I don’t believe in them, though if you travel up the roads in most of West Virginia and ask around, you will find people who believe. More than believe, they know.
The truth of the matter is that I don’t think there are any wild felines in the whole state but bobcats. I don’t think there are any cougars lurking about. Cougars were here, and one might wander in from the West.
But I don’t think there are any native “Eastern cougars” left.
And now, I don’t need to say that I don’t believe in black panthers roam the forests of the Appalachians.
But if you did a poll in West Virginia, I am dead certain that you’d get a majority believing they exist here.
It’s an odd thing, for the only large cat that routinely comes in black in the Americas is the jaguar. North American jaguars are very, very rarely black, and although one can talk of the old stories of wandering jaguars popping up well into the United States, the truth of the matter is the species has a very limited range in this country. The ones that live in this country all are male, and all live along the border with Mexico.
Black leopards might have been turned out here, but no one has found a breeding population of these cats. Black leopards come almost entirely from the tropical subspecies, and although there are jaguars that live in coldness of Korea and the Russia Far East, those subspecies have no melanistic individuals and are not well-represented in the captive leopard population.
If one were to poll people in West Virginia about the existence of bigfoot, only a tiny percentage of people would say they exist. Bigfoot is a ridiculous idea.
But black panthers are not.
I don’t know why the belief in these beasts is so persistent, but it may have something to do with the mystery of blackness. Blackness on cats has a strong connotation for people of Northwestern European heritage. Depending upon the region: Black cats are good luck. Black cats are bad luck. Black cats accompany witches.
So adding a black pelt to a massive cat gives it some sort of mysterious power.
Mystery is good. Romance is better.
And I’ve found once people believe something for those two reasons, good luck dissuading them of the moonshine (and I mean this under both definitions of the word!)
West Virginia is full of coonhounds, bobcat hounds, and bear dogs. One would think that if there were a population of big cats in this state, they would have been treed by now.
It hasn’t happened, but I know that one day, maybe not soon, but someday, a cougar from the West will wander into this state. It will be known, either from the trail camera photos or from a hound treeing, and half the state will lose its mind.
The DNR will say that cougars are protected species, and the guns will rage against the felines. Feral cats will be shot, and everyone who can will fill a few bobcat tags a year.
That’s because the cougar will be real, and in its reality, it will bring up that old-fashioned hatred of anything predatory in the woods.
But the black panther doesn’t bring that same feeling, and the reason why is that most people know somewhere back in their minds that they don’t exist in these forests.
They might not admit it in an argument at the barber shop. But they know.
Belief in the romance is what it keeps the black panther slinking along forest paths, slipping along until it crosses into the thick cover. It roars up in the imagination, wild and mysterious and untouched by encroachment.
It won’t be molested by the gun or the baying hound. It will slink on into the gray mists of winter, where it will roam as it always has in the magic and mystery of human reverie.
