`Black Panther' Sightings Mystify Game Authorities

DAVENPORT, Lincoln County - Overgrown alley cats? Mutant cougars? Weird-looking dogs? Pet panthers that got loose?

Those are some of the theories being considered amid more than a half-dozen reports of large black cats lurking near Lincoln Memorial Hospital.

The two most recent sightings were about a week ago, said Curt Wood, state game officer for Lincoln County.

"What we're hoping is that somebody will get a picture of one of them so we can figure out what we're dealing with," Wood said.

Initially, the reports were the butt of jokes, like one about doctors at the hospital testing experimental drugs. But the game agent and Police Chief Charlie Varain know some of the witnesses personally and believe too many of the reports are credible to be dismissed out of hand.

"I guess somebody is seeing something," Varain said, "but what is it?"

Karen Lyle, a fourth-grade teacher at Davenport Elementary, said she saw a big cat about 150 feet away in a brushy field shortly after dawn Sept. 17. Through binoculars out her back window, it resembled some of the exotic cats a private zoo brought to the school several years ago, she said.

She said the animal stood 2 to 3 feet at the shoulders with a tail about 3 feet long and acted like a cat, rubbing its face on a rock and prowling as though hunting.

"It looked like a bobcat-lynx-cross kind of a face," she said. "It had an extremely long tail."

In the first report, on a sunny day about 2 1/2 weeks ago, Tim Honey said he saw two black cougar-like cats in the weeds behind the hospital on the outskirts of this Eastern Washington wheat-farming town.

One was about 3 feet tall, stood on a rock about 100 feet away and ran "lightning fast," Honey said.

Cougars, which are native to the region, rarely have dark fur, Wood said.

"It would be a miracle to have two black cougars," he said. "I would tend to lean toward the exotic-pet theory."

The creatures are always gone by the time Varain and Wood show up, leaving no tracks to follow. Moreover, the weather has been too warm for any scent to last long enough to bring in tracking dogs.

"Things don't really make sense," Wood said. "If it was a large predator like that, we should be seeing dead animals, carcasses and missing pets and things like that."