This is a story set back in the early 1980s before people had good flashlights, weapon mounted lights, night vision, etc. Basically most lights, if you had one, went about 20 yards with a yellow dim beam and made more shadows than lights.
Anyway, it begins like this. We ran cows on a fairly large place with a swamp in the back. My father and I went to the back of our place to check a fence around dusk. This particular fence went across a swamp and kept our cows from venturing north onto a neighbor's property. I had been back there many times in the past hunting or just piddling around in the swamp so it wasn't a "mysterious" area.
I was a year out of basic training and my dad was a retired Navy veteran, both of us seasoned outdoorsmen. Growing up we didn't have air conditioning in our small farm house in the rural South and used to sleep with the windows open, so we were aware of the night sounds. We would hear coyotes every night and the occasional panther coming through.
Well, we drove back to the pond, got out of the truck, got our rifles, and started back to check the fence, several hundred yards away. We went down into the swamp, crossed a large (10 foot deep) ditch, and began to make our way through a cane thicket with visibility limited to about 5 or 6 feet. The sun was beginning to set as we made our way through the swamp. We hadn't gone too far into the thicket and were only about 50 yards from the fence, my father leading and me behind him, when from what seemed just an arms length away, a bloodcurdling scream came out of the woods that sounded like a woman being violently killed. We both stopped cold, two grown men with rifles. My father turned and looked at me, his face white from the blood draining away, and said, "I think we should head back to the truck, we can check the fence tomorrow". I was shaken as well and said "yeah, I think so".
We headed back to the truck, not saying another word until we got there as the sun set, when he turned to me and said, "What the hell was that!". I said I have no idea. We got in the truck, left, and drove home.
I've thought about it over the years and think it was a big cat sitting on a kill, and later on found out that my dad thought the same. Since then I have seen a panther twice in that area when hunting, in addition to seeing several large bobcats on game cameras and a friend trapping one that had to have weighed 50+ pounds back around 2009 or 2010.
That was definitely one of the scariest moments of my life, and I've gone to war twice but nothing compares to that moment of that scream, deep in the swamp, in a thicket, with the sun setting and no flashlights
