CREATIVE EDITION: Exponent Unsolved: Hunting the Wildcat of Wildcat Creek

The following is a piece from the Exponent's Creative Edition, the last print edition of the semester in which we publish creative or satirical articles, photos and artwork from our own staff. The contents of this piece should not be taken seriously.

An icy chill blew through much of the Greater Lafayette area last Tuesday. The next day, the sister cities would be covered in a thin layer of frost and snow, and as the evening creeped into the day, the chill got deeper and deeper.
Though few in the area saw it, a creek on the outer bend of Lafayette began freezing over.

The whispers in the wind of the Wildcat Creek tell a tale of a beast, both obvious and hidden to the Greater Lafayette area. The namesake of the stream has no apparent presence in the history of the land, but if there is no Wildcat, where does the name stem from?

A red Toyota Prius drives around a bend covered by trees and moves around a semi-circle gravel parking lot. The rocks held a shimmer of frost on the tops of their edges. The surrounding forest was thick, pines and spruces casting an immense and dark veil.

If something lurked in the forest, the veil had to be broken.

Three sat in the car: the City Editor, Copy Chief and a graphics artist of the Exponent. All held little in common but one detail — a pursuit to expose the truth of the Wildcat Creek.

The history of Wildcat Creek

Though Wildcat Creek is a park now open to the public and tended to by local residents and home to an allegedly fictional beast, it is important to acknowledge the land holds the dark memory of the original inhabitants of the land being ripped away from their homes.

The Wea and Shawnee tribes were the original habitants of the creek, according to a website run by the Wildcat Guardians, a group of volunteers who dedicate their time to “(improve) the health and beauty of Wildcat Creek.”

The Shawnee defended their land from American and British forces, the website said. One of the more famous scenes of combat alongside the Wildcat was the second Battle of Tippecanoe.

Following the War of 1812, the website said the Shawnee sold their land to the United States and were forced west, according to the website. Following the Shawnee removal, Wildcat-area now became a part of the “Big Reserve,” an area of land held by both the Wea and Miami tribes.

Those tribes would also be forced West following President Andrew Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act, specifically in the 1832 Treaty of Tippecanoe. Eventually, the remaining land of the “Big Reserve” controlled by Native Americans and constituted much of Indiana, would eventually be ceded to White settlers.

The quiet creek

The drive to Wildcat Creek was one of immense elevation (for Indiana) and steep drop offs. Though Lafayette is one of the more heavily wooded parts of Indiana, the forest engulfed the car in shadow as the sun sat half-swallowed on the horizon.

We joked amongst ourselves the closer we got but we couldn’t help but feel a little uneasy as daylight became sparse and shadows stretched longer. When we exited the car, the sky’s darkening blue peeked through trees now cast entirely black.

Scarier than the darkness was the silence.

The wind, once fierce, stood still and the trees refused to rustle. The only noise was our voices, and even the most inane utterance echoed into the woods.

I was once told that it’s only when the forest is silent that you know there’s a predator nearby. If that saying is true, we were in the right place.

A wooden sign stood upright in front of our vehicle, the words “WILDCAT CREEK” etched and painted yellow welcoming our investigation. Nightfall was soon to come and if we wanted to take advantage of available light, we had to act quickly.

Behind the Prius was a restroom which the Copy Chief, Cooper Thelen, immediately made use of. The building was made of wood and painted in what looked like a light blue. It was the only structure on the property.

Once Thelen returned, we made our way past the sign and began the search for the Wildcat, or it began its hunt for us.

Ancient writings

Investigators stand on a plateau and try to look out at the creek. With the sky growing ever darker, it was almost impossible to see anything.

The sky, which was pale just moments ago, shifted to an increasingly darker shade of navy. The temperature, a biting 25 degrees, turned our hands raw and into the color of a tomato. Night was near and the longer we were out here, the deeper toll it would take on our bodies.

Immediately past the sign was a wooden plateau facing the creek. The structure held a bench but scant else. What the plateau did have, however, were etchings from an unknown decade.

Most of the etchings were that of names, or two names with a “+” between the two and a heart around it. Whatever those etchings meant, both Thomas and I couldn’t solve.

The word that did catch us off guard, however, was “CLEOPATRA.”

Cleopatra, the once Queen of Egypt, marked a potential disturbing shift in the nature of the investigation. If these words were any indication to the type of beast lurking throughout Wildcat Creek, the Wildcat of Wildcat Creek may be an Egyptian god.

There are several feline Gods in Egyptian mythology, but the one that bares the most similarity to the Wildcat is Mafdet or Sekhmet.

Mafdet, according to the Iseum Sanctuary, is the goddess of judicial power, including capital punishment.

“Mafdet was believed to rip out the hearts of evildoers and lay the hearts at the Pharaoh’s feet in the same manner a cat delivers her catch to her owners,” the website reads.

Where Mafdet may be cruel but just, Sekhmet sits on the other side of her aisle. Sekhmet, according to Britannica, is the goddess of war and destroyer of enemies. She is known as the “Eye of Ra,” the God of the sun.

With the stakes raised to a mythological level and unable to find further clues, we left the plateau and hiked down a small path. Bushes reaching our torsos, we pushed through the brush and ultimately made it to our ultimate destination.

The brook

The navy was turning shades of black. As we made our way through the overgrowth, one star held in the freshly minted dark sky. We were forced to rely on a flashlight that had a tendency to flicker at inconvenient moments.

Once we made it onto the shore of Wildcat Creek, we were met by the sound of our shoes on crunchy sand. With the ever-dropping temperatures and the snow days prior, the sand stuck together and felt more like dirt. The closer we got to the water, the more soft the sand became.

On our way down to the creek, we noticed that we weren’t the only things that have been here lately.

The first track we found was a shoeprint, not an altogether shocking revelation but one that had a twinge of intrigue. Why in the world would anybody be in the area? Especially given recent weather.

But it’s only after we saw the imprint from the shoe that we noticed the all the more disturbing track.

A pawprint.

It could have been anything. We are in the middle of a forest after all, but the shape of the indentation truly just screamed “cat” all over it. We followed the tracks until we lost it going into the forest. We didn’t know it yet, but it wouldn’t be the last time we would see mysterious feline-like pawprints.

We made our way up the creek and looked for anything out of the ordinary, but little extravagant detail would be found for some time.

The creek was close to entirely freezing over. The ice near the shore was weak but deeper into the creek, the ice was thick and held snow atop it. Near the end of the shore, before the shore turned into grassland and forest, the faint sound of a barely babbling brook quietly reverberated amongst the shoreline. Closer to it, the small risings of water brushing along the tops of small, smooth rocks warbled besides the thick blocks of ice at the deeper sides of the water.

Reaching closer to the babbling, black soot began to lay at our feet. We looked down and found the remnants of a man-made fire. There were a few, small wooden limbs charred black and grey and the source of the fire, a black rope attached to a wooden tool, lie on the beach, but the strange detail were the vast amount of black wooden chips that littered the sand.

What were these chips? How did they get there? How were they used for this fire?

It’s only after the investigation that a connection became clear between the sign of a fire and the Egyptian deities from earlier.

The God we were likely to be dealing with, after seeing the sight of what could have been an effigy or visage to the mythological feline, was Sekhmet… the Egyptian Goddess of war.

Sekhmet is the Eye of Ra, God of the Sun, and what is the sun if not fire?
We turned to go back to the trail that got us down to the creek, any amount of sunlight vanished. The once lone star was surrounded by their friends and night had crept upon us. But we weren’t done just yet.

With the Sun gone, Ra would need an eye to see through the night. All we could hope for is that eye wouldn’t be fixed on us.

Icy tracks

Through the darkness, we made our way to what we could identify as the only other trail at Wildcat Creek Park. And calling it a trail would be generous. A petroleum pipeline ran through the creek and in doing so, a new, perhaps inadvertent trail, came with it.

We couldn’t see the end of the petroleum pipeline cut out. The forest, which once surrounded the area, now stood dozens of feet apart for the underground pipeline. An orange petroleum meter stuck out of the ground, but we continued.

We took a left down the empty swath of land towards the creek when we discovered an eroded drop off to the creek. There, a knocked over tree dipped over onto its side from the top of where we were standing down into Wildcat Creek.

We scaled down the dip and gazed once into the Wildcat once more. The ice truly wasn’t very thick. Thelen played with the strength of the ice and ultimately proved that it couldn’t hold his weight.

But the ice did hold something not that long ago, evident through a strangle path of tracks just a few feet in front of us.

In the snow-crested ice, an oval-shaped displacement of snow had two tracks leading to and away from it.

And the tracks, similar to that on the beach, bore the stark similarity of cat-tracks.
A lot of on-the-fly conspiracies sparked between the investigators. Could it have been a fight? Could the Wildcat have found a mate?

But looking at it closely, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of signs of two Wildcats, rather one that may cross the lake to lay down near the petroleum pipeline clearing.

But why that spot? Did it rely on petroleum for sustenance? Why did it cross the ice at all?

Questions that would ultimately, and unfortunately, remain unanswered.

Empty handed, once more

For the last three investigations from the Exponent Unsolved desk, we have each time left without definitively proving the existence of that which we were hunting.
Kennedi, the ghost that haunts Windsor Hall, never made herself clear to us, only communicating through a flickering chandelier.

The Yeti of the Wabash, as depicted on the mural outside of State Street McDonalds, would remain only visible through the artist’s depiction.

And as night covered Wildcat Creek, it seemed that the beast hiding in the forest would be no different.

As the crew packed up from the search for the beast, making one last lap around the space to see if they missed anything, the icy chill from the weather pushed them away to make a quick escape.

No one could deny that the investigation, though it didn’t yield the results they may have wanted, was wild. Cat.

About Exponent Unsolved
Exponent Unsolved is the newest desk at the Purdue Exponent, organized by graphics artist Kennedi Thomas and City Editor Wil Courtney. Exponent Unsolved is on the front lines of reporting the strange, mysterious and most importantly, unsolved happenings on and off campus. For the investigation of the Wildcat of Wildcat Creek, Exponent Unsolved was joined by Copy Chief Cooper Thelen.