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The only trees in this high cleft of mountains are stunted cedars, their branches tough as iron. Our fire is smoky and small. We bend over it, wet to our hides, exhausted from the climb.

The tent is for three, or four with crowding. But we are six–three Russians, three Americans. By mistake, the larger tent has gone ahead with the three men carrying cargo to the place a full day farther on where the stream will be large enough to float our rafts.

I got stuck for a while at the rooming house at No. 15 Gravina Street in Alicante on the southern coast of Spain. On the table beside the bed I counted thirty-five pesetas remaining–about fifty-eight cents–which even in 1960 was no real money at all. I guess I was abut as broke as you can get anywhere without winding up in jail. But, my God, I was living well!

For as long as I have been acquianted there, more than half my life now, people of that country neighborhood have nurtured their idea of the panther.

No one I’ve ever known has actually seen the creature. But nearly everyone has a relative or friend who knows a man–nameless, perhaps, but not to be disbelieved–who only last week met the thing in the lights of his pickup truck on some night lane as it bounded across between two fingers of the woods