And then with his blood become as
ice in his veins from horror and all the strength gone out of him in a
deathlike faintness, the school- master realized that he was face to face
unarmed with a cougar, gaunt with famine and come for its kill.
This dreaded animal, the panther or painter of the backwoodsman, which has
for its kindred the royal tiger and the fatal leopard of the Old World, the
beautiful ocelot and splendid unconquerable jaguar of the New, is now rarely
found in the Atlantic States or the fastnesses of the Alleghanies. It too
has crossed the Mississippi and is probably now best known as the savage
puma of more southern zones. But a hundred years ago it abounded throughout
the Western wilderness, making its deeper dens in the caverns of mountain
rocks, its lair in the impenetrable thickets of bramble and brakes of cane,
or close to miry swamps and watery everglades; and no other region was so
loved by it as the vast game park of the Indians, where reined a
semi-tropical splendour and luxuriance of vegetation and where, protected
from time immemorial by the Indian hunters themselves, all the other animals
thatconstitute its prey roved and ranged in unimaginable numbers.
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