The Last Lion in Pennsylvania

First axe then lightning on a million acres of dry slash: the state’s namesake forests burned & burned. Then flood: with no roots to hold the rains, hillsides slid, rivers raged, cellars filled with ashy gray mud. The last lion in Pennsylvania was starving, bones visible under her hide when they found her at the end of a line of incriminating footprints, near a rocky outcropping called the Pinnacle. The men from the lumber camp afterwards said she had been prowling around, had even stalked one of them the night before. Thomas Anson was the name of the man who shot her there beside what they now call Panther Springs— though she had not. He kept pumping bullets into her crumpled form to make damn sure.