It was late July 2008 when Levi Wisness asked his friend, Rusty Christophersen, to do him a favor.
Levi wanted Christophersen to help his younger brother, Chase, hunt a mountain lion in the North Dakota Badlands.
“He goes, ‘Do you ever think we could get Chase in on one?’” Christophersen recalled on Wednesday. “I said yeah, I’ll do everything I could do to get him one.”
Levi Wisness died a week later in his sleep from complications related to a brain tumor he’d been battling for nearly a year.
At the time,17-year-old Chase’s future was uncertain.
He had been paralyzed from the waist down, the result of an auto accident in June 2007 — just months before his brother was diagnosed with the tumor.
“It was pretty cool he thought of me then and it was cool that Rusty was serious when he said we could do it,” Chase said on Saturday.
Over the past month, Christophersen did everything he could to fulfill the favor.
Last Monday, he and about a dozen friends capped off more than three weeks of tracking, scouting and hunting to help Chase, 24, of Keene, hunt and kill a 100-pound female mountain lion near Grassy Butte.
It was the last mountain lion allowed to be hunted this year in the state Game and Fish Department’s western North Dakota zone.
“It finally worked out,” Christophersen said.
Dustin Monke 