mezzacotta Puzzle Competition 2016

Solution: 5A. Shaggy Cat Story

The puzzle presents us with a rambling story in broken English, describing the theft of some lions from a circus or zoo. Two things immediately stand out about it: The extremely stilted nature of the text, and the use of a constant width font for the presentation. Both suggest that the words are being forced into some kind of structure, and it is this structure rather than the words themselves that may be the important thing. Further factors that are suggestive include the unusually many rivers within the text, and the inconsistent use of spaces — sometimes there are extra spaces between words, and sometimes spaces after punctuation are left out entirely.

All of the above are suggestive that the distinction we want is that between whitespace and non-whitespace characters. Stare at the text, play with capital letters, punctuation, and so on, until your eyes glaze over with fatigue, and then notice that when it blurs, the text block seems to form letter-like patterns. Letter-like, but odd. Aha! It's upside-down.

There are also two lines of many shorter words, not aligned with those above or below, that split the remaining text into three neat blocks of seven lines each. Turning the page around, and removing the separating lines (hardly essential, but it makes things easier to see) gives this:

If you still find it difficult to see the hidden letters, then blurring your vision (or the image) may help:

The hidden text reads

USE ALL WORDS
STARTING WITH
SYMBOLS BTCK

Now we get rid of everything in the text that is not a word beginning with one of the letters B, T, C, or K. Viewing them in their original positions just gives a mess, so we extract them and throw away the position information, keeping just their order.

circus barcoded the that Because the big critters things becoming the big Keepers the temp Through the big circuses the big trainer the cat but the Then took cover case cat thieves came the the but covers transmit bulletins these confused confused breaks captured could twins the big check check this the through crim big cat but claim beast the card This claim that the training big cat big cat cadre track the cats this trade kill the captured the big cat can

That text stream is not obviously provocative, but following the idea of the puzzle it should occur to us to format the text into a suitable block and look for letters again. Since the initial message used seven rows for the letters, we could guess that we want to divide this text into seven rows. Alternatively, we could paste the text into a windowed editor (with a constant width font) and reduce the width of the window until the lines flow nicely. Either approach should reveal that with seven lines we get a neat block of text:

circus barcoded the that Because the big critters things becoming
the big Keepers the temp Through the big circuses the big trainer
the cat but the Then took cover case cat thieves came the the but
covers transmit bulletins these confused confused breaks captured
could twins the big check check this the through crim big cat but
claim beast the card This claim that the training big cat big cat
cadre track the cats this trade kill the captured the big cat can

Squinting at this text reveals letters once more (the right way up this time) that spell out the answer to this puzzle: PANTHERA, the lion's genus.