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Article Excerpt
The Being that we are asking about is almost like Nothing.--Heidegger
It was only my third day in Ulysses, Pennsylvania, when the one-armed panther hunter and I stepped in out of the abyss to play a game of pool. We'd been searching the hills that morning, like the morning before, for an animal that I had been told all my life did not exist, but then, just before noon, we'd come across a set of its tracks in the snow. At first, standing outside his truck, squinting at the large, long-gaited pugmarks, holding himself with his one arm for warmth, my elderly companion had seemed uncertain. But now, as Roger Cowburn angled his cue, he was more than certain, almost evangelical, acting as if the beating he was going to dole out to me was due punishment for my lack of faith.
The game room in the back of his house was forsaken and stale-smelling like an after-hours club for veterans. The bottles behind the built-in bar looked as musty as the skins and heads and other useless parts of slain animals decorating the walls. Staring at me down the cue stick with a triumphal glow in his keen hunter's eyes, he said that nothing makes his heart gladder than a nonbeliever, like myself, turned believer. He tapped the corner pocket. It's like this one poor man who, called him one day out of breath, a guy who confessed that he'd been ridiculing Roger behind his back for years, that he'd never believed, but now he'd seen the truth and, he said, you can tell me they're pink from now on and I'll believe ya. Converts always make his day. "How many people like to admit they're wrong?" he asked me. "Darn few." He studied the seven ball sternly and then sank it gently. "You're darn right."
In the months since I began looking for the supposedly extinct eastern panther (a.k.a. mountain lion, puma, cougar, ghost cat of America), coming to the conclusion that it is quite possibly the most metaphysical mystery in American natural history, I have flown in gut-wrenching pirouettes fifty feet over the Everglades in a falling-apart Cessna piloted by a hungover Frenchman; I have insulted chaplain-faced biologists with badly timed questions about feline electroejaculation; I have been given a deep-tissue massage by an employee of the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources--a balding, dentally compromised guy with flaming skulls tattooed on his forearms; I have ducked lightning while tiptoeing through a bear sanctuary; and I have listened to exasperated apparatchiks of the wildlife agencies, who are, frankly, "sick of this crap" about the mythical panthers. I have dwelt in the penetralia of Appalachia with seekers and hard-boiled mountainmen. I have visited sordid animal sanctuaries where mountain lions are caged in cement cells plastered with ads for psychics and divorce lawyers; I've gazed upon the entrails of dead animals; and I've studiously attempted to learn how to discern a tapered coil of fox shit from the blunter robustos left by what I have begun to think of as my bete noire. But my pursuit began at a meeting last year, around Roger's kitchen table, with several core members of a group of self-proclaimed "true believers" called the Eastern Puma Research Network (EPRN).
The house is freezing cold. Shivering under three layers, I am seated across the kitchen table from a man named Norman Davis, in a big black Russian shapka, and Roger, who holds court from the end. Stitched to the good sleeve of Roger's bulky parka is the official Eastern Puma Field Research patch, an encircled snarling cat's head bearing closer resemblance, on first glance, to a saber-toothed tiger than to a mountain lion. The furtive tone of the meeting, as if the cell has in its possession evidence of a plot for world dominion rather than clues to a natural mystery, is made only slightly more tense by the presence of its third member, a mute in tall rubber boots standing just behind me, his thuggish presence unsoftened by a faded sweatshirt blazoned with a sad, green-irised puma under his camouflage jacket.
Scattered before me are the morguish photos of slain woodland creatures and half a dozen pawprint plaster casts. On the table is a can of Zippo lighter fluid, a sputtering police scanner, and a small-caliber pistol half-concealed in a sock. A box of shotgun shells sits on top of the microwave. And looking down on us, caught in a ray of late-afternoon sun, hung above the kitchen table, is a beatific portrait of a panther, framed by heavenly blue, like Jesus Himself.
Roger holds up one of the casts--which resembles, in heft and texture, a large fossilized clam--and traces its lobed heel pad while comparing it with a heavier hear track. This particular cast was made from tracks found near the body of a fawn that Roger's cousin discovered while plowing a late March snowfall. Roger and his research deputy, Olson, the guy standing over me, had gone to the scene and found the rabbit-faced fawn in the ditch, its abdomen sliced open and its guts strewn on the half-frozen ground. A long bloody trail led from the woods where the deer had been killed and then dragged to the edge of the road. A cursory postmortem revealed that the heart, liver, and lungs of the deer had been eaten--or were, at any rate, missing. It was this unique way in which the prey's viscera had been dispatched, and the way the remains were then halfheartedly covered with loose dirt, leaves, and debris, that convinced Roger the culprit was in fact Puma concolor couguar. "First they pull out the intestines." Roger pronounces the last syllable so that 1 can't help but imagine ropy innards coiled around the tines of a fork. "Now, a bear will just rip one all to pieces. A coyote will hamstring it. But a cat, they'll break its neck, go for the throat, bleed it out."
They searched the area and took photographs. While Olson scoured the ground looking for more evidence--he has a talent for nosing out scat--Roger got his detective kit from the truck and set about mixing a batch of plaster. They returned to the site every day, but the carcass remained undisturbed. Perhaps the cat, put off by the human stink of forensic molestation, had abandoned its quarry. By the fourth day still nothing had fed on it, so they conducted a field autopsy by skinning out the carcass and counting the wounds. In the black-bound photo album tediously documenting each bloody step of their inquest, there is a close-up of a latex-gloved hand tugging back the hide of the fawn with a hand-drawn arrow pointing to a puncture in the exposed crimson under the caption "tooth mark." When they came back on the tenth day, they found fresh tracks in the mud, and the deer was not where they'd left it. They searched up and down the road until they found it again, dragged out into a field and almost completely devoured, nothing left but ribs and hoof. Everything about the predation showed signs of a mountain lion, Roger said, right down to the way its spinal cord was severed. Roger knows the behavior of the cat intimately. He has seen kills like this himself several times. And yet the animal he's talking about has been thought extinct now for over a hundred years.
The fate of the eastern panther was sealed by the arrival of European settlers. When the superstitious pilgrims first encountered the primordial bestiary of the New World--wolves, bears, and prehistoric serpents among the mangroves--it was the panther that preyed on their worst fears. It was a monster with a "Tail like a Lyon, its Leggs like a Bear's ... its Claws like an Eagle, its eyes like a Tyger, its countenance ... a mixture of every Thing that is Fierce and Savage." Powerful enough to pull down a horse, to leap twenty feet into the branches of a tree with a dog clamped in its jaws, the cat, when hungry enough, could slaughter a flock of sheep in a single night. Its unearthly scream sounded like a woman being murdered; its hide glowed like "fox-fire at night and green lights burned from the eyes"; it stalked children; it was rumored to have a taste for pregnant wives.
With the Inquisition, during which cats were associated with witchcraft, fresh in the pilgrims' minds, the panther was an intolerable demon, a dread symbol of the dark wilderness they had come to tame with the benevolent light of Christianity. So then, after all of the deer and the rabbits and the grouse and the turkeys and the elk had been wiped out by over-hunting and by cutting down the forests to let in all that celestial light, thus forcing the panther to eat the settlers livestock, it was easy to turn it into a scapegoat. "It is now only," Henry W. Shoemaker lamented in his 1917 treatise Extinct Pennsylvania Animals, "that people are beginning to wake up to the fact that the panthers were the victims of a cowardly plot to avert the white hunters' culpability."
Bounties were set, and out of the forests rumbled wagons piled high with slain lions, heaped like Persian rugs. The cats were burned and their heads were stacked in the village square like bewitched, outlawed gourds. A trapper could fetch twenty dollars for a scalp, but the animal was so reviled that its pelt was hardly worth nailing to the side of a drafty shithouse. Even some Native Americans loathed the panther, since it ,*,as associated with Machtando, the Evil One, and because they believed that the souls of unfaithful wives were reborn as cougars. The wolf was a terrifying fairy tale, but the panther was an inconceivable monster, the most vilified and feared of predators.
Once the species was dominant over a range greater than any predator in the New World, from northern Alberta to the tip of Patagonia *; by 1890 the eastern subspecies had evaporated. It was considered officially extinct in New Jersey and Massachusetts by 1800, with the last stragglers killed in 1830 and 1858, respectively. The last slain in Illinois was in 1818. Audubon, who had shot a panther or two himself, declared the animal close to extinction in the eastern states by 1851. The last bounty paid in Pennsylvania was in 1868, and the last confirmed eastern panther killed in the United States was shot in Barnard, Vermont, on Thanksgiving Day, 1881. Its stuffed corpse was then mounted and paraded from town to town under the billing: "Monster Panther--Don't Fail to See Him--An Object Lesson in Natural History." Thus was the panther banished from the wilderness.
The larger species, Puma concolor--a genus of its own--is now officially confined to a few patches of South America, Texas, and fringes of the western United States and Canada; the only known remnant in the East is a genetically compromised population of fifty or so cats mucking out an existence in the swamps of southern Florida. It's hard to believe it survived at all, considering the universal vilification. To the famous panther slayer Ben Lilly, "all panthers were dragons." Cougars are still treated as varmint in Texas. Even one early curator at the American Museum of Natural History referred to the panther as that "most insidious and deadly foe of human kind." Thoreau, a lone voice, wrote in his journal, in 1856, that since the panther had been exterminated he felt that he lived in a "tamed and ... emasculated country."
One surprising reason hunters detested the animal was for its alleged cowardice. Popular hunting lore had it that you could sneak up on the cat and pull its tail. "When about to be knifed or shot, these animals are known to have looked the hunters in the eyes and shed real tears," Shoemaker wrote. Legendary outdoorsmen like James Capen "Grizzly" Adams had only contempt for the cougar. Teddy Roosevelt, that great preserver of land, also believed the cougar to be a coward, referred to it as a "noxious species," and favored killing it off entirely. And so it went that the policy of zero tolerance continued into the twentieth century, with federal exterminators chasing down the fugitives out West with strychnine-laced horsemeat and catnip-scented traps. These noble killers, early game wardens, employees of the Predator and Rodent Control division of the old U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey--the former name of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the same agency now responsible for protecting the wildlife it once so enthusiastically ushered into obsolescence--continued killing them one by one up until the fifties,...
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