270 Wild Beasts 



Wariness and an entire absence of all the sentiments 

 that produce recklessness in man, are as distinctly marked 

 characters among the Fclid(Z as their peculiar dentition or 

 retractile claws ; yet the author was informed by Colonel 

 W. H. Harness that last summer (1893) a very large pan- 

 ther, as the animal is called in West Virginia, walked into 

 an extensive logging camp near the town of Davis at mid- 

 day ; traversed one wing of the long building in which the 

 men employed slept, and without making any demonstra- 

 tion of hostility towards those who fled before him, entered 

 their dining-room and helped himself to the meat on the 

 table ; after which he quietly passed out of a side door, and 

 was shot from a window. If this beast had been broken 

 down with age or disabled by accident so that it could not 

 hunt, or if the season and weather had been such as to 

 banish game from the vicinity, its conduct might be com- 

 prehensible. This happened with an animal in perfect 

 physical condition, and at a season when the mountains 

 were full of game. The brute also must necessarily have 

 connected all the men it knew anything about with death- 

 dealing firearms, and that it then should have walked into 

 a crowd, and lost its life in this act of seemingly idiotic 

 bravado, simply sets at naught everything that is known 

 of the creature's character and habits. 



Pumas, like Asiatic panthers, are easily caught in traps, 

 but independently of this form of incapacity, they are far 

 from being wanting in sagacity. Cougars are most accom- 

 plished hunters, and it has been explained how much that 

 means. One of them, for example, will sometimes trail 

 a human being for a day's journey without finding what 



