June 8, 2009
The Palisades panther(s) first appeared on the morning of March 6th, in Snedens Landing, a hamlet on the Hudson, just over the New Jersey line. Jane Bernick glanced out her kitchen window and saw, lying in the grass about twenty yards away, a pair of large black mammals. Assuming that they were bears, she retrieved a pair of binoculars. Closer observation revealed that they were feline. Panthers. No question. She spent ten minutes watching them groom each other, before they slinked off. No one believed her.
A week later, Bernick’s next-door neighbor Grace Knowlton, a sculptor, was sitting in her living room, with two guests, when she saw a black panther stalk through a clearing about fifty yards away. She had a sense that it was following another one, but couldn’t be sure. Knowlton called the police, who regarded her report with suspicion, perhaps because she owns a pair of black standard poodles. But she was insistent—the tail, the hind legs, the glistening coat.
A few days afterward, Dorian Tunell, an electrician, went on a bicycle ride with his eight-year-old son in Tallman Mountain State Park, about a mile north of Knowlton’s place. Not far into the woods, he heard a rustling and looked to see a big black cat jumping over a rock.
“The panther!” the boy cried. He ditched his bike, and Tunell scooped him up with one arm and rode to a friend’s house, warning people along the way to get their pets inside. The friend called the park police, who seemed uninterested until they were told that a neighbor had set off into the woods with a 12-gauge shotgun. (He was wearing loafers.) The police converged, in force, but found nothing.
Still, panther mania took hold. The authorities mounted warning notices and motion-sensitive digital cameras on trees. A town animal-control officer, who goes by Thunder, passed his days parked at Snedens’s only stoplight, on the lookout for a panther crossing the road. The neighbor with the loafers changed into full camouflage and roamed the woods with a bayonet. A deli up in Piermont christened a sandwich (chicken cutlet with melted mozzarella) the Panther Special. Residents put out a glossy journal—a “panthology,” they called it—of panther poems and limericks, with references to Pablo Neruda, Inspector Clouseau, and Bobby Seale. A contributor named Cantankerous Nick wrote:
An outpouring of amateur verseA panther: Was it possible? The term panther can describe any big cat, such as a jaguar or a cougar. Jaguars aren’t native to the Northeast; and although cougars may be, it has been many years since they have ventured so close to the George Washington Bridge, and, anyway, they are tawny, not black. Everyone who saw the panther(s)—several more encounters followed—swore that there could be none more black. People were saying that there were a couple of pet black panthers in the county—owners of exotic animals, like sex offenders, have to register with the authorities—but these cats had alibis. So the residents of the Palisades speculated that the panthers had come from Alpine, New Jersey, a few miles south, where one would find mansions and therefore, presumably, citizens more inclined to own and then abandon pet panthers.
Has not solved our community’s curse.
This lame verbal scat
About a black cat
Has made the atmosphere worse.
Another sighting, in late March, by a woman in her driveway, inspired the villagers to call in a professional tracker. One resident had had as a lab partner in college the renowned tracking guru Tom Brown, Jr., who had started an organization called Tracker SFI (for “search and forensic investigation”). Tracker SFI applies the ancient Apache art of tracking to police investigations.
SFI deployed a Brown acolyte named Shane Hobel. A week had passed, but Hobel could tell that a big animal had lain down in the gravel in the woman’s driveway. He followed a trail into the brush, across a road, and onto a construction site, where Dorian Tunell happened to be working. Hobel showed him where the panther had tracked mud on a log.
That night, Knowlton’s poodles burst out of the house barking. They ran through the electric fence and didn’t come home. The next day, a friend found them stranded on a cliff over the Hudson River. That same day, another neighbor, until now a skeptic, saw a panther out by his tire swing. Hobel raced back to Snedens and tracked the cat’s trail to a cedar at the edge of a nearby parking lot, where there was a fresh claw mark in the bark. It was five inches wide—a big cat’s paw, splayed. Hobel said, “The panther walked up to the base of the tree, paced, sat down, wiggled its butt a bit, arched its back, stretched, reached up, and scratched the trunk of the tree. Then it meandered off to the left.” It was his theory that the panthers, solitary by nature, had split up and headed north. A few weeks later, two workers saw a panther pursuing a deer, on a golf course, nine miles north. Tunell had taken to driving around up there at night, aching, like Richard Dreyfuss in “Close Encounters,” for another glimpse.
A first-time tracker, less familiar with the old Apache ways than with “Bringing Up Baby,” visited Snedens recently, hoping for signs. Tunell’s bike trail began a few feet from the gateway to the home of the actor Bill Murray. The first-timer keened, “I can’t give you anything but looove, baby.” No panther(s).
The tracker headed south through Snedens, past Orson Welles’s old house and a house belonging to Björk, to Knowlton’s place, an old farm, strewn with her sculptures. Knowlton has lived there for forty years. She took the first-time tracker along Shane Hobel’s route: past a vine-engulfed water tower and a patch of poison ivy, through the woods—Panther Pass, she called it—and into the parking lot, to the tree that the panther had allegedly scratched. There it was, all right: a scratch mark.
Hobel returned to the Palisades on May 18th. He parked his black Jeep in a lot off Route 9W and spread out some cat-track photographs and topographic maps on the hood. He is compact and clean-shaven, a self-abnegated forty-one, and was dressed in camouflage pants and a Tracker SFI fleece and cap. He told the story of Tom Brown, his mentor: at the age of seven, while looking for fossils in southern New Jersey, Brown came across a Native American boy, who introduced him to his grandfather, an elderly Apache scout named Stalking Wolf; over the next nine years, Wolf initiated Brown into the tracking arts. Brown, and later Hobel, learned how to tell, from an imprint in the earth, the height, weight, sex, speed, and mood of the animal or person who had made it. “A track is merely the way Mother Earth feels about you the moment you left the track,” he recited. Hobel’s mother was a showgirl from Buffalo, his father a Russian concert pianist. For a time, Hobel was a stuntman, working at an Old West theme park upstate. Now, in addition to his work for SFI, he teaches martial arts and wilderness survival.
The construction site where Hobel first saw the cat tracks was just south of the lot. A crew was there grading gravel. “You guys looking for the phantom panthers?” one of the men said. Hobel replied that the panthers were not phantoms. The man said, “People actually saw them? Did they have a couple of cocktails in ’em?” Hobel laughed politely and then dropped into a thicket off the road. With a laser pointer, he indicated the tracks of raccoons, squirrels, and deer in the leaves and mud. Then he crouched down over a bare circle the size of a coaster. “This is easily two months old,” he said, tracing claw marks with the laser. “It’s the rear right foot of the panther. Here’s the heel pad.” There was an empty bottle of Michelob next to it. A pack of cyclists whizzed by. Hobel, on hands and knees, sniffed at the trunk of a tree. “I smell for the obvious,” he said. Then he lowered his face to the ground: “I will put myself in the vision of a rabbit.”
After a while, he crossed 9W and walked up the driveway of the woman who had seen the panther in the gravel. “They’re behind us,” he said, of the Snedens residents, “in large part because we’re really the only ones who believe.” Even believing Snedenites seem to recognize, however, that the panthers may fulfill some metaphysical or metaphorical craving, in a neighborhood already expert at sating them. (In the fifties, locals used to spot a raccoon wearing a red bow tie.) As one credulous non-panther-witness wrote in the panthology:
A diversion from financial woesHobel dipped into the bushes, crawling into a sort of juniper den. He pointed out a hardened “bile pile”: “It was frothing and fresh the day we saw it.” There was a scratch on a tree trunk. He poked with a knife at a pile of dried scat and held it up close. “We call this V.S.P.O.P., for ‘very strange pile of poo.’ ” He said that in the woods nearby he’d found a deer carcass and a half-eaten squirrel. “I cut off the squirrel’s skin and kept the skull. The panther left me a gift.”
We’ve fixated on two feline foes
We’re all mad as hatters
But nothing else matters
When the market is at nerve-racking lows.
Hobel went back across 9W and past the construction site. “Find him?” one of the workers called out.
“We’re just cooking him up,” Hobel called back.
“Save some for us,” the worker said, and they laughed.
Hobel doesn’t think it does the art of tracking any good to take cynicism personally. He said quietly, “Go with the joke, keep moving.”
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/06/08/090608ta_talk_paumgarten
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