To the
earliest Kentuckians who cut their way into this, the most royal jungle of
the New World, to wrest it from the Indians and subdue it for wife and
child, it was the noiseless nocturnal cougar that filled their imaginations
with the last degree of dread. To them its cry--most peculiar and startling
at the love season, at other times described as like the wail of a child or
of a traveller lost in the woods--aroused more terror than the nearest bark
of the wolf; its stealth and cunning more than the strength and courage and
address of the bear; its attack more than the rush of the majestic,
resistless bison, or the furious pass with antlers lowered of the noble,
ambereyed, infuriated elk. Hidden as still as an adder in long grass of its
own hue, or squat on a log, or amid the foliage of a sloping tree, it waited
around the salt licks and the springs and along the woodland pathways for
the other wild creatures. It possessed the strength to kill and drag a
heifer to its lair; it would leap upon the horse of a traveller and hang
there unshaken, while with fang and claw it lacerated the hind quarters and
the flanks--as the tiger of India tries to hamstring its nobler,
unmanageable victims; or let an unwary bullock but sink a little way in a
swamp and it was upon him, rending him, devouring him, in his long agony.
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