The Mythical Black Panther

I’ve always loved the idea of a thick forest, so tangled with branches and magic that it engulfs you in moments.

But I didn’t want one behind my house. It blocked my view of the expressway (which I preferred over a bunch of trees), and at night, it made my open window look like a sheet of lead instead of a nighttime landscape painting.

Someone else wanted that forest there though: a black panther. The day the city bulldozed the forest, the panther wandered into our backyard as if it were a common house cat.

The closest I had ever gotten to seeing a real black wild cat was the black panther Bagheera in Disney’s live-action version of The Jungle Book. The panther in my backyard was younger, brasher. He ambled silently like a trapeze artist at the beginning of a tightrope walk, graceful, balanced, and sure of the path ahead. He looked like an ink drawing, all ebony shine with curved lines and perfect proportions. It looked at me with the steely and unperturbed stare of a defiant teenager’s, its eyes enchanting marbles of fluorescent pale jade. Its poise made me feel pathetic.

I assumed I had seen a Florida panther, the state animal and endangered subspecies of Puma concolor. My theory was too fanciful; black panthers are about as real as Bagheera. According to the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, large black cats are leopards or jaguars going through a melanistic (black) phase or spotted cats in a rare melanistic phase. More interestingly, the refuge claims, “there has never been a black or melanistic panther, cougar, or mountain lion [different names for P. concolor] documented in the wild or in captivity.”

And I thought the idea of a panther in a suburban backyard was far-fetched.

So the enchantment is this: sometimes, something you want to be real can never be real, but the idea of it is real, and an idea is the start of everything.