The Good Ole Days – The Panther in our Woods

James H. Cagle

Camping out was something my brothers and I did. We didn’t have any fancy store bought camping gear. We built us a camp site and made a lean-to with small trees and branches. Camping out made us feel like we were Daniel Boone or some other frontiersman. Or we could have been Indians or soldiers. Just whatever struck our fancy is what we were.

We didn’t have to go to someplace far away to camp. We just went camping in the woods around our home. The first time I remember camping out was when I was very little. We had heard something or seen something on Granny’s TV that made us want to camp out. Our first camp site was in the back yard. My Mother hung a bed sheet over the clothes line and weighted down the edges of the sheet with bricks or boards to make us a tent. And she could just open the back door and peek out to see how we were doing.

There were many other camp sites we made through the years where we also made traps around the perimeter to catch anything that would try to enter our camp. We had a lot of fun in the woods.

The camp site we had when we met the panther was several years later. We had moved to another house that was surrounded by woods and had a big field in back of the house that went far back to the edge of the distant woods. As young boys it looked like it was a mile to the woods but it was actually only about seven-hundred yards. Not far from where we live, just up the road a bit, was a large piece of land of several thousand acres that was nothing but woods and swamps. We were told by our friend Robert who lived up the road and had lived there all his life that there were panthers in those woods.

One fall day we decided we would go camping in the woods on the backside of the field behind our house. Later in the day we got our camping equipment together which consisted of an old bed sheet, some rope, our hunting knives, a hatchet and a canteen, and after supper left to go camping.

We tied our rope between two trees and hung our sheet over it and pulled out the edges and weighed them down with rocks. We were not allowed to build a fire which would have helped with the mosquito problem, but we did have a can of insect repellant.

From our camp site we could look across the field and see our house. We could see the lights twinkling through the windows. Not too far through the woods from where we were was another house where the Lightsey family lived. We couldn’t see their house but we knew about where they were. We could point in the right direction to their house. From where we were we could hear someone chopping firewood and when the screen door slammed shut.

The sun had set and we sat back in the woods a little so that we wouldn’t be seen in hopes that some deer might come out and we’d get to watch them. We didn’t see any deer, but we did see a possum and a raccoon walk by, and we heard all kinds of night birds.

It was as we were watching and listening to the animals of the night that a panther scream pierced the night air. At the scream we were all scared stiff. We looked hard into the darkness to see if we could see the panther. In a few seconds the panther screamed again. This was enough to shake us from our stiffness and get us all running for the far distant house. There were three fences between us and the house but I don’t remember climbing any of them. I don’t remember my youngest brother having any problem getting over them either. And we left all our camping equipment behind as we ran from the panther. We couldn’t get the back door of our house open because we were clambering all over one another and no one could turn the door knob. Finally our mother opened the door and we fell inside.

That night as we slept in our safe warm beds we wondered if the panther was so furious at not catching one of us that he ripped our sheet/tent to shreds and took some of our other stuff. We did go back later in the broad daylight to get all our camping equipment and were surprised to find that none of it was torn up or missing.

The following week school started back. The school bus came and picked us up after it did Robert, and then it turned down Lightsey road to pick up the Lightsey children. Mr. Lightsey raised a lot of exotic birds. He raised peacocks, guineas, quail, and some other birds in large covered pens outside. As we rode down the road with the windows down on the bus and stopped at the Lightsey house, one of the peacocks gave a loud scream or called out and just made whatever noise they make. I was then able to positively identify the panther we heard several days before in our woods that scared us so bad with that scream.