By popular demand (of four people in the Facebook group), here are some tales of panthers, also called mountain lions and cougars.

For me, the tales have a distinct beginning, and that beginning is with Foxfire, specifically the issue of Foxfire Magazine that gathered tales of haunts and haints and other folktales of the southern Appalachians.

I'm not going to go into the creation of Foxfire or the program's influence on my and other families in this area; there's plenty of history out there for those who are interested. Suffice it to say that it was a continual part of my life on many levels during my formative years.

This particular issue of the magazine (the haints and haunts and such) is now out of print. I don't even remember the issue number or when it was published, only that it was blue and contained some interesting local legends. For example, the legend of the man-sized catfish hanging out in Lake Burton at the bottom of the dam was collected in that issue.

(Spoiler: The catfish made an appearance near the end of Greenwood Cove. Now you know where the inspiration for that came from.)

So, too, were a number of tales passed down from the earliest days of white settlement in this area. In those days, humans were still easy targets for large wildlife like the black bears, wild hogs, and mountain lions roaming the mountains. I don't recall the particulars, but several short tales were published of mountain lions screaming at night. Reportedly, the sound is eerily similar to a woman's scream, which lured a couple of unwary folk into the dark woods where they became prey for these large, dangerous cats.

Most mountain lions are tawny in color, but some possess a mutation that renders their coat black. Plenty of people think that's pure myth, including scientists, but I know better. When I was a teenager and old enough to drive, I saw black panthers wandering along the side of Hwy. 441 near the high school I attended. I never got close to them; as far as I know, they never did more than skirt the school's boundaries, but they were a not uncommon sight for those paying attention.

Others my age saw the black panthers in that area of the county. One schoolmate told me an old folktale of the black panther being inhabited by the devil or a sign of the devil. Which I can't now remember, though the memory of the telling still has the power to raise goosebumps on my skin. That tale was also an inspiration for one of my stories, "Christmas Eve Gift," which was published under my own name in Dreaming of a Dark Christmas.

Now, I always enjoyed reading folklore and mythology, especially as a teenager when school was downright boring and I read more than I breathed. Somehow, I gained access to James Mooney's Myths and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee, probably at the high school library. It contains the tale of the human hunter who absorbed the essence of a group of talking panthers during the Green Corn Dance. When I started developing Sunshine Walkingstick's story world, it seemed only natural to use that tale as a basis for the panther shifters in The Deep Wood.

The closest I've ever been to a mountain lion was in February 1998. I was at my parent's house in the kitchen, talking to a friend on the phone while my son, then about six months old, was asleep upstairs. The kitchen is at the back of the house, facing a gentle slope up the side of Scruggs Mountain. When Mom and Dad built the house about a decade prior, they added a porch to the back behind the kitchen and a rock-faced retaining wall just beyond the porch to control erosion of the mountainside where the land was graded for the house site. The top of the wall is maybe a foot taller than the porch rail, so if you're outside and standing on the porch, the rail is about waist high for most people and the wall, which is maybe three to four feet away, is slightly taller.

Glass-plated French doors separate the kitchen from the porch. Mom put out bird feeders in a little clearing up the mountain, so she could sit in the breakfast nook (nothing more than a small table with four chairs around it) and watch the birds through the doors.

That night, I was standing at the doors talking on the phone with a family friend when I noticed an animal walking along the top of the wall about ten feet away from me, with the closed door and the width of the porch between the two of us. At first I thought it was a yellow Labrador Retriever. The animal was about that size, maybe bigger and darker in color, though the tail was a lot longer than I thought a yellow Lab had.

Curiosity killed the cat, right? Dumb me, I opened the door and poked my head out, trying to get a look at this "yellow Lab" that was now about fifteen feet away from me with it's back end to me. It turned its head and looked at me, very casually, and I froze: Oh, hell, no...it wasn't a dog; it was a mountain lion, and a big one, too, with a round, flat face and pointed ears. I casually stepped back inside and closed the door, but my heart was hammering in my chest. Meanwhile, the mountain lion just as casually turned around and walked away, easily balancing atop the rock wall until it disappeared into the darkness.

My son and I lived next door to my mom and dad off and on for most of my son's life, and let me tell you: I didn't let him cross the distance between the two houses at night by himself. It still makes me uneasy, even though three dogs now live on the property with the resident humans. Cats are predators, and mountain lions in particular are dangerous.

One final story set out west.

My son is an Eagle Scout, a hard-earned title that took him nearly eighteen years to achieve. When he was thirteen, his troop decided to throw their collective hand into the lottery to go on a twelve-day backpacking trip at Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. It was an expensive trip, but also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so we very nearly sold an arm and a leg to get him there just after he reached the eligibility age of fourteen.

I've never been to New Mexico, nor have I ever been backpacking, so I had no idea what he and the other members of his troop would be doing. No idea of the terrain, nothing. When Caleb came back, though, he was full of tales about the wilderness out that way, and to this day, some eight plus years later, he still wants to move out west to live.

It was a brutal trip in many ways, something else I heard about. The young men and their adult leaders were out on the trail for nearly two weeks in weather and heat I couldn't tolerate, facing all sorts of danger from lightning strikes to dehydration to, you guessed it, wildlife.

Now, to the best of my knowledge, Caleb's troop never saw anything more dangerous than poisonous snakes and the like, which are deadly enough in their own right. But tales were passed among the various groups and the camp's staff. The most notorious story was of a young woman, a staff member, who was out hiking on her own, probably checking on remote areas of the ranch. She happened to spot a cougar (a close relative of our local mountain lions) up in the trees.

Then she figured out that it was stalking her. Apparently, she walked backward from that point until she reached the safety of numbers. Quick thinking on her part. It probably saved her life.

Humans have a bad habit of assigning human characteristics to animals. Such personification can be relatively harmless, such as in the movie Bambi.

Other personifications are much more deadly. Large cats are not sweet, cuddly creatures; they're some of the deadliest predators walking the face of the earth and they will not hesitate to take down a lone human.

If you're wondering, yes, panthers still roam the southern Appalachians. My advice? Admire them from afar, as afar away as you can reasonably be. And, of course, enjoy these beautiful creatures in stories wherever you find them.