SnapShot: Attacked...When the Hunter Became the Hunted

A clear morning in the Arizona high desert, a ridgeline plan for javelina, and a mind primed by campfire talk about mountain lions—then the brush explodes. What follows is a split-second cascade of choices: a rifle swings from the hip, a safety clicks off, and silence. The bolt is out of battery, the target is airborne, and instinct takes over as a sidearm does what the primary won’t. When the dust settles, the “lion” is a fox, the ankle throbs, and a hard truth stands out: in wild places, perception can be as dangerous as teeth.

We trace the arc from Alaska’s big game culture to the Sonoran desert’s tight cover and quick shots, highlighting how terrain and mindset shape every decision. You’ll hear why elevation can hide as much as it reveals, how predator talk can hijack your senses, and what a malfunction teaches about redundancy and readiness. We get into practical backcountry safety—gear checks that actually matter, the value of a reliable sidearm in brush country, and the judgment call between pursuit and pause when the environment shortens your reaction time.

There’s also the human side: calling Fish and Game about rabies, choosing taxidermy over surrender, and living for years with a rug that slowly falls apart until only the head remains. That fox head becomes more than a keepsake; it’s a compact lesson in humility, risk, and the stories we tell ourselves after the adrenaline fades. If you love hunting stories with real takeaways—or you’ve ever misread a shadow at the edge of camp—this one sticks. Subscribe, share with a friend who hunts the brush, and leave a review with your own close-call story so we can feature it next time.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Alaska Roots And Early Hunting
• 0:47 Learning Javelina And Desert Country
• 1:19 Campfire Warnings About Mountain Lions
• 2:00 The Setup On The Ridgeline
• 2:55 The Charge And Misfire Panic
• 4:10 From Lion In Mind To Fox In Fact
• 5:15 Rabies Call And Taxidermy Detour
• 6:35 The Rug’s Demise And Keeping The Head

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to a Murders to Music snapshot. So I hunted growing up in Alaska, and I grew up hunting and fishing, and there was bear and moose and caribou and all the stuff that Alaska has to offer. I spent a ton of time in the woods. Even at nine, ten years old, I would come home from school and grab a shotgun and go kill squirrels and stuff like that in the woods and then bring them back and eat them and spruce hand and all those other things. Well, I moved down to Phoenix, Arizona when I was about 17 years old and uh ultimately got married there. But during that time, I was about 20, this would have been probably 1998, 1999, somewhere in that range. A buddy of mine asked me if I wanted to go javelina hunting. And I didn't even know what a javelina was. And it looks like a pig, like an ugly gross pig with some tusks, but it is actually a member of the rodent family. And these things were talking 50, 60 pounds, and they stand 30 inches off the ground and they run around and snort like a pig does, but they're actually a giant rodent. Um, and you eat them, and the native people there eat them. And anyway, so he asked me if I wanted to go have a lina hunting. And I said, sure, why not? So we go to the high desert, and we're in this canyon area, and outside of town, obviously, and it's high desert, it's canyon, there's sagebrush, and we're sitting around the fire that night and we're talking, and he's like, you know, there's mountain lion in this area, we got to be careful. And I'm like, I had no idea. So we're talking about these mountain lions, and we're talking about they could be sitting just outside camp watching us, and we would never know. So the next day we get up and we go have a lina hunting. And it's a hilly terrain. So you could very easily be standing at the bottom of the hill, your buddies standing just over the crest and not see each other, uh, but still be close enough to hear and talk and all that kind of stuff. So the next day, as we get up, we're glassing with our uh binoculars, and we see a herd of Havelena, a flock, a fleet, a school, whatever you call them. We see that herd, and it's on the other side of this hill. So the plan is this I'm gonna crest the hill and just cross over the crest. My buddy is gonna stay on the downside of the hill. He's gonna call these javelina in. The javelina are gonna come rushing over the top of the hill right towards me. I'm gonna take my pick and shoot my javelina, and life is going to be good. So that's exactly what we do. I go to the top of the hill and I crest the hill, and it's early in the morning. We're only about eight o'clock in the morning. Daylight's been up for a couple of hours, it's just starting to get warm, sun is shining, clear blue skies, Arizona. And my buddy's down the hill behind me, and I can hear him, and there's only the two of us out there. We have seen no other humans around us. So he's calling, calling, calling these javelina. I can hear him. I'm just over the crest. And around me is some sagebrush. There's like a pile of sagebrush to my left that's 12 feet long, six feet high, four feet deep, and then there's tumbleweeds all over from there. So as he's calling these javelinas, I hear something from the sagebrush to my left. And this sagebrush is about 20 feet away, 15, 20 feet away. And I hear something, and I think it's a javelina. So I turn and look that direction, and something jumps out of the sagebrush at me. It's attacking me. And all I see is ears and eyes and teeth at head height. And I'm like, this is the mountain lion we were talking about. So I gotta move fast. This thing is a it's a fast animal. I spin around to my left with my rifle, and my rifle's still at my hip, and I flip it off safety and I pull the trigger, I'm gonna shoot from the waist, and I'm shooting anybody that's a gun guy. Don't laugh, it's a big caliber for this, but I'm shooting a 300 weatherby, is what I'm shooting. So it's a bolt action rifle. So when I swing and I flip it off safety and I pull that trigger, nothing happens. And I know there's a round in the chamber. But what had happened is for you gun people, the bolt was out of battery, meaning that that thing that loads the bullets in, it wasn't seated properly. And if it's not seated properly, then one of the safety features of the gun is the gun won't go off. So I shoot, nothing happens, and this thing is coming at me. Now it bounces, it hits the ground about six feet out from me, and it lunges up again and is coming right from my face. And I take this rifle that I'm holding and I hit it on top of the head and I knock it to the ground. Then this thing grabs a hold of my left ankle and it's biting my left ankle. It's got my pants in its left, in its mouth. And I transition to my handgun, because I have a handgun on my side, and I shoot it off of my leg. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. And it rolls. And I'm screaming like a little girl. And my buddy comes running over the hill. And when he comes over the hill, I am still pushed out, pressed out on this thing, pointed in at it, and my buddy comes up, he's like, It's okay, it's dead. And he takes my gun down, and we put my gun away, and I am shaking. I've just got attacked by some wild animal. It's the mountain lion that we were talking about the night before. I've got, do I am I bit? Am I hurt? Did it just get my pants? Did it get my skin? Well, it turns out it was a fox. I got attacked by a fox. And I I get it. The fox, like tip to tail, is probably 30 inches, and it stands, you know, 18 inches off the ground. It's not a huge animal. But when that thing is coming at me, it is literally like it looked like a freaking grizzly bear jumping at me with the eyes and the teeth and all the ears and everything else laid back. It was mean. It was a very mean fox. So this fox gets shot, and we're like, he, I tell him the story, what just happened, and he's like, Man, I knew it wasn't your rifle because of the way the you know the succession of shots. So, and me screaming like a girl was a clue. So I call up the Arizona Department of Fish and Game, and I'm like, hey, this is what happened, and I have this fox. Um, what do I need to do? And like, well, you need to bring it in because it could be rabid and we need to check it for rabies. And I said, Well, if I bring it to you, do I get it back or do you guys keep it? And they're like, no, we have to keep it and destroy it. I'm like, okay, I'll bring it right in. The fox never made it to Arizona Department of Fishing Game. It made it to a taxidermist. So I took it to a taxidermy. The taxidermy made this thing into a rug, gave it like real eyes and teeth and all that, and I had this taxidermied rug forever. And it was just about two weeks ago, I went to get it out of the closet and it had just disintegrated and fallen apart. So I took it to the dump and I was gonna throw it away, and the lady at the dump was just impressed. She's like, there's no way it's real. And anyway, she was petting its little head. So, but its head was still good, like all the fur on its head and ears and eyes and teeth. That thing that I saw jumping out at me, all of that was still good. So I didn't throw it away. I took it home, I cut off the remainder of the body that with a pair of scissors, you know, and threw the rest of the rug away. Now I've got just the head. I'm gonna put that on top of my gun safe. There's my story, and that's what it's like to be a hen in the foxhouse.