Panther On The Prowl - Nancy Morse

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heaved a ragged sigh at the cruel irony. Whoever would have guessed how things would turn out? How, in a heartbeat, something could go so terribly wrong and change your life forever?

      Sometimes, when the night was still and he lay awake on his bed of moss, he could still hear her laughter…and her screams.

      Seminole women were encouraged from birth to be independent because the culture demanded survival skills, and Maggie certainly was that. Over her parents’ objections she spent two years at the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe studying painting and sculpture. She returned to the Big Cypress Reservation to wait tables in order to earn enough money to enroll in an art school in San Francisco. She was working in a little luncheonette off State Road 7 when he walked in one day.

      Maybe it was because she was Seminole that made the difference for him. She had no notion of him slinging her over his shoulder and carrying her off, the way the white women he had dated typically did. He was no savage. At least not in the way they thought he was, because he was Indian. If anything, being Indian only tempered his spirit and gave him a sense of his own place in the world and an acceptance of and reverence for the things around him. Being a loner at heart only added to the stereotyping and had made not dating easy. Until Maggie.

      Maggie laughed at the white world’s idea of what it was to be Indian. She knew there was nothing savage about him. These days, whatever fierceness he possessed was born out of tragedy, the kind that wounds so deeply it turns a soft heart into a hard one. He wondered if Maggie would even recognize him now.

      He never asked her to give up her dream of going to San Francisco. She did so willingly. And together they planned a new dream for the future. She continued to wait tables while he studied for his master’s degree. When he landed a job with the Everglades Research Center, she quit her job at the luncheonette to concentrate on painting and sculpting.

      Having been born in a chickee made of cypress wood and palmetto leaves, like most of his people, John didn’t expect much from a world that was decidedly white and hostile. But a hundred years of white influence could not eradicate the one thing he was above all else. Seminole. In his Indian soul he had no wish to be any different or better than he was. He merely wished to be. Working in his own backyard among the creatures and cattails of the swamp, returning home to the reservation each night to be with his wife, was more than he could ever have hoped for. But happiness, like hope, was shortlived, and all because he killed a panther and was unable to come to terms with it.

      He’d been tracking the big male cat for weeks, hoping to collar it and monitor its movements through the swamp to determine what was causing a decline in the population of the Florida panther. But the cat only came out at night, seeming to disappear into thin air during the day, the morning rains that were so common in the Everglades washing away its tracks.

      One night, camped in a cypress hammock, he heard a rustling in the tall grass. In the next moment the panther was on him, claws ripping through his jeans and leaving a ridge of scars on his thigh. He managed to grab his knife and kill the panther, only to discover later that he’d killed a female.

      Sick with guilt, he returned home, only to awaken later that night to Maggie’s screams. A male panther had tracked him to the reservation, and with almost human vengeance, killed his mate just as John had killed the panther’s mate.

      Outsiders might have questioned the existence of a creature as smart and vindictive as a human, but in the Seminole world in which he was raised, he learned about the legend of the panther that the old ones told, and he knew how such a thing could be.

      There was, they said, a long time ago, a proud and vain Seminole warrior who killed a panther while hunting in the swamp. In his arrogance, the warrior didn’t say a prayer to the Spirit Being for taking the life of one of its children. Angered, the Spirit Being condemned the warrior to wander the earth for all time by day as a man, by night as a panther.

      The legend struck a particularly painful chord inside of John. Could it be that the panther he’d been hunting was the one the old ones spoke of? That would explain the clever way the beast eluded him. Some would say he was crazy to even think it, but deep in his Seminole heart, John wasn’t so sure. His curiosity was almost as great as his thirst for vengeance. But if myths and legends were supposed to teach us about ourselves, what was it teaching him about himself? Could it be that he was doomed by fate to follow the same crazy path as the legend, wandering around by day emotionally cut off from the rest of the world, at night adrift in his grief and alone? If there was any lesson to be learned from it all, it had to do with the part he played in a cycle of vengeance begun by some ancient warrior and which lived on inside of him.

      Why couldn’t he have left the panther alone instead of tracking it relentlessly? Was it the panther that caused Maggie’s death, or was it really he himself for tampering with a greater plan and not leaving well enough alone? A year and a half later the questions remained unanswered. All that was left was the guilt, and an overriding vengeance for the panther. Yet as much as he hated the panther, that was as much as he blamed himself. For him, the only way to get past the sickening guilt was to kill the panther. It didn’t matter if it made any sense. It was just the way it was.

      In the distance through a break in the trees the sun was slowly sinking into the gulf. Fiery patches of orange and purple burst across the sky as if shot from cannons. It was the most beautiful and terrible time of the day, for soon it would be dark and the memories would come flooding back as they did every night. Sometimes just the sheer anticipation of it was more than he could bear.

      Tonight, however, in addition to the dark glimpses into the past, there was something else John was remembering, something he wished he could forget. He turned his head away from the spectacle of the setting sun and his own image in the windows that filled him with disgust, and looked at the woman sleeping in his bed.

      For three days she lay unconscious, like a beautiful star that literally fell from the sky, while he stared at her and remembered, to his intense dismay, what it was like to want a woman.

      Why did the frog hunter have to bring her here to him? Why did he have to feel things just from looking at her that he thought were dead inside of him?

      Even with bandages wrapped around her eyes, she was beautiful. Her tawny hair sparkled in the buttery light that penetrated the thick cypress branches. Her skin, paled by her ordeal, glowed iridescently. Her sightless blue eyes had beamed out blinding quantities of light when he had applied fresh bandages, taking his breath away unexpectedly.

      Her clothes were torn and scorched, but obviously expensive. Her hands were smooth-skinned and soft, bearing none of the calluses that scarred the palms of hardworking Seminole women. Her voice, weakened by the trauma and lulled by the infusion he’d given her, sounded different from any voice he’d ever heard. In it he could hear the culture and refinement that told him she was from a world very different from his.

      She was running away from something, of that he was certain. But he wouldn’t press her to reveal what it was. Who knew better than he did what it was like to run from something? He could not help but wonder as he watched her sleep how safe she would feel in his care if she knew that he had not been able to keep Maggie safe and the awful shame he carried over it.

      Growing up in the company of alligators and os-preys did little to prepare John for the unexpected and unwelcome company of a pampered socialite, which seemed to be what she was. Hell, he didn’t know anyone who flew their own plane. Again he reproached himself for the weakness in him that had him agreeing to let her stay. He hadn’t known he possessed such weakness, having worked so hard to harden his heart, until she’d asked, and he’d looked at her beautiful, pale face and heard her quivering voice and found himself acquiescing.

      Maggie’s death had driven him behind a defensive wall that showed dangerous signs of cracking with Rennie’s intrusion in his life. His all-too-human heart longed for a woman’s love, but a deeper, more primal part of him knew how dangerous it would be for him to love any woman. Look at what had happened to the last woman he loved.

      Well, he’d made the offer, now he would have to live with it. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all. He would be gone most of the day. He’d

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