Nobody likes to be told that they’re wrong. Humans have a phobia toward being wrong. We will make up a hundred excuses or side stories before we will admit that we ever said anything wrong. We also don’t like being called a liar; and some conversations might make us feel like we’re being accused of being a liar. And if it’s over something that we learned from a parent, then we’ll feel like someone is calling our parent a liar.

I never felt that my mother lied to me that night. As a matter of fact, I may have even misunderstood what she meant by the word ‘panther.’

The word ‘panther’ can cause confusion. It originally came from the Greek name for leopards. But over the centuries it has come to mean different things to different people. Some believe, as I did, that panthers are a species of wildcats that are always black. But there is no such species. The black coats that appear on some wildcats come from a mutation called melanism. Melanism is similar to the albinism that produces albino animals. It most often occurs in the leopards of Africa and Asia . It occasionally occurs in the jaguars of Mexico and South America . These melanistic specimens are what some people mean when they use the word ‘panther.’ To others, a ‘panther’ can mean any large wildcat; no matter what the color or the species. To some Americans, ‘panther’ is used to refer primarily to the felis concolor a.k.a. the mountain lion. So maybe it was a mountain lion that made the screaming sound that I heard that night.

Felis concolor translates into “cat of one color,” but it is a cat of many names. Aside from mountain lion and ‘panther,’ it is also called cougar, puma, catamount, and painter. Others have even called it devil cat, Indian cat, ghost cat, and screamer. These cats once populated the entire United States . But their numbers quickly dropped after Europeans settled in the east and after the pioneers began moving westward. The large cats were widely feared and stories abounded about them. Such stories included reports of them snatching human babies right out of the crib. Thus the cats were diligently hunted. They were hunted so much that by the early 1900’ s, they were thought to be extinct everywhere east of the Rocky Mountains except for a small population in Florida .

But that would mean that they’ve been extinct in Missouri for some time. Yet there are plenty of people who will tell you different. They know that mountain lions are still living here. They’ve heard the creature scream with their own ears, just as I have. It’s a pretty spooky sound to hear too. Some have told me that it had made the hair on the back of their neck stand up. The sound has also been described in writings as blood curdling, hair raising, terrifying, unearthly, and demonic. However, some have even described the human-like scream of a cougar to be pure myth. No species of wildcat is known to make a sound that is similar to a woman’s scream. When I was younger, I had only considered that the sound could be A: a woman or B: a panther. I didn’t consider the possibilities of C, D, or E.

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