Lion Tales

Jonathon Kibler, a cougar-hunting specialist, has been hunting American lions since his early teens. Hunting lions with hounds on dry ground in the Southwest is arguably the hardest method of hunting these large cats. Kibler has mastered this skill and his hunting adventures have elevated him with the Lee brothers and Ben Lilly to a legendary status as a master lion hunter of the American Southwest. He’s one of the last of a handful of purists who disdains any method other than dry-ground, fair-chase hunting. In his more than three decades of chasing lions through the toughest desert country in North America, he’s guided clients to hundreds of trophy cats and captured lions for various government and private biological studies. In his quest, he’s bred his own lion dogs and largely trains and shoes his own mules. Predictably, he’s had close encounters in his decades astride mules in the desert wilderness, and though it has on occasion been a near thing, he’s survived them all to write this, his first book. Kibler has followed a lion into a pitch-black cave with an ice-cold underground pool, dealt with a tom cat that eluded him for more than two years, and taken lions sitting on ledges mere inches wide and hundreds of yards up a steep cliff. Lion Tales contains some of the most interesting stories ever written on hunting mountain lions in the United States.