Panther by Roderick Haig-Brown

First published: 1934 as Ki-Yu: A Story of Panthers; 1967, in Great Britain as Panther: The Story of a North American Mountain Lion (U.S. edition, 1973)

Type of work: Adventure tale

Themes: Nature, animals, and death

Time of work: The 1930’s

Recommended Ages: 15-18

Locale: Vancouver Island, British Columbia

Principal Characters:

• Blackstreak, Ki-Yu’s father
• Nassa, Ki-Yu’s mother
• Ki-Yu, a male North American mountain lion, or panther
• David Milton, a professional hunter, especially of panthers
• King, ,
• Jim, ,
• Jack, and
• Mona, David’s hunting dogs
• Carl Sandstrom, a farmer, whose livestock Ki-Yu kills, and a friend of David
• Osa, and
• Mora, two of Ki-Yu’s females
• Nurm, an old blacktail buck

The Story

Panther: The Story of a North American Mountain Lion begins before the protagonist’s birth. Blackstreak and Nassa, male and female cougars on Vancouver Island, meet and mate. David Milton, a bounty hunter, pursues Blackstreak for raiding farm animals, and the panther kills his dog. Nassa gives birth to two females and Ki-Yu. She nurses them, and when their cub spots fade to fawn, she takes them hunting.

David kills Ki-Yu’s sisters, but he and the mother escape. The day after Ki-Yu makes his first skillful kill, he finds a young female. Together they take a look at Carl Sandstrom’s farm animals, then go upriver. Ki-Yu later finds his female dead and skinned and learns that dogs and men are to be feared. He becomes a skillful deer killer, fearing nothing but man.

One very cold winter, wolves worry a herd of deer and stalk Nurm, a big buck, which escapes through clever maneuvering. Ki-Yu tries for him but is out of range. As the long winter makes game scarce, panthers and wolves descend farther into the valley. The number of wolves has been increasing after being almost totally wiped out by an epidemic years before. Ki-Yu stalks Nurm, now old and wasted, and kills him instantly, but a wolf pack comes, forcing Ki-Yu to leave. David and his dogs pursue Ki-Yu, who leads them into deep snow and escapes. Dogs and hunter huddle around a campfire before they return home wearily.

The next spring, Ki-Yu kills a dozen of Carl’s chickens. Carl and David go after Ki-Yu, who heads for canyons and cliffs, outmaneuvering men and dogs. Later, David’s dogs come upon Osa, one of Ki-Yu’s females; she goes after Mona, but David shoots her.

The next January, David hunts Ki-Yu but slips on crusted snow and breaks his collar bone. Meanwhile, an old bear and Ki-Yu fight, and both are badly injured. Ki-Yu lies fevered and sick for ten days; David is also very ill. When he recovers, Ki-Yu begins looking for females, but David has killed them all. The panther follows campers to a farm clearing, where he chases cattle, kills chickens, and terrifies people. Eventually, Carl, David, and the dogs track Ki-Yu and find his kill, surrounded by wolf tracks. Wolves pursue Ki-Yu, who, from his last fight, has a crippled leg and one eye put out. Backed against a tree, Ki-Yu fights fiercely, killing several wolves before being killed.

Context

Haig-Brown was born in England but, at the age of seventeen, emigrated to the state of Washington. He worked there as a logger, later becoming a professional hunter, trapper, and guide in the wilderness of British Columbia, where he gained firsthand knowledge of the wildlife of the Pacific Northwest. Returning to London in 1929, he published his first book, then left to marry and settle in British Columbia, where his continuing adventures included a stint in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police during World War II. In his home village of Campbell River, he was a court magistrate and juvenile court judge as well as a farmer, hunter, fisherman, and writer. The subject matter of his writing is always nature in the wild, which he captures in clear, vivid prose. Haig-Brown’s works combine naturalistic detail and poetic descriptions. His books on fishing and the river (A River Never Sleeps, 1946, and Return to the River, 1941) are considered classics in the field.

At the time Panther was first published (as Ki-Yu: A Story of Panthers in 1934), cougars, or panthers, were abundant on Vancouver Island, and there was no thought of them becoming extinct. Even at that time, however, Haig-Brown and many of his fellow outdoorsmen argued against bounty hunting, although in the book, no disapproval is expressed for David Milton. In his preface to the reissue of Panther some forty years later, Haig-Brown tells about the discovery of the valuable place of the cougar in the ecology of the deer and elk—something which hunters such as himself felt intuitively and which subsequent scientific study verified.

According to critic Alec Lucas,

Panther, which is truly North American, seems in part to have been an experiment, since Return to the River (1941), with its sentimentality and its interest in the rights of animals in a man-centered world, turns back some distance to the English tradition. Here Haig-Brown differs from his peers [Charles G. D.] Roberts and [Ernest Thompson] Seton and gives the Canadian animal biography a new direction in that he openly makes his concern for the species and its environment integral to his theme and art.

Reading Haig-Brown’s book perhaps provides the quintessential “seeing” of a cougar in the wild; the reader not only accompanies the animal but also enters into its mind and muscles. It is this naturalistic and unqualified capturing of an experience in the wild that makes Panther a classic for the young reader.