KILL COUNTY INSIDE A RURAL WASHINGTON SHERIFF'S PRIVATE WAR

“Constitutional sheriffs” claim to be the law of the land when it comes to issues such as gun rights and mask mandates. A leading figure in the movement has now assumed responsibility for managing dangerous wildlife, using a posse of hunters to kill cougars.

- DAWN STOVER

SHORTLY BEFORE noon on Jan. 25, 2020, Brian Ostenson called the sheriff’s office in Goldendale, WA, to report he’d found a deer carcass near a tree about 30 yards from his house. The carcass wasn’t there yesterday, said Ostenson, a man in his early 70s who lives about 14 miles east of town in a sparsely populated rural area that has a mix of open fields and wooded streams.

Ostenson told Deputy Sheriff Erik Beasley that even though he hadn’t seen a cougar, he believed one had killed the deer. The deer was partially buried beneath forest debris, which is how cougars—also known as mountain lions or pumas—often hide their kills so they can feed on them again later.

Beasley called his boss, Klickitat County Sheriff Bob Songer, who advised him to call out a hound hunter. Shortly after arriving on the scene, hunter Lance Fields and his dogs treed a juvenile cougar and shot it. While continuing to search for the cougar’s mother for several more hours, Fields found a second juvenile cougar and killed it, too. He cut the ears off both animals, so they couldn’t be claimed as trophies, and took some photos.

The two cougars killed by Fields are among at least 16 that Sheriff Songer, a blithe man in his 70s who was first elected sheriff in 2014, estimates his hound hunters have killed since he created a special program in 2019 to manage cougars, bobcats, and bears. Eight deputized hound hunters work unpaid for Songer as members of his 130-person volunteer posse in Klickitat County, an area of southern Washington that’s nearly the size of Delaware, but has a population of only about 22,000 people.