BAKER CITY — Brian Ratliff has sliced open and probed the innards of quite a number of cows, but he’s never come across a case as confounding as the missing tongue.

“This is a stumper,” Ratliff said on Thursday, Aug. 26. “I don’t have an answer.”

The mystery started the day before for Ratliff, the district wildlife biologist at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s (ODFW) Baker City office.

A ranch manager found the carcass of a 3-year-old cow that morning on a public grazing allotment near the head of Fox Creek. That’s near Lookout Mountain, about 14 miles north of Huntington.

Ratliff investigated the case as a possible wolf attack.

Wolves from the Lookout Mountain pack have killed three head of cattle, and injured three others, this summer several miles to the west.

Wolves didn’t kill the cow at Fox Creek — Ratliff is sure about that.

He’s also confident in his conclusion about why the cow died. Almost the whole of the cow’s tongue — at least a couple pounds of flesh — was missing.

The wound severed two arteries at the base of the tongue, and Ratliff said a veterinarian told him that a cow with that injury would bleed to death relatively rapidly.

That was the only injury which happened prior to the cow’s death, Ratliff said.

The carcass was undisturbed with one exception — birds had pecked out one eyeball.

He estimated the cow died either late on Aug. 24 or early on Aug. 25.

Ratliff said tracking conditions were “phenomenal,” with a large area of dry, soft dirt around the carcass.

He didn’t find any predator tracks, but there were tracks from deer, elk, mice, squirrels and birds. There were also human boot tracks — presumably from the ranch manager who found the carcass.

The carcass was near the upper Fox Creek road, east of Lookout Mountain in eastern Baker County.

But Ratliff said the evidence suggests that the cow sustained the fatal injury on or near the road, about 100 yards from where the carcass was found. That evidence, in the main, is blood.

Copious quantities of blood.

“Buckets,” Ratliff said.

There were multiple large patches of bloody ground, splashes of blood as high as five feet up in nearby trees, and a blood trail between the road and the carcass.

Ratliff surmises that the blood was splashed onto the trees when the cow whipped her head from side to side after the injury.

Tracking conditions were also good at the road, which was dry and dusty. Ratliff found ATV tracks on the road, but, as at the carcass site, no predator tracks.

Ratliff said that as he cut open and examined the carcass, he considered, and in turn discarded, multiple theories about the cow’s demise.

He initially thought the cow might have been shot.

But there was no bullet wound — no wound at all in the hide, come to that.

He wondered if the animal had had an internal tumor that had burst.

But the cows’ lungs and heart appeared to have been healthy.

The mystery deepened when Ratliff examined the jaw and, for the first time, saw that most of the tongue was gone.

The wound was jagged, not the clean cut that a knife or other sharp implement would make, he said.

There were no tooth marks or other evidence of a predator.

Ratliff said he can’t envision how a person could have removed such a large section of the tongue from a living cow.

Other possible explanations aren’t much more plausible, he said.

Cows do curl their tongues around plants they’re eating to rip the food loose, and Ratliff speculated that perhaps the cow’s tongue had been entwined in vegetation and ripped that way.

But while that could cause a small wound, he said it hardly explains the removal of most of the tongue.

He also considered the possibility that the cow’s tongue was caught in a trap.

Or that the cow bit off its own tongue.

Except cows don’t have front teeth on the top of their jaw — there’s just a hard plate. As for the tongue itself, Ratliff didn’t find it.

He said he didn’t open the cow’s stomachs, so he can’t say for certain that the cow didn’t swallow the tongue.

“I cannot tell you what caused that cow to lose its tongue,” Ratliff said.