My grandmother Galene was a rugged woman of Wyoming. Grandma lived in Riverton, Wyoming and worked as the bookkeeper at her brother's auto dealership in the 1960s. One of her job duties was to travel to the county seat in Lander, over the mountain pass, to handle all the vehicle title and registration paperwork.

Now at that time, going to conduct official business with the county government meant she would dress formally in her Sunday best, wearing a dress, high-heeled shoes, white gloves, and a hat. One day, as she drove her 1964 Dodge Rambler around a bend on the top of the mountain pass, the blur of an animal bounded in front of her car, and was hit. Grandma saw, in her rear view mirror,it tumbling over the side of the road and down the incline.She stopped her car and from the roadside looked down where she saw a bobcat (now known as a lynx) crumpled up and still. She got back in her car and thought about that big cat all the way to the county courthouse, where she checked with the Sheriff's office and discovered that there was a fifty-dollar bounty on bobcat because at the time they were viewed as a danger to the local ranchers' herds of goats and cattle. On her way back over the pass, Grandma thought about what she could do with fifty-dollars, and also about what a taxidermist could do with that cat's pelt - as it hadn't looked in too bad of condition. When she came to that same curve in the road, near the top of the mountain pass, she stopped on the same side of the road and got out of her car. She opened her trunk and removed the tire iron - just in case that big cat wasn't completely dead. Grandma carefully side-stepped down the incline and found the bobcat still there - clearly dead. She examined the pelt and it looked inreally goodcondition; great, she thought! So Grandma then took a hold of this big dead cat by the scruff of its neck and she managed to carry it while climbing up the short incline in her high-heel shoes, dress, white gloves and fancy hat. Just as she reached the roadway, with the cat in one hand, and a tire iron in the other, another vehicle came slowly laboring up the high mountain pass next to her car - a big Greyhound bus - with all of the windows full of the passengers' faces with their mouths agape.

So across this country, and maybe by now the world, people may have heard the wild tale originally told by travelers on a Greyhound bus about the wild andrugged women of Wyoming, who hunt and kill wild bobcat with their bare hands, while wearing their Sunday best clothes. Well, that story is true - sort of. Our family gets a chuckle every time we tell thefulltrue story and show the preserved pelt and head of that infamous lynx that Grandma named "Cat". Grandma was wild and rugged woman of Wyoming, and she would have a big grin at the story's retelling.