Oklahoma City Kitty

When the authorities at Oklahoma City's 20-acre Lincoln Park Zoo got the newest addition to their menagerie installed in public view two weeks ago, they experienced a pardonable glow of' civic pride. The newcomer was a full-grown leopard, brought straight from the jungles of India and probably one of the toughest tomcats ever to wind up in stir.

The leopard, however, did not enter into the Oklahoma City community spirit. After twitching his ropelike tail, baring his large yellow teeth and emitting rasping bursts of feline obscenities, he began trying to jump out of the pit in which he had been installed to serve his time. The sheer walls were 18 feet high, and this did him no good at all. But he kept jumping. One day last week he tried a bank shot--he hit one wall at an angle, ricocheted upward toward the next, and got over the top.

He jumped to a wooden fence, strolled delicately along it for a few yards, and then hit for the bushes like Dillinger evading the FBI. By the time Zoo Director Julian Frazier had organized a posse of zookeepers and cops, the leopard had vanished, though not without leaving some large tracks along a stream in the park.

By noon the next day it seemed that half the citizens in town were out on the roads northeast of the city to watch the hunt. A good many, armed to the teeth and accompanied by a rabble of house dogs, joined in the search. The skirmishing took on the look of a Guatemalan revolution. Civil Air Patrol planes flew low. Cops, zookeepers, deputy sheriffs, volunteer gunmen and a detachment of Marine reservists with M-i rifles and walkie-talkie radios scoured the scrub-oak thickets, flushing out rabbits, house cats, and, occasionally, each other.

The leopard (or something that looked like a leopard) was sighted in some bushes by a plane. An hour later it was spotted by a motorist in an open field. Though one hunting party put the torch to 40 acres of brush, the big cat remained at large. That night, one M. D. Douglass swore he saw the fugitive sneaking back into the zoo; attendants hung chunks of drugged meat on nearby fences, but the varmint went unseen and uncaught.

The hunt was intensified. Foxhounds, bloodhounds, and whole packs of beagles, poodles, terriers and collies had failed to follow the leopard's spoor. The publicity-conscious Denver Post got into the act by flying a pack of Colorado cougar dogs to the scene. Wild at this poaching, the Daily Oklahoman immediately sent a special plane to Dryden, Texas, got a pack of hounds guaranteed to have chased pumas in old Mexico. As darkness fell on the third excited day, the leopard was still loose. But according to early information, none of the hunters had yet shot another.

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