They took their cats within 18 hours of each other, but their mountain lion encounters were much farther apart.

Accompanying his girlfriend who was trying to fill a mule deer doe tag, Bryan Myers, of Roseglen, shot his at "about 7 yards" about 3:30 p.m. CST on Wednesday.

Then Will Vance, of Dickinson, shot his mountain lion at "just under 400 yards" about 8:30 a.m. MST on Thursday.

The mountain lions were the first two harvested during North Dakota's experimental mountain lion season, which opened Sept. 2. The season will close March 12 or earlier if the five-cat quota is filled.

Vance's cougar was a male, estimated to be 1½ to 2 years old and weighing 99 pounds. Myers' cougar was a 92-pound female between between 2½ and 3 years old. There was no evidence the female had born kittens, North Dakota Game and Fish Department furbearer biologist Dorothy Fecske said Friday after she had weighed and aged the cougars.

For Myers, the cougar had one distinguishing characteristic.

"I turned around, and all Isaw were its head and eyes. The eyes were piercing. I can hardly describe a feeling like that," he said by telephone Friday.

He and Lauren Swantko were returning to their pickup.

"She was a little behind me, and I turned and caught sight of a fur patch. I thought, 'fur patch? Why is a dog following us?' Then something hit me that something was wrong," Myers said.

"I turned around, and knew what it was. Isaid, 'Lauren, give me the gun.' She handed me the gun. She didn't see it right away."

Myers' first shot missed.

"It froze. I was facing it head on. I shot again and hit it in the chest. It leaped and fell over. Then it got its legs under it and ran off into the trees," he said.

The couple regained their composure, rested, tracked it a ways but stayed away from the trees.They saw its tail sticking out in the sunlight, but the rest of the cougar was shrouded in shade.

They waited again.

Then "I walked around the bottom side and shot her twice more," said Myers, who added he was glad he had purchased a furbearer license, which is required to harvest a cougar in North Dakota's season.

Vance saw his mountain lion in a brushy draw as he and two friends walked a ridge line, checking the draw for deer.

"I saw a head in the brush and assumed it was a doe. I couldn't see horns," he said Friday.

Even using binoculars, Vance looked about five minutes before he figured out he was peering at a cougar.

"The cat got up. I got lucky and got an open shot and got lucky again," he said.

The mountain lion went down, rose, ran into more thick brush but didn't come out.

"We didn't know if it was done for sure. As we approached it, it got up one more time, and it took a second round to take care of it."

The cats were killed in a habitat considered good for mountain lions.

"It was rugged topography and plenty of stalking and concealment cover," said Fecske.

Myers was hunting southeast of Ice Box Canyon in the Grassy Butte area. Vance shot his in the Killdeer Mountain Wildlife Management Area.

Both cats appeared to be in good shape, she added. She examined Myers' cougar on Thursday and Vance's cat on Friday.

With both men arranging with taxidermists to create full body mounts of the trophies, Fecske is waiting for the cats to be skinned before she performs necropsies.

Then she will learn what the animals are eating, test them for diseases, look for parasites and take samples for a genetic analysis "to see where these came from."

Researchers in South Dakota and Wyoming have begun gathering genetic information on mountain lions. "Working with them, we can determine where this young male came from," she said.

The female cougar is "more than likely a resident animal, although Ican't say for sure," Fecske said.

The male could be a transient, she added. Young males typically disperse, traveling 60 miles or more, she explained. South Dakota holds a resident mountain lion population in the Black Hills.

The male had porcupine quills on its chest, indicating it recently had eaten, Fecske added.

"Young animals newly on their own often haven't developed their hunting skills yet and rely more on smaller prey. Porcupines are a common food item for younger animals," Fecske explained. Young males typically disperse when they are between 13 and 18 months old.

Four young mountain lions, including three females, have been killed in North Dakota in the past 14, or so, months. In addition to the two cats harvested this week, a cougar was arrowed by a bow hunter, who said it was about to pounce on him, during the 2004 archery deer season, and another was caught in a snare.

That so many were females "suggests there are a few breeding animals in the state because females don't disperse far from their natal ranges," Fecske said. "The fact that a female was harvested indicates there are individual animals in western North Dakota, but it's too soon to say if it's a resident breeding population."

Both cats were killed in terrain that was covered with snow, and the men who harvested them credited the snow with helping them.

"If it weren't for the snow, there's no way Iwould have seen the cat in there," said Vance.

"After it laid down underneath that tree, it was amazing. Without snow you would never see it," Myers said.

Vance was taken back to learn he had killed North Dakota's second mountain lion of the experimental season.

"The odds of finding one are so remote, I was really surprised," he said.

Myers, who paced off the distance between where he stood with Swantko and the lion was, said he was running on instinct after seeing the mountain lion.

"I saw it and reacted. You hear stories like the bow hunter last year and think, 'Wow it's pretty crazy.' You never imagine it would happen to you.

"When the biologist came, I asked whether it was curious or stalking us. She said, 'I'm still thinking on it.'

"It's tough to tell. I wish I had gone back to track it and see how far we had been followed," he said.

(Reach reporter Richard Hinton at 250-8256 or richard.hinton@;bismarcktribune.com.)