A Reddit user said the encounter happened while he and his brother were archery hunting deer in a spot that was normally productive for them. According to his comment in the thread, deer movement had been slow, so the two of them ended up meeting near a large old clear-cut after not seeing much. They were both in full camo, had decent scent control, and were just looking the area over when they spotted two shapes crossing the cut about 150 yards away and heading toward a jack pine stand. At first, he said, they were both basically just staring and asking the same thing: “What the hell is that?”
Then they figured it out.
It was not deer. It was a pair of mountain lions — a mature female and what he described as an adult cub.
And instead of doing the smart thing right away, they got curious.
He wrote that one of them actually said, “Hey bro, how close do you think we can stalk up on them.” That is the kind of line that sounds hilarious in hindsight and terrible in real time once you know how it ends. According to him, they started working their way closer, splitting up a little at one point as they moved in. The answer to the question, he said later, turned out to be uncomfortably close: one of them got to 28 yards, and the other got to 32. That means two bowhunters ended up within easy bow range of not one mountain lion, but two of them, before everything really sank in.
What makes the story so good is the moment where curiosity finally loses to common sense. He said they eventually looked at each other and both basically reached the same conclusion: maybe getting that close to two lions was not the brightest move. So they decided to back out. They did not say the lions charged or blew up the scene. In fact, from the way he told it, the worst part was almost how calm the whole thing stayed while they realized how deep into a bad idea they already were. The cats were still there, the distance was already down to around 30 yards, and the brothers had to quietly reverse course without turning the encounter into a panic sprint.
He added one more line that tells you how the experience stuck with him afterward: they still wonder, all these years later, if the lions knew they were there. That is really the part that hangs in the air. Two hunters in full camo, moving carefully, working in close through a clear-cut and jack pine, getting inside 30 yards of a mature female mountain lion and an adult cub, and never fully knowing whether the cats had them pegged the whole time and simply chose not to react. That uncertainty is half the story.
The whole thing was not a charge, not a shot, and not some classic “predator attack” story. It was worse in a quieter kind of way. Two brothers were out archery hunting deer, spotted movement in a clear-cut, realized too late they were looking at two mountain lions, and then let curiosity carry them to within 28 and 32 yards before deciding maybe bow-range mountain lions were close enough. After that, all they could do was ease back out and wonder afterward whether the cats had been watching them the entire time.
What do you think — if you realized too late that you had stalked to within 30 yards of two mountain lions with a bow in your hand, would you trust yourself to back out slowly, or would panic take over the second it clicked?
Original Reddit post: What’s the scariest real life animal encounter you’ve had?
