Harper's Round Table, July 21, 1896

by Various

Not long after that a woman living only two farms below went to the door at noonday, and saw, or thought she saw, across the field, a creature which she said was bigger and longer than any dog, trot away across the lot and enter the woods, looking back once or twice as it ran.

December came, and nothing more was heard of the panther. There was snow enough to make good hauling. Raish and his brother Howard, who was two years younger, had twenty cords of wood to get in from back. One dark cloudy day the young fellows were hurrying to get in another load before darkness shut down. The oxen were swung around, head homeward, alongside a pile of wood. A quarter of the load was on when the oxen began to act queerly. They commenced to sniff, putting their noses into the air, and looking all around. Raish had never seen them so behave, but he went on loading. Presently one of the steers put his head down and gave a long, low moan, at the same time pawing the snow.

Raish spoke to them, yet a curious feeling began to take possession of him, when, without a warning more than that, a cry rose upon the still air of the woods, and that same instant the oxen threw themselves against the yoke. There followed a crash of falling cord-wood as the sled started, and hardly slower, the boys sprang aboard, seizing hold of a sled-stake; and as Raish rolled over again he heard that cry, and something leaped into the middle of the road behind them.

IT WAS A WILD RUN.

But that was all. The oxen plunged madly forward, and at every lurch their bellows mingled with the clangor of chains and the pounding of the sled. What power guided them along that road? Bounding over the cradle knolls, crashing now into this side, now into that, strewing the road behind them with the cord-wood sticks. It was a wild run.

A quarter of a mile was passed. There was no looking back, and no looking forward for the pelting of ice from flying hoofs. The clearing is reached. Wild with fright, on the steers go. The house, the wood-pile, as in a swim, flash by, and then there is a crash.

When Raish's memory gathered up the thread of swiftly passing events, he was lying on the floor of the cow-stable on the straw, and his brother, pale from fright, was bending over him, and there were some other frightened people crowded around, and a pair of steers were at the far end of the cow-stable. Raish was aware of some blood from an ugly cut. He lay stunned, they say, for some moments. Howard escaped without a hurt. The oxen, guided by instinct, made straight for the stable, and seeing the open door, made straight for refuge. The sled had struck the corner of the log barn, the tongue had snapped off, and the boys had been thrown forward; Raish's forehead struck, it was believed, either a sled-stake or one of the oxen's hoofs. The wonder was that both were not killed from the force with which they must have struck.

But all this time where was the panther? It came, so some persons at the house said, to the edge of the timber and a little beyond, where it stood some while, hesitating, and then turned back to the woods, where, instead of taking the road, it gave a mighty spring to the limb of a tree, and disappeared from view, no one venturing to follow.

Before the winter was over, however, some men with a small dog drove it to tree and shot it, after it had killed a fine heifer, no great ways from there. Out of curiosity the height of the panther's leap was measured, and it was said to be nearly eighteen feet.