55. One Tough Turkey, Black Panthers

The black and white young male goat has progressed to trying to drive Odessa, the Arabian mare, off her food dish. Thursday morning, Pepper reared up on this back legs, put his head down, and made a dive at Odessa with his horns leading. She simply backed away, turned around, and tried to retaliate with a back kick. He had plenty of time to back off. When she resumed eating, he tried to nose his way into the dish again, and this time she started waving her head back and forth, threatening to catch him with the side of her head. You would not want to be hit by a horse's head: it is hard and heavy with multiple times the power of a man moving it. Pepper abandoned the idea of eating out of her dish and went to his where a much less amount awaited his dining pleasure.
While Hawkeye, my son, and I, Two-Guns, were fishing last Saturday, he told me of one tough turkey. Hawkeye said, "Gator and I were on one side of a field where a huge turkey would walk around and display himself to the hens. On the other side of the field were three younger gobblers, whom we called the Three Amigos. They were chased there by the big turkey and didn't dare come over to the other side of the field where the hens were. We put out a Pretty Boy decoy and hunkered down to see what would happen. Gator had the video camera, and I had the three and a half inch Mossberg pump loaded with five shot. As soon as that big turkey saw Pretty Boy, he came running over. You could hear his feet going thump, thump as he came in. He was completely lit up, red all over, angry as hell with Pretty Boy being there. I got five or seven yards away from me, and I let him have it in the neck. He was thrown down by the impact of the shot, but got up and ran. I rolled him with the second shot. But still, he got up and this time, flew. I busted him out of the sky, and he fell to the ground. Gator was on him immediately, but he began hooking Gator's 3D camouflage jacket, pullling off bits of cloth. Gator was standing with the mad turkey by the neck, getting spurred and going around and around, trying to keep the turkey off him but still break his neck. I ran over to them, grabbed the gobbler by his neck and twirled his body around his neck, finally breaking it. But as I did that, he was trying to get me with his spurs too. Never have I had a turkey so hard to kill!"
"That Pretty Boy decoy really turned him on, " I commented.
"And then some. I shot his beard off when he flew. We found some of it, and it would have been about twelve inches long. He would have been a real trophy if I hadn't shot his beard off. One damn tough turkey."
Yesterday, I told about Wendy, the woman who manned a big game check-in station told me about seeing a big, black cat with a thick, very long tail, twice. She had seen the cat on Dallus Road, a road that wended its way from the check-in station through the jungle-woods to Dallus Creek where there was a public boat ramp. Dallus Creek emptied into the Gulf of Mexico. Wendy said the cat was a black panther. I had never heard of a black panther except for the black color phase of the American jaguar and the African and Asian leopard. This was not the place to expect either. Just then, a tall, thin man drove his truck out of the woods, stopped a the check-in station, and got out. He had a sensitive, serious face. "Mark, you are here more than I am!" said Wendy, laughing as she spoke. "Have you ever seen a black panther?"
Mark looked more like someone you would see at the library rather than in the treacherous jungle-woods of Florida. He hesitated, considered his reply, and then answered forthrightly," In 1976, I saw something barelling down a tram (referring to one of the thousands of trail left in the jungle-woods when railroad lines were built into the swamps of Florida in the 1920s so the giant cypress trees could be cut and hauled out by locomotives.) And it wasn't a ber or hog either. It had a long, black tail that it held straight up into the air as it raced down that tram."
Two-Guns at peternickerson12@yahoo.com.