7

All creatures great and human

Faithful animals like Socket play such an important part in the lives of farmers, they can hardly wait to see them again if they’ve been apart for any reason. On the other hand, farmers get to see beasts they wish they’d never seen.

Basil the sharemilker had heard of Bigfoot and Sasquatch, the yeti and the abominable snowman. He reminded himself that New Zealand was free of large predators – unless something had escaped from the zoo or circus. Yet the creature coming through the long grass towards him looked like no other steer, deer, wild pig or rogue dog he had seen. Besides, those critters walked on four legs. This apparition, admittedly a blur in the distance, seemed to be walking upright, although from time to time, as it bustled through the hay paddock, it returned to a four-legged stance.

The fog swirled low, which didn’t help. Identification of the advancing beast wasn’t easy. All Basil could ascertain was that he was the size of your average man, jet-black in colour with a coat that covered his hooves and nether regions. Shaggy plumage sprouted over most of his face save for an inch or two that revealed a bare white strip and remarkably close-set eyes. A long, flowing mane tumbled down his back and obscured what he presumed to be ears.

Early milking had just finished and the wintery pre-dawn light was as confounded a nuisance as the fog. It was the most unusual beast Basil had ever seen. Was it a mutant? A cross between something and something else? As it got closer it could be heard making strange, guttural sounds that led Basil to conclude that there were elements of wolf, albeit with laryngitis, in the DNA.

By now Basil had collected his .22 and the gun was cocked. He didn’t want the cows disturbed. Nor did he want to die. The fog rose, the beast reared up on his hind feet, little more than 20 metres away, and yelled out, ‘G’day Basil, it’s me, Kevin,’ before collapsing on all fours again. Basil figured he might be going mad. All those early morning milkings, the late milkings. Mortgage worries. Had the beast actually talked to him?

It was indeed Kevin, the son of the farm’s owner, on his way home. Kevin was not a wild creature or a marauding predator, just your average university student of the late 1960s, complete with long black duffel coat, bristling black beard and long dark hair. He was as hirsute a human being as Basil, of the short-back-and-sides generation, had ever seen.

‘Why didn’t you identify yourself?’ Basil chastised. ‘I could have shot you.’

‘Didn’t you hear me yelling out halfway up the hill?’

You could tell why Kevin alternated between a quadruped and a two-legged approach. The bottle of whiskey wedged in his duffle coat pocket was almost spent. By now he could barely crawl. Kevin had hitchhiked down from Auckland overnight with a truck driver, after spending most of the previous day trying to thumb a ride out of the central city. No one stopped. Kevin, a big lumberer, looked like the wild man of Borneo or a grizzly bear, neither a good look for a hitchhiker.

While it could be said that hairy university students were about as popular as marauding big cats back in Central Hawke’s Bay in the 1960s, no one wanted to shoot them, as such, even though they were often perceived to be time-wasters, enjoying one long capping week booze-up at the tax-payers’ expense. But no one wanted to shoot them. Not really.

It’s a good thing Basil wasn’t operating in the twenty-first century when reports of a big black cat came out of Mid-Canterbury. Several sightings over the years were lodged. Indeed a photo of the mystery beast was exhibited for all the world to see. Or not to see. Reality is in the eye of the beholder. Nowadays Basil, aware of stories of the Canterbury big cat, might have pulled the trigger, even if he was in Central Hawke’s Bay.

The snap taken by a local showed a black feline of some description crouching in the long grass near Lake Clearwater. Was it just a large feral moggy? Its size was hard to gauge. It certainly wasn’t a drunken, hirsute university student in a long black duffle coat. It would surely not respond to the name Kevin.

A Department of Conservation officer revealed that feral cats were a problem in the area because they posed a threat to native species. Rabbits were a favourite meal but the cats were adaptable enough to snack on other wildlife – including crickets. That was all very well, but if there was a black panther on the prowl, it would more likely go for cricketers and other sportsmen who made themselves vulnerable by playing in wide open clearings – cricket ovals, golf courses and the like.

Indeed golfers at the Mayfield Golf Club in Mid-Canterbury got a surprise when, upon scanning the fairway of the fourth hole they saw what could have been a black panther lurking in the surrounding trees. Reports of the panther sightings had circulated freely on the well-oiled rural grapevines. The nineteenth hole at golf courses, where the less than sobering properties of draught beer led to good-natured posturing and speculation, saw the story grow wings – and legs. Raconteurs, craving the limelight, expanded the myth – if it had ever been one.

More serious types considered that it might be fact. Why would anyone make up a story like that? Mind you, cagier citizens kept such thoughts to themselves. They were loath to be numbered amongst the cranks peddling such nonsense, or to be seen adding credibility to what was an elaborate hoax. An Ashburton retailer was a case in point. He claimed to have seen the animal some months prior to recent sightings, but considered it inappropriate to report his findings then on the grounds that no one would believe him.

So when he did make his revelation, what made him think he would be believed? Despite new ‘sightings’, the guffawing golfers at the nineteenth hole and the cricketers having a beer back in the pavilion still saw the situation as a classic hoax. Perhaps that was why the golfers at the fourth hole of the Mayfield Golf Club showed little fear as they approached the black panther in the trees. As ‘Tiger’ Woods jokes flew, they investigated a wooden cut-out the shape and colour of a panther. It looked realistic enough from a distance, but who was going to admit to a touch of apprehension because of that?

The panther cut-out bolstered the beliefs of the doubting Thomases, yet many still held fast to the notion that there was something out there in the Mid-Canterbury foothills. There had been too many sightings over the years, by level-headed farmers and men of the land. And their stories and descriptions agreed: a large black feline animal, yay wide, with a distinctive long tail.

The first sighting occurred in 2001 near Alford Forest. Some months later a stock-truck driver, a member of a sober occupational group, reported a sighting on a Mayfield farm. In 2003 the big cat was seen lurking around the PPCS meat works at Fairton, up the road from Ashburton. Obviously the big cat was no vegetarian. Nor was it a dog, although it was the size of a Labrador. The man who saw it at Fairton was out walking his dog, so he would know what wasn’t a dog when he didn’t see one. The distinctive long tail was in evidence. The witness was regarded as reliable.

Then the Ashburton retailer made his sighting. Who could be more down-to-earth than an Ashburton retailer? When he said he saw the mystery beast near Blowing Point Bridge on the Ashburton Gorge Road between Mount Somers and the Lake Clearwater settlement, you had to believe that he had seen something.

Could it have been one of those goths, young men dressed entirely in black, their long hair dyed black and often favouring black balaclavas, crawling through the hinterland after a bad drugs experience? No, said the big cat believers. It was definitely feline and definitely enormous.

Enormous is a hard word to quantify. An enormous cricket would still be small, set against a small cricketer. Rumours can get enormous too. Around this time reports that the big cat had escaped from a circus or zoo did the rounds, although no one seemed to think it might be useful to check with zoos or circuses for AWOL beasts.

Prior to the Mid-Canterbury sightings there had been reports of a big cat lurking in various places: near Invercargill, the Lindis Pass, somewhere near Moeraki, out the back of Banks Peninsula. One of the reports was lodged by a couple of British tourists, a fact which played into the hands of doubters. At about the same time Britain had been plagued by a frenzy of big-cat sightings, far beyond rational bounds. In 2001 alone there had been over 400 sightings of big cats across the width and breadth of the United Kingdom.

Closer to home and in true Kiwi fashion, the tiny rural hamlet of Mayfield became the epicentre of the conundrum. All panther-related roads and trails now led to Mayfield. There’s not a lot at Mayfield, Mid-Canterbury. A few hundred people, a shop, tavern, garage, transport company and rural supply store. Not everyone would know how to get there, if you needed to.

It’s about four miles south-west of Valetta, which itself is even more obscure; roughly 10 miles south-east of Mount Somers; going on 15 miles north-west of Hinds (not quite as obscure as Valetta); and approximately 20 miles from Ashburton. In 1952 the New Zealand Guide revealed that tennis was played at Mayfield. No talk of golf back then, so the Mayfield golf course must have evolved in the subsequent 60 years.

Mayfield latched onto the 1990s belief that, after the downturn in the rural economy, rural communities of its kind needed to sell themselves. The idea was to rebrand the place in such a way that people – both tourists and prospective residents – would want to seek it out. The post office closed in the 1980s, a warning sign. Stagnation could lead to strangulation. So renewed efforts were put into the Mayfield A&P show to the extent that the annual event is now regarded as a highlight on the South Island culture buff’s tourist circuit. Activities such as pig and ostrich racing and lawnmower polo have become famous. And of course the panther sightings have not been kept under wraps. The local Mayfield Tavern has changed its name to ‘Panther’s Rock’, based purely on reputed sightings.

Another reputed sighting was that of American actor Tom Cruise who, rumour has it, bought an ice cream from the Mayfield Dairy while travelling around the South Island during time off from filming The Last Samurai. In the Panther’s Rock you can see the ice cream stick reverently mounted in a dedicated cabinet. Which raises another conundrum. Did Tom Cruise donate the stick, or had he flicked it wantonly onto the pavement like any common litterer, not wishing to be identified? And has anyone made the link between Tom Cruise and the panther?

Tom Cruise is not a big man. He is more panther-size. He wears dark polo shirts – or has been known to – and baseball caps, sometimes dark in colour, which could obscure facial features. In one of his movies, War of the Worlds, he spent a lot of time crawling around, avoiding being zapped by hideous alien tripods, muddied, prowling, looking for all the world like a panther. Could it be that Cruise was making another movie in secrecy? War of the Worlds II? Or even The Panther of Mayfield? After all, the secrecy surrounding the filming and locations of the Hobbit movies was hard to crack.

‘Get real,’ doubting Thomases guffawed. And yet, such has been the sincerity of the reports of sightings that the seed of doubt has been planted. In fact the myth has continued to sprout, long after Kevin of Central Hawke’s Bay had had a shave and haircut and swapped his duffel coat for a corporate suit. At least he can be eliminated as a suspect.

Black panthers are intelligent beasts and it would be nice to think that the Mid-Canterbury panther has the wit to realise that most humans are not out to do him in. Still, it’s probably best to expect the worst if a black panther confronts you on the trail, on the fourth fairway at Mayfield or outside the Mayfield pub.

And yet there was Shrek, who wouldn’t have harmed a fly. The story of the independent merino wether that survived for five years in a cave on Bendigo Station in Central Otago captured the imagination. When he was finally flushed out, having escaped the annual muster for so many years, he was wool blind and weighed down by the weight of a massive fleece.

Mind you, there’s a distinct difference between a merino and a black panther, and Shrek went on to become a Kiwi icon, a fundraiser for Cure Kids, the charity that supports research into childhood diseases. He was a very together wether. Public appearances and one-offs such as being shorn on an iceberg didn’t faze him. His five years of isolation had produced a remarkably laid-back, contemplative creature, with a strong sense of self.

What was more remarkable was the way Shrek had survived in all weathers, his existence quite unknown, for all that time. Panther proponents were heartened. If Shrek could survive in the wilds like that, why not a black panther? Or the slithering rattlesnake reputed to be living near the Molesworth Road in Marlborough. Or the large saltwater crocodile doubling as a floating log in Golden Bay. Or the pack of wolves menacing stock somewhere in Central Hawke’s Bay. Sometimes it was easier on the nerves to contemplate and dismiss the more outlandish claims, rather than dwell on black panther possibilities.

Like the thirty-foot giraffe seen stripping the forests of Fiordland. If you looked hard enough you might just see the lost tribe too. And a UFO, having landed on Lake Te Anau, being swallowed whole by the local equivalent of the Loch Ness monster.