JOY ALONG THE WAY: YELLOW EYES IN THE DARK?

Ahah! So there were panthers back when Mama and Dad strenuously admonished my sister and me not to linger in the woods after dark or the black panther might get us. It said so, right there in black and white in my favorite newspaper. ". . . state conservationist agent . . . encountered a cougar. . . first sighting in Missouri of a panther living in the wilds in sixty-nine years . . ."

At that time, my sister and I would have been walking a goodly distance through thick woods on our way home from school which didn't dismiss early then.

Big-eyed and goose-pimpled, we believed in the big black panther. As we grew older, and never having seen one, we began to wink at each other and giggle at our parents' admonitions, thinking it only a ruse to get us home in time to milk a certain number of cows and carry in wood before supper.

But now, were they right all that time? We'd seen foxes, both gray and red, squirrels, both gray, red and flying, skunks, 'possums, mink, muskrats, groundhogs, chipmunks, rabbits, wild turkeys, but never a panther. And, of course, we'd seen Britts' bull, who couldn't be classified as wildlife, but who bullied the life out of us twice a day, coming and going to school, even though there was a flimsy fence between us.

One night when, by lantern light, I accompanied Dad to the barn to make sure all doors were tightly closed, on our return trip to the house we did see a pair or yellow eyes staring at us from beneath the gooseberry bushes. "Just keep walking," Dad said, in a low voice. We did that, perhaps at a little faster pace. Next morning, although we looked for tracks, none were found.

Maybe, if I dared, I could take a flashlight and walk along the hedgerow some night to see what eyes I might discover looking back at me, but I'm not real anxious to do that. By much observation, I know what lives there by day. Why not leave the nighttime to my imagination? It is much more dramatic. Sometimes I hear my neighbors' dogs barking frenziedly over there and I can imagine a grizzly is stalking along, having come, unnoticed, from who knows where. Maybe a Tasmanian devil or a unicorn. I hear the hoot owl, too, not asking, "Is that you Huey? Bobby Seal?" but just "Who, who, who are you?"

Maybe the hoot owls and dogs ought to obey Richard Armour's admonishment, "If you ever hear a panther, don't anther." It is a little exciting to learn at this late date that Mama and Dad were right about the black panther (sometimes called a cougar or mountain lion). And also exciting to learn that panthers (God's creatures too) haven't become extinct. That is, just as long as they really do exist in the hedgerow only by way of imagination, even though the news story quoted above went on to say they (panthers) "are elusive and wary of humans.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.