Panthers in the Pines

My daddy was a big man, in a different sort of way. He wasn’t particularly tall, a couple of inches under six feet when he had his work boots off. He wasn’t particularly heavy set either. A lifetime of manual labor had given him a body that was rock solid, arms bulging in his sleeves. He was wide enough to fill a doorway, covered in muscle. A large, bushy beard hung from his face, and had the biggest hands I’d ever seen. Big enough to shake hands with God, some of the old timers would jokingly say. He wasn’t particularly large, but all of this combined to give apresence to him that demanded your attention. Anything else was disrespectful. His presence alone made other men feel smaller. He was a man among men, something of a hillbilly demigod. 

He was a natural when it came to playing with that attention. He loved to talk. He could make anyone feel like an old friend after just a few minutes of conversation. And, good lord, could he tell a story. 

The stories he’d tell could be anything from his childhood trapping small game and hunting bears, to his exploits in some of the local rodeos in his younger years, to the far too numerous brawls he and our uncles got into at bars scattered all over our corner of Alabama. My favorites, though, were always about the panthers. 

“There’s panthers in them mountains.” That’s how he’d begin every story about them. It wasn’t a question, or a bit of make believe. They were there. He said so, and that meant it was true. Daddy would not joke about such things. 

“They prowl those woods, living in caves all over the place. They’re out there hunting. They like deer, but they’ll take a goat or sheep when they can get it. Maybe rabbits and dogs and the like when times are hard and food is scarce. But the thing they like most, and the thing that’s the hardest to hunt, is people.”

“Those panthers will wait out in the woods, just hoping for someone to come walking through and not notice them. The real smart ones will try to lure you out. They’ll holler like a woman getting beat or cry like a hungry baby.” His deep, gruff voice strained to reach those high, keening notes as he did his best to approximate the cries. 

“All it takes is for you to run out there, trying to save somebody, and they’ll snatch you up!” His massive hands splayed out like a big cat’s claws, a snarl barely visible through the mass of his beard. With the last couple words of this line, he’d grab whatever kid was closest, lifting them off their feet with one strong arm and letting out his best panther cry, before he mimed eating them up. 

 “A little one like one of y’all? Hell, that panther would still be hungry. You’d make it more mad than anything. So y’all stay out of those woods at night, don’t be going towards any weird noises you hear. I’d hate to have to wrestle a panther. I’m getting too old for it nowadays.” We’d all always laugh about this. Not just because we were too little to be of importance to the panther, but also because our daddy was big and scary enough that we didn’t have to worry about it. 

Still, I worried. What little kid wouldn’t worry about sleek, black big cats roaming just on the other side of the creek? There were horrors in those hills. The dread of being carried off by a panther filled some of my nights.

It was only as I got older that I learned that “panther” is just another name for a mountain lion. Mountain lion, panther, puma, cougar, catamount, they’re all the same. These were still creatures to be wary of, without a doubt, but they weren’t the midnight terrors that I’d spent years looking over my shoulder for. Still dangerous, but not something I’d let haunt me. 

I was older still when I did some research and found out there hadn’t been a reliable mountain lion sighting in Alabama since the 1950s. There weren’t any panthers in those mountains, hadn’t been for decades before I was born. And if somehow there was, they were very few and very far between. 

Life, it seemed, wasn’t as scary as I thought it was as a kid. It also wasn’t as exciting. There weren’t any terrible, unseen creatures roaming the hills, just the more mundane things I could see. The panthers were all bullshit, like a lot of stuff in life is bullshit. 

Still, I’ll never forget those nights standing in the backyard, peering into the darkness beyond the circle of protection that was the light coming from the back porch. Willing my eyes to make something of the nothingness out there. My ears picked up a shrill, wailing cry. Like a woman hollering. Maybe a baby crying. Trying desperately to see something, anything, before my courage broke and I dashed through the screen door fast enough to escape any creature, real or imagined. 

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