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Originally Posted by Unclebuck257  GREAT story!!
About four years ago I saw what I thought was a mountain lion on our place in the open pasture. He/she was coming up behind our horse and our mule and really spooked them. It didn't really chase them, but spooked them enough to run off in a huge hurry and then jump our fence onto the county road. By the time I got my rifle, that cat was long gone and never to be seen again. I called our game warden who then came out rather quickly. He told me that a big cat had been raising a lot of problems in a neighboring county, Montague County, killing livestock and house pets, but he hadn't heard of one around here in quite a while. He told me that there is no season on these cats and if I could, shoot it, but he doubted I'd ever see it again. He then told me that although they look like Mountain Lions, that they are actually Mexican Panthers, from of course Mexico, usually colored black, but some with the gray/blonde color too, like the one I saw.
Nothing else seen or heard about that cat until just two weeks ago. My sister and brother in law live about 1/2 mile from me, and directly across an 80 acre farmed pasture from me. They have a home with a small backyard, fenced in with cyclone fencing. Beyond their back yard is untouched, all natural, grazing pasture. My brother in law went out to feed and after feeding was just resting, leaning on their backyard fence, looking out into that open natural grazing pasture. He saw something about 50 yards out, laying down behind some small bushes and then went into the house for his binoculars to check it out. The minute he got back out with those binocs to the back of their yard and put the binocs on what he had seen, IT stood up and looked right square back at him. He told me it was a mountain lion at first. After I told him what the game warden had told me four years ago, he said it was one of the blonde/gray colored ones and it was huge in size. It stood up fully, looked at him looking at it, and then vanished into the brush very quickly. Those Mexican Panthers are definitely still around this area of North Texas and apparently doing well too. |
I'm a native born Texan, and my family moved here to Arkansas about 1948 so I claim both states as home. I was born in Bonham (Fannin County) in 1944. My dad and his family lived on a farm at the old Hilger community east of Bonham. THere was a small creek that ran across their place, and it also crossed the old gumbo road they lived on. He said that when he was a boy (born in 1925) every Tuesday night a panther ran that creek and when it got to the place where it crossed the road it would always let out a scream or two. Smelled the humans that had crossed I guess.
Years went by and one night as a young man walking home from somewhere he got to that crossing and thought of that panther which hadn't been heard in years and the hair stood up on the back of his neck at the memory. Every year when the crops were planted his family would go and camp out on the Red River and once saw a panther or mountain lion there.
Before they dammed it, Coffee Mill Creek near Bonham was surrounded by hundreds of acres of hardwoods. Lots of Bois d' arc I remember (osage Orange) from which the Indians made good bows. When we went home there for Christmas or some other holiday, all those old boys would go into the Coffee Mill Creek bottoms for a squirrel hunt. I saw some of those forests as a lad and it looked like anything could live in there to me.
An old time cowboy watches stock on the hills around Bonham, Texas and an Indian leads a pony near Bonham, circa 1900.
