A Mississippi man was living out a dream when he went to Utah to hunt elk with his bow, but that dream almost turned into a nightmare when he encountered a mountain lion that charged him.
“When I first saw it, I thought, ‘This is cool,'” said Ben Malloy of Shelby, a small town in Bolivar County . “When it came toward me, I said, ‘This is not cool.’
“At that point, you’re pretty much looking at death. You’re either going to win or lose and there’s no in between.”
Malloy is an avid bow hunter and harvested his first white-tailed deer at the age of nine. Since then, he’d always wanted to go elk hunting. When a friend, Spencer Burrows of Scott City, Missouri, suggested they both go to Utah, he jumped at the opportunity.
“He called me last year and said, ‘Let’s go try to shoot an elk,'” Malloy said. “Getting to do that was a dream come true for me.”
Mississippi hunter makes trip to Utah
The two planned the trip for about a year and decided to hunt public land about an hour outside Roosevelt, Utah. It would be a 2-week adventure that began in late August.