No one, after all, has any sort of proof – a photo, a positively identifiable set of tracks, or even a really good look at the thing. But the panther stories are different, told with pitch and fervour, a wild look in the eye. Twenty years in a taxidermy shop and Jack Wells has heard his share of tall tales, near misses, the one that got away. In the houses, the big cat creeps nightly, making the rounds of dinner tables and dreams. In the woods, hunters linger in their tree stands, hoping they might be the next.
Whatever you want to call it, by the end of October, half a dozen more claimed they had caught a glimpse of it: a pale shiver in the distance, a flash of fur through the trees. The story changed with the telling, and after a while Dave Hardy himself didn’t know what to believe: See that old pine tree over there? It was close to me as that tree. Afterwards he bushwhacked hell-bent down to the parking lot and, gasping for breath, tried to tell the story to anyone who would listen. Dave Hardy was the first to see it, the first weekend of bow season, up in his grandfather’s tree stand on the hill behind Wal-Mart.
Something has shown up in the woods of Highland City.
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