Bill Matthews hunted a panther he had never seen, trailed it for years with relish and was delighted when he found the cat had been trailing him in turn. But Matthews was a special man who watched the mountains when he talked to you on a Denver street, and if he had been born a hundred years earlier he would have worn buckskin and trapped beaver.
There have been--may still be--human youngsters who grow up with cougars without ever seeing them--and if they are a certain kind of youngster they have learned of their contemporaries through tracks in the snow or the remains of deer or rabbit kills.
Matthews was a young hunter when he first began to trail his cougar each fall, and at first he wanted very much to shoot it but in later years he read its tracks for the pleasure it gave him. It was the second year that he found the cat was trailing him as well, the big paw marks very near his boot prints in snow along the rimrock, through the aspen patch and next to the pines on the border of the high sage flat.
So the two of them enjoyed the game for several years and Matthews was not sure what he would do if he ever saw the cat. He often had the feeling that it was watching him and sometimes the trail showed that he was right. He knew the cat's territory and it would take no more than a day or two each fall before he would find its trail. The tracks had become much larger than they had been the first year.
Now, authentic cases of cougars attacking humans are few and far-spaced and dairy bulls have proved a thousand times more dangerous, but there was a day when Matthews became uncomfortable about his acquaintance's intentions. By then it was an old lion.
Matthews had, as before, lost interest in his mule-deer hunting when he crossed the cougar track and he had followed it for more than an hour before lunch time. Then he sat down where the wind had cleared snow from a rock near a familiar rim and he ate some beef jerky and a piece of chocolate.
When he had rested a few minutes he picked up his rifle and walked a wide circle around his lunch spot to see if the cougar had been watching. He found where it had moved toward him behind cover, its narrow belly leaving a shallow groove in the snow, and he found where it had crouched on a flat boulder, closer than usual, with its feet drawn under it--but what brought Matthews erect and prickled the hairs on his neck was a special mark in the snow. It was where the tip of the cougar's tail had switched gently as it watched him eat his lunch. After that Matthews ate lunch only in broad openings.
Only once have I seen a cougar in the wild when he had not sensed my presence first. It was a mature panther sitting incredibly tall on the edge of heavy timber and he flowed into the bushes so smoothly there was a moment of misgiving as to whether he'd really been there.
There was a time when we rode tired horses along a rocky ridge, eyeing a canyon for sign of the elk which had disappeared into it hours before. We had left a timber trail and only a ragged patch of scrub pines stood on the ridge ahead.
Heads down and slogging through patches of snow the horses breathed hard from a climb they had just made and we were about to rest them when they caught a scent from somewhere ahead and became almost unmanageable.
It was grizzly country and I fumbled at my saddle scabbard, feeling like an unwilling model for the calendar paintings that have for generations shown rugged horsemen faced by giant humpbacked bruins on narrow mountain trails.
But we saw nothing move and when the horses were calmed we found sections of a cougar's trail where he had passed close by on the way to lower concealment, slipping by through some cat miracle without being seen, somehow using shreds of cover hardly enough to hide a marmot. In the mountains the big cat is a shadow, a wraith and a creature of rumors and tall tales.
We traveled more than a mile of mangrove creek to reach a fishing spot in Everglades National Park--more than a mile of shadowed tunnel, with an idling outboard motor bumping over logs and the boat's bow scraping against mangrove roots and through cobwebs--sure sign the creek had long been unused.
It was the same kind of travel that has so often brought us within scant yards of wild turkeys and silent whitetail deer. When the creek opened to a small bay we cut the motor and rowed along the mangrove bank. An unidentified small bird gave alarm calls and a few feet away through the mangroves we heard a series of wheezy coughs, moving farther away, and there was one faint shadow drifting briefly and disappearing. Then it was a silent place again.
"An old tom," said the long-time resident. "We woke him up and he was cranky. It's a place a cat could live and if you'll look at a map you'll see why."
Swamps and mountains are better with panthers in them.
This story appeared originally in The Part I Remember by Charles Waterman. Copyright (c) 1974 by Charles F. Waterman. All rights reserved.