Panther on the Prowl

by Nancy Morse

  It was easier for the old-timers at Brighton and Big Cypress, with their isolation, harder at the reservation in Hollywood where young Seminoles were essentially city kids. For John, it wasn’t the money or the material things the white world offered that had an impact on his life. What need did he have for any of that, when this untamed wilderness teeming with life and with memories was all that really mattered?

  Yet, what the white world offered him was even harder to ignore, much less deny. It had brought him a remarkable woman, a woman any man would have been proud to call his own. Any man, that is, except him. There was no pride in hearing a woman tell you she loved you, and then walking away from her.

  He’d seen the acute pain in her blue eyes just before he turned and walked out the door, and as much as it had affected him, it hadn’t dissuaded him from doing what he knew in his heart he had to do. What she didn’t know was that the pain he was suffering over it was as great as her own…maybe even greater, considering that he’d already lost so much and now stood to lose even more.

  Losing the things that mattered most to him was becoming a habit he deplored. If it was the last thing he did, he would find that cat and kill it. Hopefully, that would put an end to the long, lonely hours of isolation, and to the suffocating grief he wore around himself like a cloak, at times so stifling he thought he would smother beneath the weight of it. Desperately he sought release the only way he knew how. He had become a hunter—like the panther, hunting to survive.

  Rennie might not ever understand his irrational need to hunt down the panther and kill it, but that didn’t make it any less real to him. He had long ago given up trying to reconcile his thirst for revenge with his Seminole upbringing which said that all creatures were his brothers, and one does not take the life of one’s brother lightly. The warrior had killed a panther out of arrogance; John would kill out of vengeance and retaliation. Unlike the warrior, however, he would not forget to say a prayer when he killed the panther.

  As he stood on the bank watching the last rays of sun stretch across the swamp, John felt a new urgency to the hunt. It was no longer about Maggie. She was dead and gone and no amount of vengeance would bring her back. No, this was about Rennie, who was alive and vital, and who he’d left hurting. This was about making it right. It was about ridding himself of the pain of the past so that maybe, just maybe, there was a future for him with her.

  Dusk was settling over the Glades when he returned to the cabin. Pockets of darkness laced the footpath from the water. Inside, he didn’t bother to turn on the light. He had returned only to collect his pack and go back out again. He’d made up his mind. He was going after the panther tonight, and he wasn’t coming back until he’d finished what he set out to do. There was nothing left to lose.

  “Going somewhere?”

  A familiar voice spoke from the darkness, freezing John in midmotion as he reached for his backpack. Everything inside of him tensed. His head whirled in her direction, the violence of the movement whipping the dark hair off his face.

  Even in the darkness she was beautiful, and he was powerless to stop himself from wanting her, a gut reaction since the day she fell into his life. He snatched his backpack off the table and said roughly, “I hope you didn’t come to try and talk me out of it. It won’t work. My mind’s made up.”

  She spoke from the shadows. “I know it is.”

  When he walked out of her condo that day, leaving marks on her arm and inflicting a wound on her heart, Rennie had thought she would die. She had cried herself to sleep, lamenting her inability to get through to him. If only she’d been able to change his mind. If only… But come morning, all the if-onlys in the world made no difference. His past was a part of him. The death of his wife. His grief over it. Even his insane obsession with the panther. It molded him into the man he was today, the man she fell in love with. Morning shed light on the indisputable fact that it wasn’t her place to try to change him, only to love him.

  But just as he could not help being who he was, Rennie couldn’t help being the woman she had become, a woman with a brand-new sense of herself who had learned the hard way that love was worth fighting for. Whether he liked it or not, she had him to thank for it. Maybe he didn’t love her. Maybe he wasn’t able to. But she would never know until he let go of his past, and there was only one way to do that.

  “I didn’t come to try and stop you,” she said. “I came to help you. I’m going with you.”

  “Like hell you are,” he shot back.

  “If everything you told me is true, then that’s one incredible cat. And if you’re not the man of the legend, then someone else is. You forget what I do for a living. This is an astounding find, and I’m not about to let it get away. Our reasons for hunting the panther may be different, but it was that cat that brought us together, and it’s the cat that binds us now. We both have a lot riding on this.”

  His gaze cut through the darkness with the practiced skill of a hunter and focused tightly on her face. “We also both have a lot to lose.”

  She came forward from out of the shadows. There was a bag in her hand, as if she’d known all along that this was something they had to do together. But the reason she gave him was only partly true. Granted, she was curious about the creature from a strictly anthropological standpoint. From a purely personal perspective, however, her reasons were entirely different. For the first time in her life a man wanted her not for her money or her family connection but for herself. It made her feel wanted…necessary. This, she knew with all certainty, was her missing link, and now that she had found it, she wasn’t about to let it go without a fight.

  “When you catch it, will you—”

  “Kill it,” he said abruptly. “Do you have a problem with that?”

  Who was she to judge him, when her own life had been in such utter disarray before she met him? His strength and gentle caring had enabled her to put things in order, to make sense out of who she was and what she wanted. In truth, she loved him as much for his intelligence and strength as she did for this one weakness, for in it she recognized the aching and vulnerable heart of the hunter.

  “What are we waiting for?” she asked.

  The morning broke bright and clear and unbearably hot. Breakfast was a collaboration of scrambled eggs and bacon that John made and the coffee that Rennie made. Sitting on a fallen log, John took one sip and grimaced. “Where’d you learn to make coffee?” he complained, tossing what was left in his cup into the bushes.

  He’d been edgy and abrasive since they set out. It was obvious he didn’t want her there. He made a point of it by making two separate beds of moss and leaves for them to sleep on last night and by beating those eggs this morning with undisguised hostility.

  She was used to making coffee in an electric coffeemaker, not by tossing a handful of grinds into a pot of boiling water. But why say anything and give him another reason to point out what she was giving up by being here? As if any of that mattered.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Charm,” she grumbled.

  Her retort only drove John deeper into his dark mood.

  It was still early when they climbed into the canoe and went on their way. The hot, humid air was uncomfortable in Rennie’s lungs as they paddled through a mangrove tunnel, but she didn’t complain. This was his world, not just the glowing, green, beautiful part of it, but that which was stagnant and harsh, and just as she loved him for everything he was, she had come to love this place for everything it was.

  It was a place of beauty and danger, where patience was a necessary virtue. If you waited long enough, you might see the mullet jumping out of the water like wet cakes of soap squeezed into the air, and dolphins gliding quietly across an inlet, appearing and disappearing until there was no trace of them but for the ripples that lapped against the mangrove roots. You might even see a panther. And who knew? Maybe if she waited long enough, John might find his way out of his dark mood just as he found his way through the swamp.

  About midday
they stopped to rest. John got down into the knee-deep water. He made no move to place his hands about her waist and lift her down as he’d always done before, so Rennie climbed down into the water and did her best to slog through the muddy bottom that sucked at her feet as she waded to shore.

  With Rennie sitting in the shade beneath a tree, John searched the area for a stick that would suit his purpose. Finding one, he quickly carved the tip into a point, and returned with it to the water, where he speared a fish. Back on shore, he cleaned and gutted it and tossed it into a frying pan over a small fire he’d got going.

  He passed some to Rennie on a paper plate. “You’d better sit in the sun if you want to dry out.” His deep voice broke the silence that had been sitting between them all morning like an unwelcome guest.

  Rennie’s jeans were wet from midthigh down, but although the denim was heavy from the water it had absorbed, the wetness was a cool relief to the stagnant heat that swelled all around them as the day heated up. From where she sat with her back against the trunk of a tree, she nibbled on the fish and observed him.

  Droplets of perspiration glided down the sides of his handsome face, glistening in the sunlight. He looked ominous, but she knew by the sound of his voice that his anger was dissipating. “Where are we going?” she ventured to ask. She knew they weren’t wandering in aimless circles. John was too methodical in his movements, too intent in his purpose, and too knowledgeable about the swamp not to know exactly where they were going.

  He tried to stay angry so as not to let his guard down. He had learned the hard way that anger and guilt were supreme motivators, and he would need both if he were to succeed in ridding himself of them. But though the guilt remained, try as he might, he could not maintain his anger, at least not at Rennie. It wasn’t her fault he’d come to this sad place in his life. He had only himself to blame for that.

  “There’s a place I know,” he said. “I saw his tracks there once. I figure it’s as good a place as any to start.”

  “How will you catch him?”

  “I’ll set traps, bait the area and wait for him.”

  “Won’t he smell you there?”

  “Hopefully there’ll be a breeze and I can wait downwind. If he’s hungry enough, he’ll take the bait.”

  “How do you know it will be him and not some other panther?”

  Despite his efforts to keep a rein on his anger, Rennie’s questions were beginning to annoy him, for they were the same questions he’d asked himself a hundred times. He glanced up sharply and was about to say something, when the words caught in his throat. A ray of yellow sunlight slashed through the trees and danced in her hair. She looked so beautiful, so fair and sparkling next to his own skin and dark demeanor, and the difference between them had never been so acute as it was at this moment. That a woman like her could love a man like him stilled whatever harsh words he’d been about to utter.

  He forced his gaze away before he did something stupid like go over there and kiss her. That would certainly take the edge off, but in this deadly game of cat and mouse, it was precisely that edge he needed.

  “There’s a population of about forty adults centered mainly in Collier and Hendry counties,” he said. “That’s the only population that remains that we know of anywhere. If there’s a panther in this area, it’s alone and it’s him.”

  “What do you want me to do?” she asked.

  “You? Nothing. This is my fight, Rennie. I’ll handle it.”

  “I won’t be dismissed that easily,” she objected.

  He answered dryly, “I noticed.”

  He knew he was crazy for bringing her with him on such a dangerous adventure, but seeing her unexpectedly at the cabin, with moonlight slanting across her face, he’d been powerless to deny her. The dismal fact was that he wanted her with him. Not just her body, although he craved that as surely as he craved the air he breathed, but the incredible essence of her and who she was.

  He’d held the unfair advantage of being able to see the person he was falling hopelessly in love with, but she fell in love seeing only with her heart. She had survived her physical ordeal and the emotional trial of betrayal, and against all odds had come out miraculously stronger than before. Over and over again she had proved to him what real courage was. It was courage that led her to his cabin after he had walked out on her. Courage that brought her here despite the danger. Courage that allowed her to love him in spite of what she thought he was.

  Yet even though he longed to believe in the promise of that love, John was determined to do what he felt he must in order to rid himself of the last vestiges of guilt. Yes, he was crazy for bringing her, because of the unswayable power she had over him. One look at those blue eyes and he was questioning everything, most of all what he was doing here and why.

  “Why not use me as bait?” Rennie suggested. To his horrified look she quickly added, “If what you said is true, and he takes from you any woman you—”

  “Not on your life!” His bellow cut through the rest of her words, shattering the afternoon stillness. Love, he wanted to shout. Any woman I love. But he couldn’t say it out loud, not here where it might be overheard by the one creature in the world with the power to take it all away from him as it had done before. “Get your things,” he barked. “It’s time to go.”

  They continued their journey in wordless unease. When dusk fell, they found a spot along the bank and set up camp for the night.

  Twilight played in soft shadows over the hammock in which they were camped. The summer sky flashed a flickering finale to the day. Soon the full face of the moon shone down on them from an ebony sky strewn with stars that glittered like diamonds.

  The air crackled from the small campfire John made that sent yellow sparks into the night and cast warm shadows over Rennie’s face as she sat cross-legged on a bed of moss and leaves.

  Earlier she had watched him catch and kill a rabbit. As its meat browned now on a spit over the open flames, she recalled the shudder that had gone through her at the sight of it. There had been no malice to it, no hostility. It had been the simple, matter-of-fact action of a man catching food the way his ancestors had done. She had watched wordlessly as he paused over the animal’s lifeless body, his lips moving in a prayer not meant for her ears. The impact of his Indianness had never been greater than it had been at that moment.

  When he offered her a bit of his kill, she refused, choosing instead to munch on a chocolate bar she had in her bag. It wasn’t that she was squeamish about eating something he had caught and killed. On the contrary, she found watching him in his element primitive and exciting. It was that she was still nursing her wounded pride in the aftermath of his harsh manner earlier. She had never seen him so angry as when she had suggested that she be bait for the panther. How could she ever get through that wall of anger to the core of his vulnerable heart and make him see what a dangerous mistake he was making?

  The swamp was alive with sounds. The stagnant heat of the day had abated, and in its place was air so still you could touch it. Not a leaf moved in the canopy. Not a blade of grass stirred.

  From where he sat on the ground several yards away, John watched Rennie. The flames from the fire reflected in her hair, illuminating the tawny color. His fingers twitched involuntarily, longing to crush the silken strands, to lift them to his face and breathe in their fragrance. The fire’s glow was on her face. He felt himself growing weak as he watched her. He had purposely placed his mat of moss a safe distance from hers, but several yards felt suddenly like a river, with her on one side and him on the other feeling unbearably alone.

  He used to come to places like this to be alone beneath the twinkling stars, to wait out the night with his memories and his grief for company. The darkness asked no questions and made no demands. Under its cloak, away from prying human eyes, he didn’t have to pretend to be anything other than what he was, a man who had made a dreadful mistake and was having a hard time living with it. But that was before Rennie. Now t
he darkness reeked of loneliness and emptiness.

  His low voice carried across the space between them. “I don’t expect you to understand why I have to do this.”

  “Does it matter whether or not I do?” she replied.

  Yes, he thought, it did. More than he wanted to admit. “He and I have a score to settle.”

  “What if you never catch him?”

  His gaze dropped, and he plucked absentmindedly at the blades of grass. The thought of going on like this, lost and alone, without ever catching the panther and putting an end to it, was a possibility John had never allowed himself to consider…until now. If he didn’t end this thing once and for all, the anger and the guilt would eat him up inside and he would lose himself…and Rennie…forever. “I’ll catch him,” he vowed.

  That was precisely what Rennie was afraid of, that John would catch and kill the panther, only to find that it didn’t bring the salvation he hoped for. If that happened, it would only lock him further into his grief and guilt and shut him away from her forever.

  A deep, guttural sound tore through the stillness of the night, carrying a more imperative fear. “Wh-what’s that?” Rennie asked in a muffled gasp.

  “Bull alligator,” John replied.

  She jumped to her feet. “He sounded close.”

  “Sounds carry easily across the water, especially at night. But if it would make you feel better, you can sit over here.”

  She hastened to where he sat and dropped to the ground beside him, feeling instantly safer, as she always did when he was close to her. “I thought it might have been…him.”