Panther Sighting, "Black Panther Betrayal" cont.

Moy Aquirrey saw the brown panther with black spots in Waccasassa, a small town between Archer and Newberry, roughly twenty miles west of Gainesville and the University of Florida. She was the female of an established pair who had been seen repeatedly. The male was solid black. Moy had never seen the male.
To return to my online book, "The Black Panther Betrayal":"When I told my father about the panther and the white patch, he said he had seen him several times.
A couple of years before that, my daddy let me go squirrel hunting for a few days because our watermelon harvest had been very good. A friend and I went to Trenton and camped out. Apparently, we had camped near a panther's young because that night it kept screaming. What a horrible sound! It makes the hair on your neck stand straight up, and your skin crawl. She screamed all night only yards from us. We didn't get any sleep. We kept the campfire built up high. As soon as it got light, she stopped screaming at us. We got out of there as fast as possible. We took only our guns and left everything else. We had a '51 Chevy truck, but wouldn't you know,it wouldn't start. We began walking out on this grade, looking at every tree and bush carefully. We wanted time for a good shot if she charged. Then she crossed just above us. I'll tell you, it was hard walking past where she had crossed. Her prints were in the road. Finally, we got out of there. Later we came back, got the truck running, and picked up everything. Then I went looking for a dog. A regular deer hound will not run panthers. Sometimes, a Walker will. Walkers will run anything. I found a dog that evening that everyone said would run bear. They kept saying, "It will run bear. It will run bear. It will run bear." I took it back in the truck to where the cat tracks were. I put him on the tracks. He turned himself inside out trying to get out of there as fast as possible. I found him hiding in the truck. He wouldn't come out for anything!"
The former mayor of Alachua City continued, "I used to hunt bobcats every Thursday with a bobcat hunter. That's all he did - hunt bobcats with his hounds. One night his hounds hit a line, and they all turned themselves inside out getting out of there as fast as possible. The bobcat hunter said it was a panther. My father worked hard at farming and ranching, but I'll tell you, if you jumped a deer in Dixie or Gilchrist County, he could tell you exactly where that deer was going, what roads he'd cross and just where in the roads. Daddy got blood clots in his legs. At 78, of course, they were dangerous. The doctors wanted to do just one leg at a time so he had one leg fixed in the summer. The next leg was to be fixed in Octoer, but when October came, Daddy said an operation would get in the way of hunting season. So we postponed the operation. Mother had died years before. She just got tired of living. It was a hard life. After hunting season was over, it was time for Daddy to have his other leg done, and I got to Daddy's house the morning of the appointment and went inside. A girl was sitting there. My brothers, who were farming with Daddy, had gotten him someone to watch him twenty-four hours a day. I asked the girl, "Is Daddy ready to go to the hospital?" The girl said, 'He's dead.' I went inside and saw that Daddy had died in bed. A blood clot had gotten him just hours before it would have been removed. Hunting was that important to him.
I asked him about the farming life, and he reiterated that it was very hard. He added, "When I walk out of here (indicating the barbershop), I leave my work behind. It's not like that with farming."
"It's not like that with sixteen dogs either," I thought.
"After Daddy died, my brothers asked me to come back to the farm. I told them I didn't want to work for no one. They said I'd have the third vote. That would just guarantee that everyone would be mad. I don't know what happened - my brothers and I were so close, but we don't get along that well now. Still, I know that if I really got in trouble, they'd sell part of the farm to help me."
(Mitch, the barber and ex-mayor, died of pancreatic cancer a couple of years later. I don't know if he was battling it at this time, but I think he was from the wistful way he talked about his brothers and being in trouble.) After he cut my hair for a while in silence, I asked, "You've worked with government. Why do you think the Game Commission and Ph.D.s in wildlife managment say that we everday people are hallucinating when we see black panthers?"
"They're as full as shit as last Christmas's turkey!" he snorted.