Every one who has hunted in the “Seven Brothers’”, as the Seven Mountains are called in Central Pennsylvania, has heard of Daniel Karstetter, the famous Nimrod. The Seven Mountains comprise the Path Valley, Short Bald, Thick Head, Sand, Shade and Tussey Mountains. Though three-quarters of a century has passed since he was in his hey-day as a slayer of big game, his fame is undiminished. Anecdotes of his prowess are related in every hunting camp; by one and all he has been acclaimed the greatest hunter that the Seven Brothers ever produced.

The great Nimrod, who lived to a very advanced age, was born in 1818 on the banks of Pine Creek, a: the Blue Rock, half a mile below the present town of Coburn. In addition to his hunting prowess, he was interested in psychic experiences, and was as prone to discuss his adventures with supernatural agencies as his conflicts with the wild denizens of the forests. There was a particular ghost story which he loved dearly to relate.

Accompanied by his younger brother Jacob, he had been attending a dance one night across the mountains, in the environs of the town of Milroy, for like all the backwoods boys of his time, he was adept in the art of terpsichore. The long journey was made on horseback, the lads being mounted on stout Conestoga chargers.

The homeward ride was commenced after midnight, the two brothers riding along the dark trail in single file. In the wide flat on the top of the “Big Mountain” Daniel fell into a doze. When he awoke, his mount having stumbled on a stone, Jacob was nowhere to be seen. Thinking that his brother had put his horse to trot and gone on ahead, Daniel dismissed the matter of his absence from his mind.

As he was riding down the steep slope of the mountain, he noticed a horseman waiting for him on the path. When they came abreast the other rider fell in beside him, skillfully guiding his horse so that it did not encounterencounter the dense foliage which lined the narrow way. Daniel supposed the party to be his brother, although the unknown kept his lynx-skin collar turned up, and his felt cap was pulled down level with his eyes. It was pitchy dark, so to make sure, Daniel called out:

“Is that you, Jacob?”

His companion did not reply, so the young man repeated his query in still louder tones, but all he heard was the crunching of the horses’ hoofs on the pebbly road.

Daniel Karstetter, master slayer of panthers, bears and wolves, was no coward, though on this occasion he felt uneasy. Yet he disliked picking a quarrel with the silent man at his side, who clearly was not his brother, and he feared to put his horse to a gallop on the steep, uneven roadway. The trip home never before seemed of such interminable length. For the greater part of the distance Daniel made no attempt to converse with his unsociable comrade. Finally, he heaved a sigh of relief when he saw a light gleaming in the horse stable at the home farm. When he reached the barnyard gate he dismounted to let down the bars, while the stranger apparently vanished in the gloom.

Daniel led his mount to the horse stable, where he found his brother Jacob sitting by the old tin lantern, fast asleep. He awakened him and asked him when he had gotten home. Jacob stated that his horse had been feeling good, so he let him canter all the way. He had been sleeping, but judged that he had been home at least half an hour. He had met no horseman on the road.

Daniel was convinced that his companion had been a ghost, or, as they are called in the “Seven Brothers,” a gshpook. But he made no further comment that night.

A year afterwards, in coming back alone from a dance in Stone Valley, he was again joined by the silent horseman, who followed him to his barnyard gate. He gave up going to dances on that account. At least once a year, or as long as he was able to go out at night, he met the ghostly rider. Sometimes, when tramping along on foot after a hunt, or, in later years, coming back from market at Bellefonte in his Jenny Lind, he would find the silent horseman at his side. After the first experience, he never attempted to speak to the night rider, but he became convinced that it meant him no harm.

As his prowess as a hunter became recognized, he had many jealous rivals among the less successful Nimrods. In those old days threats of all kinds were freely made. He heard on several occasions that certain hunters were setting out to “fix” him. But a man who could wrestle with panthers and bears knew no such thing as fear.

One night, while tramping along in Green’s Valley, he was startled by some one in the path ahead of him shouting out in Pennsylvania German, “Hands up!” He was on the point of dropping his rifle, when he heard the rattle of hoof beats back of him. The silent horseman in an instant was by his side, the dark horse pawing the earth with his giant hoofs. There was a crackling of brush in the path ahead, and no more threats of hend uff.

The ghostly rider followed Daniel to his barn yard gate, but was gone before he could utter a word of thanks. As the result of this adventure, he became imbued with the idea that he possessed a charmed life. It gave him added courage in his many encounters with panthers, the fierce red bears and lynxes.

Apart from his love of hunting the more dangerous animals, Daniel enjoyed the sport of deer-stalking. He maintained several licks, one of them in a patch of low ground over the hill from the entrance to the “dry” part of Penn’s Cave. At this spot he constructed a blind, or platform, between the two ancient tupelo trees, about twenty feet from the ground, and many were the huge white-faced stags which fell to his unerring bullets during the rutting season.

One cold night, according to an anecdote frequently related by one of his descendants, while perched in his eyrie overlooking the natural clearing which constituted the lick, and in sight of a path frequented by the fiercer beasts, which led to the opening of the “dry” cave, he saw, about midnight, a huge pantheress, followed by a large male of the same species, come out into the open.

“The pantheress strolled from the path,” so the story went, "and came and laid herself down at the roots of the tupelo trees, while the panther remained in the path, and seemed to be listening to some noise as yet inaudible to the hunter.

"Daniel soon heard a distant roaring; it seemed to come from the very summit of the Brush Mountain, and immediately the pantheress answered it. The the panther on the path, his jealousy aroused, commenced to roar with a voice so loud that the frightened hunter almost let go his trusty rifle and held tighter to the railing of his blind, lest he might tumble to the earth. As the voice of the animal that he had heard in the distance gradually approached, the pantheress welcomed him with renewed roarings, and the panther, restless, went and came from the path to his flirtatious flame, as though he wished her to keep silence, as though to say, ‘Let him come if he dares; he will find his match’.

"In about an hour a panther, with mouse-color, or grey coat, stepped out of the forest, and stood in the full moonlight on the other side of the cleared place, the moonbeams illuminating his form with a glow like phosphorescence. The pantheress, eyeing him with admiration, raised herself to go to him, but the panther, divining her intent, rushed before her and marched right at his adversary. With measured step and slow, they approached to within a dozen paces of each other, their smooth, round heads high in the air, their bulging yellow eyes gleaming, their long, tufted tails slowly sweeping down the brittle asters that grew about them. They crouched to the earth–a moment’s pause–and then they bounded with a hellish scream high in the air and rolled on the ground, locked in their last embrace.

"The battle was long and fearful, to the amazed and spellbound witness of this midnight duel. Even if he had so wished, he could not have taken steady enough aim to fire. But he preferred to watch the combat, while the moonlight lasted. The bones of the two combatants cracked under their powerful jaws, their talons painted the frosty ground with blood, and their outcries, now gutteralgutteral, now sharp and loud, told their rage and agony.

"At the beginning of the contest the pantheress crouched herself on her belly, with her eyes fixed upon the gladiators, and all the while the battle raged, manifested by the slow, catlike motion of her tail, the pleasure she felt at the spectacle. When the scene closed, and all was quiet and silent and deathlike on the lick, and the moon had commenced to wane, she cautiously approached the battle-groundbattle-ground and, sniffing the lifeless bodies of her two lovers, walked leisurely to a nearby oak, where she stood on her hind feet, sharpening her fore claws on the bark.

"She glared up ferociously at the hunter in the blind, as if she meant to vent her anger by climbing after him. In the moonlight her golden eyes appeared so terrifying that Daniel dropped his rifle, and it fell to the earth with a sickening thud. As he reached after it, the flimsy railing gave way and he fell, literally into the arms of the pantheress. At that moment the rumble of horses’ hoofs, like thunder on some distant mountain, was heard. Just as the panther was about to rend the helpless Nimrod to bits, the unknown rider came into view. Scowling at the intruder, mounted on his huge black horse, the brute abandoned its prey and ambled off up the hill in the direction of the dry cave.

"Daniel seized his firearm and sent a bullet after her retreating form, but it apparently went wild of its mark. Meanwhile, before he had time to express his gratitude to the strange deliverer, he had vanished.

"Daniel was dumbfounded. As soon as he had recovered from the blood-curdling episodes, he builthe built a small fire near the mammoth carcasses, where he warmed his much benumbed hands. Then he examined the dead panthers, but found that their hides were too badly torn to warrant skinning.

"Disgusted at not getting his deer, and being even cheated out of the panther pelts, he dragged the ghastly remains of the erstwhile kings of the forest by their tails to the edge of the entrance to the dry cave. There he cut off the long ears in order to collect the bounty, and then shoved the carcasses into the opening. They fell with sickening thuds into the chamber beneath, to the evident horror of the pantheress, which uttered a couple of piercing screams as the horrid remnants of the recent battle royal landed in her vicinity.

“Then Jacob shouldered his rifle and started out in search of small game for breakfast. That night he went to another of his licks on Elk Creek, near Fulmer’s Sink, where he killed four superb stags,” so the story concludes.

But to his dying day he always placed the battle of the panthers first of all his hunting adventures. And his faith in the unknown horseman as his deliverer and good genius became the absorbing, all-pervading influence of his life.