re task. When they refused to come back at his call,
he stung them with fine shot, and in this manner taught obedience. But
obedience was not enough; the hounds must know how to follow and tree a
lion. With this in mind, Jones decided to catch a lion alive and give
his dogs practical lessons.

A few days after reaching this decision, he discovered the tracks of
two lions in the neighborhood of Mt. Everett. The hounds were put on
the trail and followed it into an abandoned coal shaft. Jones
recognized this as his opportunity, and taking his lasso and an extra
rope, he crawled into the hole. Not fifteen feet from the opening sat
one of the cougars, snarling and spitting. Jones promptly lassoed it,
passed his end of the lasso round a side prop of the shaft, and out to
the soldiers who had followed him. Instructing them not to pull till he
called, he cautiously began to crawl by the cougar, with the intention
of getting farther back and roping its hind leg, so as to prevent
disaster when the soldiers pulled it out. He accomplished this, not
without some uneasiness in regard to the second lion, and giving the
word to his companions, soon had his captive hauled from the shaft and
tied so tightly it could not move.

Jones took the cougar and his hounds to an open place in the park,
where there were trees, and prepared for a chase. Loosing the lion, he
held his hounds back a moment, then let them go. Within one hundred
yards the cougar climbed a tree, and the dogs saw the performance.
Taking a forked stick, Jones mounted up to the cougar, caught it under
the jaw with the stick, and pushed it out. There was a fight, a
scramble, and the cougar dashed off to run up another tree. In this
manner, he soon trained his hounds to the pink of perfection.

Jones discovered, while in the park, that the cougar is king of all the
beasts of North America. Even a grizzly dashed away in great haste when
a cougar made his appearance. At the road camp, near Mt. Washburn,
during the fall of 1904, the bears, grizzlies and others, were always
hanging round the cook tent. There were cougars also, and almost every
evening, about dusk, a big fellow would come parading past the tent.
The bears would grunt furiously and scamper in every direction. It was
easy to tell when a cougar was in the neighborhood, by the peculiar
grunts and snorts of the bears, and the sharp, distinct, alarmed yelps
of coyotes. A lion would just as lief kill a coyote as any oth