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ASLAN RESURRECTED Searching for Wild Panthers in a Domesticated World 'Byjay Cj1rk

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ASLAN RESURRECTED Searching for Wild Panthers in a Domesticated World 'Byjay Cj1rk F 0 L 0 ASLAN RESURRECTED Searching for wild panthers in a domesticated world 'ByJay CJ1rk The Being that we are asking about is almost like poor man who called him one day out of breath, Nothing. a guy who confessed that he'd been ridiculing -Heidegger Roger behind his back for years, that he'd never believed, but now he'd seen the truth and, he It was only my third day in Ulysses, Pennsyl- said, you can tell me they're pink from now on and vania, when the one-armed panther hunter and I'll believe ya. Converts alwaysmake his day."How I stepped in out of the abyssto playa game of pool. many people like to admit they're wrong?" he We'd been searching the hills that morning, like asked me. "Darn few." He studied the seven ball the morning before, for an animal sternly and then sank it gently. that I had been told all my life did "You're darn right." not exist, but then, just before In the months since I began noon, we'd come across a set of looking for the supposedly extinct its tracks in the snow. At first, eastern panther (a.k.a. mountain standing outside his truck, squint- lion, puma, cougar, ghost cat of ing at the large, long-gaited pug- America), coming to the conclu- marks, holding himself with his sion that it is quite possibly the one arm for warmth, my elderly most metaphysical mystery in companion had seemed uncertain. American natural history, I have But now, as Roger Cowburn an- flown in gut-wrenching pirouettes gled his cue, he was more than fifty feet over the Everglades in a certain, almost evangelical, act- falling-apart Cessna piloted by a ing as if the beating he was going hungover Frenchman; I have in- to dole out to me was due punish- sulted chaplain-faced biologists ment for my lack of faith. with badly timed questions about The game room in the back of feline electroejaculation; I have his house was forsaken and stale-smelling like an been given a deep-tissue massage by an employ- after-hours club for veterans. The bottles behind ee of the West Virginia Division of Natural Re- the built-in bar looked as musty as the skins and sources-a balding, dentally compromised guy heads and other uselessparts of slain animals dec- with flaming skulls tattooed on his forearms; I orating the walls. Staring at me down the cue have ducked lightning while tiptoeing through a stick with a triumphal glow in his keen hunter's bear sanctuary; and I have listened to exasperat- eyes, he said that nothing makes his heart gladder ed apparatchiks of the wildlife agencies, who are, than a nonbeliever, like myself, turned believer. frankly, "sick of this crap" about the mythical He tapped the corner pocket. It's like this one panthers. I have dwelt in the penetralia of Jay Kirk's last article for Harper'sMagazine,"Watching the Detectives," appeared in the August 2003 issue. FOLlO 49 Appalachia with seekers and hard-boiled moun- long bloody trail led from the woods where the tainmen. I have visited sordid animal sanctuar- deer had been killed and then dragged to the ies where mountain lions are caged in cement edge of the road. A cursory postmortem revealed cells plastered with ads for psychics and divorce that the heart, liver, and lungs of the deer had lawyers; I've gazed upon the entrails of dead an- been eaten-or were, at any rate, missing. It was imals; and I've studiously attempted to learn how this unique way in which the prey's viscera had to discern a tapered coil of fox shit from the been dispatched, and the way the remains were then halfheartedly covered with loose dirt, leaves, and debris, that convinced Roger the culprit was THE TONE OF THE MEETING IS in fact Puma concolor couguar. "First they pull FURTIVE, AS IF THE CELL HAD out the intestines." Roger pronounces the last syllable so that I can't help but imagine ropy in- EVIDENCE OF A PLOT FOR nards coiled around the tines of a fork. "Now, a WORLD DOMINION 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." blunter robustos left by what I have begun to They searched the area and took photographs. think of as my bete noire. But my pursuit began While Olson scoured the ground looking for at a meeting last year, around Roger's kitchen more evidence-he has a talent for nosing out table, with several core members of a group of self- scat-Roger got his detective kit from the truck proclaimed "true believers" called the Eastern and set about mixing a batch of plaster. They re- Puma Research Network (EPRN). .turned to the site every day, but the carcass re- The house is freezing cold. Shivering under mained undisturbed. Perhaps the cat, put off by three layers, I am seated across the kitchen table the human stink of forensic molestation, had from a man named Norman Davis, in a big black abandoned its quarry. By the fourth day still Russian shapka, and Roger, who holds court from nothing had fed on it, so they conducted a field the end. Stitched to the good sleeve of Roger's autopsy by skinning out the carcass and count- bulky parka is the officialEastern Puma Field Re- ing the wounds. In the black-bound photo album search patch, an encircled snarling eat's head tediously documenting each bloody step of their bearing closer resemblance, on first glance, to a inquest, there is a close-up of a latex-gloved saber-toothed tiger than to a mountain lion. The hand tugging back the hide of the fawn with a furtive tone of the meeting, as if the cell has in hand-drawn arrow pointing to a puncture in the its possession evidence of a plot for world do- exposed crimson under the caption "tooth mark." minion rather than clues to a natural mystery, is When they came back on the tenth day, they made only slightly more tense by the presence of found fresh tracks in the mud, and the deer was its third member, a mute in tall rubber boots not where they'd left it. They searched up and standing just behind me, his thuggish presence un- down the road until they found it again, dragged softened by a faded sweatshirt blazoned with a sad, out into a field and almost completely devoured, green-irised puma under his camouflage jacket. nothing left but ribs and hoof. Everything about Scattered before me are the morguish photos the predation showed signs of a mountain lion, of slain woodland creatures and half a dozen paw- Roger said, right down to the way its spinal cord print plaster casts. On the table is a can of Zip- wassevered. Roger knows the behavior of the cat po lighter fluid, a sputtering police scanner, and intimately. He has seen kills like this himself a small-caliber pistol half-concealed in a sock. several times. And yet the animal he's talking A box of shotgun shells sits on top of the about has been thought extinct now microwave. And looking down on us, caught in for over a hundred years. a ray of late-afternoon sun, hung above the kitchen table, is a beatific portrait of a panther, he fate of the eastern panther was sealed by framed by heavenly blue, like Jesus Himself. the arrival of European settlers. When the super- Roger holds up one of the casts-which re- stitious pilgrims first encountered the primordial sembles, in heft and texture, a large fossilized bestiary of the New World-wolves, bears, and clam-and traces its lobed heel pad while com- prehistoric serpents among the mangroves-it paring it with a heavier bear track. This partic- was the panther that preyed on their worst fears. ular cast was made from tracks found near the It was a monster with a "Tail like a Lyon, its body of a fawn that Roger's cousin discovered Leggs like a Bear's ... its Claws like an Eagle, its while plowing a late March snowfall. Roger and eyes like a Tyger, its countenance ... a mixture of his research deputy, Olson, the guy standing over every Thing that is Fierce and Savage." Powerful me, had gone to the scene and found the rabbit- enough to pull down a horse, to leap twenty feet faced fawn in the ditch, its abdomen sliced open into the branches of a tree with a dog clamped in and its guts strewn on the half-frozen ground. A its jaws, the cat, when hungry enough, could 50 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I APRIL 2004 slaughter a flock of sheep in a single night. Its un- had shot a panther or two himself, declared the earthly scream sounded like a woman being mur- animal close to extinction in the eastern states dered; its hide glowed like "fox-fire at night and by 1851. The last bounty paid in Pennsylvania green lights burned from the eyes"; it stalked was in 1868, and the last confirmed eastern pan- children; it was rumored to have a taste for preg- ther killed in the United States was shot in nant wives. Barnard, Vermont, on Thanksgiving Day, 1881. With the Inquisition, during which cats were Its stuffed corpse was then mounted and parad- associated with witchcraft, fresh in the pilgrims' ed from town to town under the billing: "Mon- minds, the panther was an intolerable demon, a ster Panther-Don't Fail to See Him-An Ob- dread symbol of the dark ject Lesson in Natural wilderness they had come to History." Thus was the pan- tame with the benevolent light ther banished from the of Christianity.
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