Cry of the Panther

by Jeff Gulvin

  ‘My wife?’ Patterson stared at her.

  ‘Yes, Colin, your wife. The mother of your children.’ She stopped. ‘Where does she think you are now?’

  All at once he was flustered. Her feelings for him shifted from general indifference to something more like disdain. He was a pitiful middle-aged man. MacGregor was a far better specimen in comparison.

  ‘Do you know what, Colin,’ she went on. ‘I don’t think you ought to come up here any more. I mean, people talk, don’t they. You’ve got your children to think of, and I teach one of them.’

  ‘Imogen, I—’

  ‘I can do without the gossip and innuendo. I can do without your wife giving me the evil eye every time I go in the post office.’

  ‘Imogen, I’m sorry. I had no—’

  ‘I’ve got to go home now, Colin. I think you’d better go, too. Your wife will be wondering where you are, won’t she.’ She held the door open for him.

  Ten

  CONNLA BOUGHT A COKE and a pack of cigarettes at a service station just north of the Forth Bridge and climbed back into the truck. Unscrewing the top of the Coke bottle, he studied his road map. Dunkeld. Mary Warren had thought Cullen lived in or near Dunkeld. She had explained her slight hesitancy: Cullen was an ex-slaughterman and he was too comfortable around guns for her liking, but he was well known to the SSPCA because he turned up at virtually every big-cat sighting. Nothing slipped by his attention, and not only in Scotland; he had visited various other parts of the UK. He was a firm believer in the theory of multiple release after the laws changed in 1976. He also believed that, given the twenty-two years that had passed since, and the fact that the average life span of a leopard in captivity is twenty years, the cats had to be breeding.

  Every time there was a sighting that warranted any kind of TV coverage Cullen was spoken to, although, for some reason the recent one at Balerno seemed to be the exception. All the time Mary had been speaking Connla could tell she didn’t like him. He confronted her about it and she squirmed a little, as if she was hesitant to admit dislike for a person she was trying to introduce him to.

  ‘No, I suppose I don’t like him very much,’ she had said. ‘He’s not really my kind of person. As I think I told you, he has a bit of a reputation and he’s been interviewed by the police a few times—for poaching, I think, or suspected poaching anyway. I’m not sure if he still works as a slaughterman, but he used to come to sites where livestock had been killed, and quite often we had young inspectors there, some of them women. Don’t get me wrong, Mr McAdam, our inspectors are all pretty tough. They have to climb, swim, dive and handle all manner of animals and people.’ She had paused then. ‘But Cullen had this way about him, as if he enjoyed upsetting women. You know, almost misogynistic. He loved to describe firing the bolt into a cow’s head at the abattoir.’

  Connla studied the map. Cullen didn’t sound like his kind of person, either, but Mary had advised him there was nobody better qualified in the country when it came to big cats. Cullen had lived all over the place and knew the countryside better than most. Not content with kills and the locations of kills, he had tried to track the beasts, unsuccessfully so far, but he was something of a self-styled expert on their habits and behaviour. Connla thought of his own background and knew it would be an interesting meeting. He had asked her why Cullen was nicknamed ‘Bird Dog’ and she had told him he had a penchant for pitbulls and peregrines.

  Connla drove north on the M90, avoided Perth, and took the A9, which was signposted to Inverness, some hundred or so miles further north. The afternoon was waning now and he hoped to find a hotel in Dunkeld for the night. He had discovered over the years that locating people in small towns wasn’t really a problem: if Cullen did live in the area he would, no doubt, have a favoured drinking hole, either in Dunkeld itself or in nearby Birnam. Connla chewed over that name. Though Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane … and thou opposed being of no woman born … or was it Birnan Wood? He never could remember his Shakespeare.

  He entered the small town from the south, driving through Birnam before crossing the River Tay on an old humpback bridge. Twin towns, one all but running into the other; they were bunched against heavily forested hillside, with chunks of exposed rock rising above the houses. Dunkeld was more twee and affluent-looking than Birnam. Connla drove slowly across the bridge, pulled over on the main street and switched off the engine. It had begun to rain, the windscreen being slapped here and there by heavy, individual spots. He fetched his jacket from the back seat and got out. He could smell the river and bread baking somewhere, and he pulled a face at the weird combination. There were two hotels that he could see, both on Atholl Street, which ran north, away from the river. He strolled up Bridge Street, glancing left halfway along, where the high street ran to a square and then on to the roofless cathedral. He paused there, considering whether to get somewhere for the night first then look round, or vice versa. Deciding on the former, he walked the length of the high street; white buildings huddled together in an ever-widening line. The rain stopped, and within minutes a pleasant evening sun was reflected off the slate grey of the rooftops. He paused at the fountain, watching a French couple taking photographs, then looked around the ruins of the cathedral. There was a gentleness about the place, a slowness that appealed to him. A couple of people glanced curiously at him—his hat maybe; hats were not so common in the UK, he had discovered.

  He checked into the Atholl Hotel for one night initially and asked the receptionist if she knew a man named Harry Cullen. She looked blankly at him and shook her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I don’t.’

  ‘No problem.’ He smiled again. ‘Where’s the best place in town to get a drink?’

  ‘The Taybank Hotel. Dougie Maclean’s place.’

  ‘Dougie Maclean?’

  ‘Aye, the singer. It’s down by the river there on the Meikleour road. Go down to the bridge and turn left. You’ll not miss it.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll give it a shot.’

  The room was pleasant and not overdone, with a view to the woods that climbed steeply at the back of the building. Connla dumped his bag on the bed, took out a fresh shirt and a pair of underpants, then showered. With his hair still wet, he went to the dining room, ate a brief dinner, then headed for the Taybank Hotel. On a Tuesday night there weren’t many people in the bar, but the few who were there looked quite an alternative bunch. One of them, a man in his fifties with white hair, a white beard and a large gold earring, tweaked on the strings of an acoustic guitar. Connla noticed a fiddle hanging on one wall and a strange, flat Irish drum, the name of which he could never remember but always felt that he should, hung on another. He bought a pint of Caffreys and sat at the bar. The girl who was serving was slim, young and very attractive, with blue eyes, angular features and a tumble of blond hair piled up on her head. Connla sipped his drink, lit a cigarette and smiled at her.

  ‘Where’re you from?’ she asked him.

  ‘The United States.’

  ‘I know that, silly. I mean whereabouts?’

  Connla laughed. ‘South Dakota.’

  ‘I’ve never been there.’

  ‘Mount Rushmore. You know the presidents’ heads?’

  ‘Oh, aye.’

  ‘Well, it’s also got Crazy Horse Mountain, but most people don’t know that.’

  Her name was Isabel; she was from Dundee and was only working in the bar for the summer. She knew the owner from his music shop in the high street. Connla had to admit, once again, that he had never heard of him. He asked her about Harry Cullen. Again he got a blank look, which he’d half-expected. ‘Jimmy might know.’

  ‘Jimmy?’

  ‘Aye, the manager. Hold on a sec’ and I’ll ask him.’

  She disappeared out the back and then reappeared with a squat-looking, yellow-haired man with a deep suntan. He wore a silver stud in his ear and his muscles pressed against his shirt at the bicep. ‘You want “Bird Dog”?’ he asked.

  Connla nodd
ed. ‘I’d like to talk to him, yes.’

  The man looked at him, head slightly to one side. ‘What d’you want to talk to him about?’

  Connla looked back at him evenly, thinking that he ought to tell him it was actually none of his business, but knowing that would get him precisely nowhere, and as he had nothing to hide it would achieve equally as little. ‘Panthers,’ he said.

  The man grinned. ‘You’re American.’

  ‘There you go.’ Connla offered his hand. ‘McAdam. Connla. I’m a zoologist and photographer. The SSPCA told me Harry Cullen was the main man in these parts as far as big cats are concerned.’

  The manager laughed then. ‘Oh, Harry’s the main man, all right. At least he thinks he is.’

  ‘D’you know where I can find him?’

  ‘He comes in sometimes. The weekend mostly. He lives over in Meikleour. Got himself a cottage on the estate.’

  ‘Meikleour?’ Connla frowned.

  The manager pointed to the door. ‘Take a left and keep going. It’s about fifteen miles. Spittalfield and then Meikleour. You canny miss it.’

  Connla thanked him and ordered another beer.

  The following morning he took the Meikleour road, which bordered the Tay for a few miles before lifting through open farmlands with Caputh Castle to the south. Connla liked the Tay, wide and deep and gentle in a way he could never associate with any of the rivers back home. The Salmon came to mind, fast and fierce, and he shook away the sudden shadows the memory brought with it. Spittalfield was a minute, blink-and-miss-it sort of place, and Meikleour seemed to be no more than a post office and a bus stop for schoolchildren. He checked the directions the manager from the Taybank had given him and made a left turn opposite the post office.

  The road narrowed into a single unmade track, with potholes everywhere still filled with last night’s rain. Farmland opened out on either side, and he saw Friesian cattle and black-faced Scottish sheep separated by lines of electric fencing. A cattle grid rattled under the wheels of the Land-Rover, and to his right was a sprawling brownstone building, broken only by an arch. This must be the converted stable block the manager had mentioned. Cullen’s cottage lipped the river itself at the far end of the track. Halfway down, Connla’s truck was greeted first by barking, then a pitbull, or something that looked extremely like it, running full tilt towards him. He thought pitbulls were illegal in Britain. Maybe he was mistaken. Slowing the car, he looked down at the leaping dog, which had spittle flying from its frayed black lips and a meanness in its eyes that he usually associated with people.

  Up ahead, the narrow track arced between the trees and opened into a clearing with a small stone house at the far end. Connla could see the way the land dropped to the river beyond it. A battered Volkswagen pickup truck with a steel-coloured camper top on the back was parked askew in front of the house with what looked like years of dried mud climbing above the wheels. A man appeared in the darkness of the doorway wearing jeans, work boots and a thin cotton parka of military green. He was balding; his black hair was wispy at the sides, lifting above his ears to border the crown, and he had a moustache covering his upper lip. He nipped the end of the hand-rolled cigarette he was holding between forefinger and thumb and stepped out into the sunshine. With one hand in his coat pocket, he regarded the brand-new Land-Rover with suspicion. Connla switched off the engine and the man called the dog to heel. It stopped barking immediately and trotted behind his legs, where it stood with its chin resting on one exposed boot top. Connla opened the cab door and got down.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘How you doing today?’

  Cullen, if it was Cullen, just looked at him. ‘Not bad,’ he muttered, his voice deep and gravelly, without much trace of an accent. ‘What can I do for you?’

  With a glance at the dog, Connla stepped closer. ‘I’m looking for Harry Cullen.’

  ‘Oh, aye.’ The man put a fresh match to the stub of his cigarette. Connla noticed that his fingernails were long and yellowed, like animal claws. He could smell something resinous from inside the door to the cottage, but couldn’t say what it was.

  ‘Are you Cullen?’ he asked.

  ‘Depends.’

  ‘On who I am? Connla McAdam. Zoologist. The SSPCA told me you were the man to speak to about big-cat sightings.’

  Something sparked in Cullen’s eyes and he dipped his hand back in his jeans’ pocket.

  ‘And you want to know about them.’

  ‘Panther, lynx, puma. Whatever it is that’s out there.’

  Cullen smiled then; he had long teeth, but only across the front. Connla could see by the shadows that all his molars were missing. ‘Oh, there’s everything out there,’ he said.

  Connla followed him into the darkness of the main sitting room, which was furnished crudely with a battered leather sofa with half a rug thrown over it before the empty fireplace. In the shadows just to the right of the front door, a Harris Hawk perched on a stand tearing at the flesh of a large brown rat. It was that which Connla could smell from outside. He glanced at Cullen. ‘Bird Dog,’ he said and grinned.

  The little room at the back was a shrine, a testament to years of study. There was no wallpaper, and no need of it as every spare inch was covered, pasted, with newsprint. It was in chronological order, as if he had begun at the door jamb with 1987 and continued right round the room, going from top to bottom until he got to the final sighting at Pentland. News stories from hundreds of different sources, with pencil marks on them and circles here and there round specific words. Below the window Cullen had a free-standing bookshelf stuffed with books and magazines. Connla could see that the newsprint continued behind it. The small desk had a map of the UK pasted on top, with a multitude of different-coloured pins stuck into it at various locations.

  ‘My own system,’ Cullen explained. ‘Black’s for panther.’ He pointed. ‘Red is for spotted leopard or jaguar. Nobody can tell the difference, so I put them all down as leopard. I put lynx in with leopard, too, because everyone thinks they’ve seen a leopard, and as, far as my research goes it was mostly spotted and black leopard that got released back in the Seventies. Yellow is for puma. You know the difference?’

  Connla half smiled. ‘I wrote the thesis for my doctorate on the North American mountain lion.’

  Cullen looked unimpressed. ‘Green is for lion,’ he went on. ‘That’s African lion.’

  ‘Two?’ Connla stared at the map.

  ‘One really.’ Cullen tapped London with a long fingernail. ‘There’ve been two sightings in Barnet, north London. But I reckon it can’t be a lion, or even a lioness. A lion’s a big animal, you know. If there was one roaming around London, I think the police would know.’

  Connla glanced at the other green pin in the southwest of the country. ‘And there?’

  ‘That’s Dartmoor.’ Cullen showed his teeth again, scraping a blackened palm over the stubble that clung to his sagging jaw. ‘It’s possible. We had two sightings in May. Two different people both described what I’d call a young male lion.’

  Connla leaned his knuckles on the desk and looked sideways at him. ‘Paw prints?’

  ‘They took a plaster cast. Some fella at a zoo down there confirmed the prints were big enough. No claw marks, you know the sort of thing.’

  ‘And the rest?’

  ‘Fawn coloured, beginnings of a mane. Young male lion.’

  ‘Running wild on Dartmoor?’ Connla raised his eyebrows.

  Again he looked at the clippings of virtually every sighting for over ten years. He glanced at the big-cat books on the shelf—tiger, lion, leopard—then back at the map once more. ‘How many of these have you checked out?’

  Cullen popped the air from his cheeks. ‘About seventy-five per cent, I’d say.’

  ‘All over the country?’

  ‘As much as I can. I’ve been doing only Scotland for the last three years.’

  Connla looked through the open door to where the brown-feathered hawk was swallowing the last
of the rat. ‘Does she catch her own food?’

  ‘Of course she does. She’s not a pet, Mr McAdam.’ Cullen squatted at the desk, brushed the toe of his boot along the pitbull’s flank and rolled some fresh tobacco. ‘Now, what is it I can do for you?’

  Connla moved back into the sitting room, finding the confines of the study suddenly very stuffy. Cullen followed him and made his way to the tiny kitchen area beyond the stairs, which climbed to the open mezzanine above. Metal rattled as he poured tap water into a kettle.

  ‘I’m an expert on pumas,’ Connla told him. ‘I’m also a photographer. Big cats mostly, but I do other stuff. Sharks, salt-water crocs, alligators, the odd snake here and there.’

  Cullen laughed, a guttural sound in his throat. ‘Anything that’s dangerous, huh?’

  ‘I guess.’ Connla flapped an arm at his side. ‘Never really thought about it that way, but, yeah, I guess you’re right.’

  ‘You want to get a picture of a panther in Great Britain.’ Cullen stepped out of the shadows, a greyness in his face which Connla hadn’t noticed before.

  ‘Yes.’ Connla folded his arms and looked across the short distance between them. He felt strangely uncomfortable in this man’s presence. It was an alien sensation. He always got on with everybody, and he had been in some rough places with some very rough people. ‘I can track better than anyone I know,’ he said.

  ‘But you don’t know the country.’

  For a long moment Connla stared at him. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t.’

  Eleven

  IMOGEN HUNG THE PAINTING of the white-tailed sea eagle on the wall at the bottom of the stairs, adjusted it, stepped back and took a good long look. The eagle stared back at her, his eye catching the sun over the loch. She folded her arms, cocked her head to one side and knew this was one of the best watercolours she had ever painted. Normally the really good ones went to Glasgow for prints and then reduction for greetings cards, which brought in enough money to buy winter feed and shoes for her horse. But this one would remain here. Eventually, perhaps, she would allow them to print from it, but she wanted to do nothing that would draw attention to the presence of white tails on Tana Coire.