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hello i live in texas. i live in the city and own a ranch about 2 hours away from the city. its a low fence but we have some pretrty nice bucks. about one week ago it snowed about six inches, and the guy who looks after our ranch found an eight point buck dead in the snow. he wasn't sure if its neck had been bitten, like most mountain lions do, but had a large chunk taken out of its hindquarters. this took place sometime during the night before, and the spot where they found him dead is kind of in an open clearing at the top of a hill. the hill has many stones and crevices, possible mountain lion den, but before this i have gone hiking through the part of the hill and have never seen anything.

anyways back to the deer. there was some blood around it, but not enough to follow a trail and since there was snow, there were prints. my first question had been if it were a coyote, but the prints did not have nails that showed, and they appeared to curve in, also this was a 170+ pound deer, and a coyote is not likely to have taken him down on its own. if you do think it was a cougar, any tips on how to track it? in the ranch we have actually have had 3 encounters with a lion: the first year i owned it, like five years ago, it walked across the path in the front of the house, the second was when my father spotted it looking out over the edge of a hill on opening morning of hunting season, but he missed the shot, and the final time was one night when the guy watching our ranch and his wife saw it run across the road in the middle of the night at about 50 yards away 3 or 4 years ago. the land is about 800 acres