In 1951, as a three year old child, Kirk Robinson wandered through the peach and cherry orchards and the hay fields around his family’s house near Bountiful, Utah – a small town then with a population of 6,004. From the back porch he could watch deer, turkey vultures circling the sky, sea gulls, skunks, and an occasional fox. He loved going hiking in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains.

When he was 11, he read Rutherford George Montgomery’s “Yellow Eyes” about a baby cougar.

When he was 16, he spent time on a ranch working for his uncles and his grandfather, who were potato farmers who leased a ranch near the Idaho border, just inside Utah, in Curlew Valley. He saddled horses, rode, and rounded up cows. He remembers his grandfather as a “real cowboy.”

Like many other boys in rural Idaho, he sometimes went hunting, mostly rabbit hunting…