The Florida panther is the only mountain lion found east of the Mississippi River. The big cats used to roam all over the Southeast, but no more. It wasn t so long ago when a lot of people thought Florida had none left. They were very nearly right. That the panther still exists at all is a miracle – the result of a desperate experiment that led to the most remarkable comeback in the history of the Endangered Species Act. And no one has told the whole story – until now. With novelistic detail and an eye for the absurd, Craig Pittman recounts the extraordinary story of the people who brought the panther back from the brink of extinction, the ones who nearly pushed it over the edge, and the cats that were caught in the middle.  This being Florida, there’s more than a little weirdness, too. Florida s version of Bigfoot, the fabled Skunk Ape, makes an appearance. So does a former alligator wrestler who killed a panther and ate its heart, and a bumbling