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In my misspent youth, I once worked a few years for the TN Dept of Corrections. One day I got to talking to an old inmate and noticed how he had a bunch of long scars down his arms and across his chest and asked about them.
He told me that when he was a young teen, he and his daddy were squirrel humting up on the Cumberland Plateau. As they were walking along, his pa stopped and pointed up into a tree. Laying along a branch was a full grown wildcat(bobcat). The inmate told me that he quickly raised up his .22 and shot the bobcat off the limb and then ran over to where it fell on the ground. His daddy was yelling to him to stop, but he said that he was too excited to listen to him and just dropped his rifle and picked the cat up with his hands around the critters chest. He said that he was looking at the cat's face when, the cat, which apperently was only stunned, opened it's eyes.
He told me that the cat tried to go one way and he tried to go the other, the problem being that they were in each others way to get there.
The scars were so wide because there wasn't any doctor around and they couldn't afford one anyway, his mother just doctored him up with poutices until he was healed.
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