Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
BACKCOUNTRY GIRL
Woman driven by taste for big cat hunting, whiskey
TBIG SMOKY VALLEY he men arrived at Letha Roberson’s house early, with crackers and beef jerky for the job of skinning and harvesting the downed mountain lion. But the one with the knife and the know-how provided a profound twist to this gritty ritual of the hunt: A woman was showing them how it was done.
The day before, Roberson had guided 27-year-old Glen Stoner to a spot where he’d felled the big cat from its tree perch 300 yards away with a powerful shot from a high-
powered rifle.
Later, Stoner, his father and his grandfather joined Roberson to celebrate at a nearby bar as the regular drinkers marveled at the snarling carcass of a predator so stealthy many people here have yet to see one, let alone kill it.
In Western states such as Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Arizona, where mountain lion hunting is legal, many hunters go years without bagging a big cat. So the occasion called for countless shots of whiskey and gin.
Just before midnight, Roberson had dragged the body of the big cat into the kitchen to keep it from freezing. Now it was time to skin the animal right there on her kitchen floor.
Roberson, a 43-year-old with short, brown hair, had skinned countless wild animals and could finish a 7-foot, 110-pound cat like this one in a half-hour. She began expertly slicing away at the back leg with a scalping blade, equal parts butcher and surgeon. Hung over from the night before, she steadied her hand with a shot of rum in her coffee.
The men watched in silent awe, as though witnessing an autopsy.
“Well, that’s it,” said Donnie Stoner, Glen’s father, gazing down at the body. “Cleaning fish is about as far as my wife would let me go in her kitchen.”
For Roberson, a 140-pound Idahobred former tomboy, college rugby player, Army National Guard helicopter mechanic, mineworker and backwoods guide, the hunting, killing and skinning are all just part of an independent, rough-hewn rural lifestyle she has carved out over 20 years in this sweeping valley 250 miles north of Las Vegas.
The once-divorced daughter of a milkman works at the Round Mountain gold mine, the only woman to operate a 35-foot, 230,000-pound Caterpillar D-11 bulldozer that rumbles over crushed boulders with such shuttering vibration it often sends drivers to the chiropractor.
When she’s not working, Roberson gathers up her yowling hunting dogs; the hounds are named Jesse, Walker and Tucker Two (Tucker One was killed by a mountain lion). She hops inside her 2009 Dodge Power Wagon with the camouflage interior and vanity-plate acronym OMFR that suggests scaling “one more (expletive) ridge” and heads out in search of big cats.
‘A REAL RARITY’
Across the rustic American West, many women pride themselves as being as tough and self-sustaining as their fathers, husbands and sons. Yet even among this no-nonsense tribe, Roberson stands apart, staking her claim in a traditionally male-dominated domain.
Cory Kemp, who drives a haul truck at the mine, is amazed by Roberson’s pluck. “She’s a wrecking ball,” he said. “Letha doesn’t ask you for help; you ask her for help.”
Kemp has seen Roberson maneuver her bulldozer up mining pit walls at impossible angles, performing dangerous jobs many male operators refuse to chance.
“You see her and you say, ‘Are you supposed to be doing that?’ ” Kemp said. “She’s a real rarity.”
Fellow hunter and mine worker Billy Berg describes Roberson by saying, “That’s just Letha.”
Roberson was married 20 years when Berg noticed her lack of feminine ways.
“I asked my dad, ‘That’s a girl?’ But once you get to know her, you see that soft side. She’s tough; she can hunt and drink with you, but she’s got feelings and you have to remember that.”
Roberson often feels like a misfit born 150 years too late, someone more at home in the Wild West than the new west. She avoids cities, doesn’t like stoplights and wears a hard hat to work each day to reach her seat in a bulldozer cab that looms 15 feet off the ground.
She speaks in a country twang and swears like a drill sergeant, often with a strong accent on the first syllable of words, like DEE-vorce and JU-ly. Her home is a gallery of animal trophies, with elk, mountain lions and raccoons hung on her walls.
On one table, several animal skulls surround a bottle of Wild Turkey, like some offering to the gods. Roberson has bagged bighorn sheep, coyotes, mule deer, antelope, badgers, foxes and bobcats and has climbed trees to face off with a cornered mountain lion. The only thing that scares her are snakes.
On her wall hangs a photo of a mountain lion perched in a tree. “I liked that cat; it was pretty, so I took its picture.” Asked if she then killed the animal, she nodded.
Roberson established her killer instincts early: When she played college rugby, teammates called her not Letha, but Lethal.
She hasn’t combed her hair in 15 years and has worn makeup just once — for her wedding. She’s changed just one diaper in her life, as a 10-year-old babysitter.
Roberson mostly avoids the kitchen, surviving on instant ramen noodles. She owns an arsenal of knives, pistols and shotguns, and carries a .44 magnum mini-rifle in her hunting backpack. Her jeans pocket has a small worn circle from a round canister of chewing tobacco.
Drinking is one of her hobbies. She makes her stops at numerous local bars for her gin-and-tonics. She lives for a good buzz and that daily jolt of adrenaline, an “Oh-myGod heartthrob” that comes from a challenge on the bulldozer or stalking wild animals.
“I have OCHD,” she said, dressed in hunting gear and a camouflage cap, drinking from a camouflage coffee cup. “That’s obsessivecompulsive hunting disorder.”
Roberson no longer keeps a professional guide license in Nevada so only takes friends out on trips, folks like the bar owner whom she traded a guided hunt for an offer of “free drinks for life.”
She met the hunting Stoner family the previous week after Glen Stoner found her friend Connie Kendall’s wallet in a grocery store parking lot and refused a reward.
“Want to hunt a cat?” the women asked.
The big cat on the floor hadn’t wanted to die. Berg’s 14-year-old daughter had shot it twice the previous day, and her father shot it one more time. But the lion ran off, and Berg tracked it until sunset. The next day he returned with Roberson to help finish the job.
Inside the kitchen, the men marveled at the cat’s will to survive. They noticed it was missing several toes, which they figured were lost in a trap.
They took turns skinning, asking, “What am I doing wrong here, Letha?”
Connie Kendall arrived with her husband, Stan, and watched Roberson finally roll up the pelt, head still attached, like a blanket. Later, Roberson fried the meat in garlic and salt, and the group washed it down with gin-and-tonics and beers.
Before taking the pelt to a taxidermist, the hunters were required to present state game wardens with a premolar tooth and a small slice of tongue or muscle to help determine the cat’s age.
Most years, hunters are limited to two cats apiece, but harvested mountain lions remain a rarity in Nevada. In 2014-15, for example, the state issued 5,709 hunting tags but