This dreaded animal, the panther or painter of the backwoodsman, which has
for its kindred the royal tiger and the fatal leopard of the Old World, the
beautiful ocelot and splendid unconquerable jaguar of the New, is now rarely
found in the Atlantic States or the fastnesses of the Alleghanies. It too
has crossed the Mississippi and is probably now best known as the savage
puma of more southern zones. But a hundred years ago it abounded throughout
the Western wilderness, making its deeper dens in the caverns of mountain
rocks, its lair in the impenetrable thickets of bramble and brakes of cane,
or close to miry swamps and watery everglades; and no other region was so
loved by it as the vast game park of the Indians, where reined a
semi-tropical splendour and luxuriance of vegetation and where, protected
from time immemorial by the Indian hunters themselves, all the other animals
thatconstitute its prey roved and ranged in unimaginable numbers. To the
earliest Kentuckians who cut their way into this, the most royal jungle of
the New World, to wrest it from the Indians and subdue it for wife and
child, it was the noiseless nocturnal cougar that filled their imaginations
with the last degree of dread. To them its cry--most peculiar and startling
at the love season, at other times described as like the wail of a child or
of a traveller lost in the woods--aroused more terror than the nearest bark
of the wolf; its stealth and cunning more than the strength and courage and
address of the bear; its attack more than the rush of the majestic,
resistless bison, or the furious pass with antlers lowered of the noble,
ambereyed, infuriated elk. Hidden as still as an adder in long grass of its
own hue, or squat on a log, or amid the foliage of a sloping tree, it waited
around the salt licks and the springs and along the woodland pathways for
the other wild creatures. It possessed the strength to kill and drag a
heifer to its lair; it would leap upon the horse of a traveller and hang
there unshaken, while with fang and claw it lacerated the hind quarters and
the flanks--as the tiger of India tries to hamstring its nobler,
unmanageable victims; or let an unwary bullock but sink a little way in a
swamp and it was upon him, rending him, devouring him, in his long agony.
Some hunter once had encamped at the foot of a tree, cooked his supper, seen
his fire die out and lain down to sleep, with only the infinite solitude of
the woods for his blanket, with the dreary, dismal silence for his pillow.
Opening his eyes to look up for the last time at the peaceful stars, what he
perceived above him were two nearer stars set close together, burning with a
green light, never twinkling. Or another was startled out of sleep by the
terrible cry of his tethered horse. Or after a long, ominous growl, the
cougar had sprung against his tent, knocking it away as a squirrel would
knock the thin shell from a nut to reach the kernel; or at the edge of the
thicket of tall grass he had struck his foot against the skeleton of some
unknown hunter, dragged down long before.