” Jim had a way of knowing where the lions would be. “I kept goats in pens around and those lions would come kill a goat. They always come back to a kill. When they’d get a goat, I’d be there the next morning with my hunters and dogs.” Jim used a booking agent in Chicago to get hunters to come to West Texas. “The hunts didn’t last long, maybe a day or two, because the hunters were pretty high powered people and didn’t have time to come out here and fool around, ride around these mountains for a week. We’d skin the lions because all the hunters wanted was the hide so they could hang it on a wall or put it on a floor. We shot a lot of them in a tree or on a bluff. A lion will go to the roughest place he can get to.” Jim had a camera man along to video all the hunts. He says that’s what really sold the hunts. He used a twenty-two pistol to shoot the lions, saying it was light and besides that, it doesn’t take much to kill a lion if you shoot him right behind the foreleg. His hunters used bigger guns. “Lot of them would bring these great big cannons. I was getting big bucks so I didn’t care what kind of gun they had. Both my ears are still ringing. Some of these guys would get excited while they were right behind me and fire those big things.” Jim says the best time to hunt mountain lions is during cold weather.