FIELD AND STUDY 



the field the day before, and could not get up and 

 run to the brink of the hill, below which the crea- 

 ture seemed to be. What could it be? 



The next night it came again at about the same 

 hour, but I was sleeping too soundly to be awakened. 

 A young couple from Kansas were sleeping in the 

 chamber above me; they heard it and were so 

 frightened that they could sleep no more till morn- 

 ing. The next night we all lay awake listening till 

 after midnight, but the performance was not re- 

 peated. 



Not long afterward I visited the Zoological 

 Park at the Bronx and described the sound I had 

 heard to the director. "A puma," he said, "prob- 

 ably one escaped from captivity and calling for 

 her mate." The director had heard them cry hun- 

 dreds of times and he repeated the cry. "Was 

 it like that? " "Not a bit," I said. "No human voice 

 could give the scream I heard, or imitate the hope- 

 lessness of that wail." The only sound that I had 

 ever heard that was at all like the cry was uttered 

 by a young man whom I caught one night stealing 

 my grapes. I suddenly rose up amid the vines, 

 draped in black, and seized him by the leg as he was 

 trying, half paralyzed with fear, to get over the wall. 

 He gave forth a wild, desperate animal scream, as 

 if he had found himself in the clutches of a veritable 

 black fiend. Only the wild animal which slumbers in 

 each of us, and which fear can at times so suddenly 

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