Now that it was late May, she was glad for the extra hours of daylight. A wildlife biologist for Florida's Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission, Maren was the newest member of a team that studied the movements of the Florida panther. It had been a long day, with no sign of a panther.

She sat down to rest for a minute on a patch of exposed limestone. About half an hour ago she had taken shelter under a palmetto bush. Andy Carr, the team leader, had taken a shortcut back to the old logging road where they had left their trucks just before it rained. He had to put the final touches on a grant application due the next day. In order to cover as much ground as possible Maren had taken another route back to the trucks.

Maren watched an ant carrying something dark in its mouth. In the lengthening shadows, her eyes picked up dark spots in the rain-spotted, sandy ground just ahead. "It looks like tracks!” she whispered out loud. She walked forward and examined the first print. “These must have been made since the rain,” she thought. They were the first panther tracks she had seen in several days of searching for panthers in the Big Cypress!

She got up and carefully followed the paw prints for several meters. It was a single set of prints, with no claw marks showing. That is, until she got to the next palmetto bush. "Oh my!" she gasped.