The nightmare never has ended yet. The Marines have gone back to base, but something is still savaging the sheep and deer of Exmoor and Dartmoor, though less profligately than before.
The beast has joined the gallery of large and strange cats, dogs, lions, pumas, cheetahs and leopards reported to be running wild in Britain. Nearly 1,000 people now claim to have seen the famous Surrey puma over the last twenty years, and have gone to the trouble of telling their stories to the police. Lions have been seen in Flintshire (now Clwyd), more pumas in Scotland, bears in Hampshire. This is the most pervasive example, in Britain, of the problem which faces the sceptical enquirer into mysteries. Can so many people, apparently intelligent and sane, be entirely mistaken?
The Exmoor beast has some immaculate credentials. Trevor Beer, a local man and a trained naturalist, has seen it five times. Once, at close range, he saw it lope along a hedge before clearing it easily. It was dark coloured, cat-like and about 4 1/2 ft (1.3 m) long. The most distinctive feature was the greenish-yellow eyes. Wayne Adams, aged fourteen, holidaying on Halfcombe Common, was also struck by the eyes: ‘I looked over a gate and saw the animal about ten yards away. It stared straight at me with bulging greeny eyes just like a lion. It was jet black apart from white markings down its head and chest and had a head like an alsatian dog, but it was bigger than any dog we’ve ever seen.’
His companion, Marcus White, aged twelve, said: ‘It moved like a cat but its face was like a dog’s. There was no chance it was a dog. It was miles too big for that. I thought it was a panther.’
Marine John Holton saw something at 5.30 on a May morning. ‘It was very big, all black and looked very powerful. It was crossing a railway line, but there was a farmhouse in the background and it wasn’t safe for me to shoot.’
And so the sightings went on: school bus driver John Franks finds himself following a black beast with powerful legs and shoulders down a country lane; Mrs Doreen Lock sees it cross the road in front of her car, three miles from Drewstone Farm; taxi driver Wayne Hyde catches the beast in his headlights on Silcombe Hill: ‘It had a cunning look in its eyes and very powerful shoulders.’
Game park boss Philip Lashbrook, relying on his experience in the bush in South Africa, offers to track the beast.
The Torrington Foot Beagles, assisted by police with a helicopter, spend all day scouring the moor around Drew-stone. But the beast eludes them all.
The Chairman of the South Molton Farmers’ Union is impressed by the violence of the kills. This thing kills and eats lambs like no dog or fox ever did. It eats wool and all and goes for the chops. It leaves the bone structure of the neck like you would leave a fishbone.’ Another local farmer reports a cow killed, ‘the skull crushed by one incredible snap of the jaws’.
A beast of some description has been seen by reliable witnesses around Exmoor for at least twenty years. Police Constable John Duckworth of Tavistock saw the beast twice and collected eyewitness accounts of many other sightings. The first time he saw the animal was at Coxtorr in October 1969. He and his son had been flying a kite, but had got back into their car to warm up.
Then, about 40 yards in front of them, they saw a strange animal coming towards them. ‘It was about the size of a pony,’ said Constable Duckworth, ‘with a dog’s head and ears, wolfhound head, and a short tail. It was slatish grey, with heavy shoulders and a smooth coat.’ Three years later he was out shooting, also in October, about two and a half miles away from Coxtorr. The same, or a similar creature appeared, loping across some fields about 100 yards away. This time PC Duckworth had some binoculars with him and followed it until it disappeared over a wall.
Sporadic reports of sightings continued until the Great Beast Hunt of 1983. Many described the beast as more cat-than dog-like. Indeed, a landowner from Stoke Gabriel, Mr Kingsley Newman, has seen a black panther-like creature at least five times – once at close quarters behind his house after he had loosed off a shotgun at two creatures in the dark.
One leapt up on to the beam of an uncompleted building. In the light of his torch Mr Newman was reportedly transfixed by the cat’s blazing red eyes. The animal’s coat seemed blue-black and it had a long furry tail which lashed around until the beast leapt away.
One man claimed to have shot a strange animal and buried it because he thought he might have committed some offence. Others have delayed reporting night sightings on the grounds that it might be a provocation to breathalyser custodians. There have been casts taken of awesomely large pug marks. But neither hide nor hair of the beast has fallen into the hands of its pursuers – not even a reasonable photograph. Yet still the farmers of Devon find sheep with their necks crushed, and the readers of the Devon newspapers report their close or distant encounters.
There is no doubt that there are strange animals loose in Britain. There are wallabies in Derbyshire, feral porcupines in Devon, beavers and raccoons, and probably some Arctic foxes. Many animals were released when the 1976 British Animal Act introduced much stricter controls on the keeping of large and dangerous animals. Animal societies believe that at least two black leopards were turned loose at that time. And who would have been believed if they had reported seeing a fully-grown bear on a Hebridean island? Yet Hercules the bear, famous for his television commercials, lived quite happily for two weeks on Benbecula in 1980 after escaping from his owner.
Evidence does turn up. Ted Noble, a farmer at Cannick near Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands, repeatedly, over several months, saw his sheep savaged by what looked like a panther or leopard. His neighbour, Jessie Chisholm, had seen the animal only yards away when her hens suddenly started to clamour. By the hen run was a black cat, bigger than a labrador dog, with a thick tail longer than its body. Then a visitor to Mr Noble’s farm brought in the carcass of a lamb: he said he had seen it dropped by a large cat as it jumped over a deer-proof forestry fence. The head of the lamb had been almost severed and there were deep puncture wounds on both sides of the chest.
Mr Noble and his sister-in-law saw the animal several times, once even stalking one of his Shetland ponies. Finally, spurred by local derision, he constructed a trap. The bait was a sheep’s head hung at the back of a disguised cage. One October morning in 1980 Mr Noble found the trap sprung. Inside was a full-grown female puma. Mr Noble’s losses diminished and the puma went to the Highland Wildlife Park at Kincraig, where she lived happily for another four years. Ever since, there has been the strongest suspicion of a hoax. The puma turned out to be well fed to the point of obesity and positively friendly to humans. Yet who was hoaxing who? And where did the puma come from?
Sightings of puma-like animals have continued in the Highlands, as have rapacious killings of sheep and deer. At Dallas in Moray three very large black cats were shot which appear to be a large mutation of the Scottish wildcat. And in February 1985 another expert witness saw a strange animal in the Highlands. Mr Jimmy Milne is gamekeeper and ghillie on the Wester Elchies estate at Aberlour. Early one morning he saw an animal around 2 1/2 ft (75 cm) tall in a field on the estate. ‘It was a massive beast with a black coat,’ said Mr Milne. ‘I’ve been a gamekeeper here for forty years and I have never seen an animal like it before.’
There are vast areas with neither roads nor tracks in the Scottish Highlands, and some exotic and unexpected sights – eagles that have been trained to hawk against deer by local gamekeepers, sea eagles and polecats illicitly introduced to ancient habitats where they had long been extinct. If there is a place where a wild leopard might subsist, then it is in the great wild tracts and glens to the north and west of the Caledonian Canal.
Least likely site would be the Hackney marshes in the East End of London, yet here, just after Christmas 1980, the police were occupied for three days hunting a wild bear. The story had all the marks of a hoax, reported as it was by a ten-year-old boy, Elliot Sanderson, and his two twelve-year-old friends, Darren Willoughby and Thomas Murray.