A thick envelope sat on my desk when I arrived at work. The paste-on return address told me it had been sent by Kim Richter of Heath, color photo of a cougar on the left. “Uh-oh,” I thought, “here we go again.” The mail, electronic and snail, seems to flow hard every time I write about cougar sightings, be they close or faraway.

For those who missed it, the cougar I wrote about last week was in the east-central New Hampshire town of Barnstead, where someone saw a “mountain lion.” When a state wildlife official responded to the scene, he also saw it or another big cat with his own two eyes. Of course, a New Hampshire Fish & Game Department bigwig immediately doused the story with enough cold water to drown the big-cat, never mind the tale.

Imagine that. Stunning.

Ms. Richter, herself one of many Franklin County residents to report a personal cougar sighting in my weekly column, caught the report and wanted to alert me to black panther sightings that are raising a ruckus around Randolph, Vt., with lots of chatter in The Herald of Randolph. A story with legs and reader interest.

Apparently, our Heath source and her husband have been recently familiarizing themselves with an idyllic new piece of property they purchased in the Randolph area; going to the coffee shops, the general store, chatting, reading papers, listening to local radio, watching local TV, kind of feeling the pulse, the lucky dogs. Where better than Vermont to poke around, acclimate? I too love the Green Mountain State, its people’s gentle way, its liberal politics going all the way back the Ethan Allen and his boys, many of whom had direct connections to this slice of WMass paradise we call home. Too bad we didn’t secede and join the Republic of Vermont as proposed just after the Revolution, when WMass rabble-rousers decided it was time to shake free of the debt-grip being applied by Boston’s mercantile elite. But let us not digress (Long live Dr. Howard Dean! Here’s to you, pinko U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders!), back to panthers, the lower-case black ones; no, not the urban dwellers who attracted police bullets and jail cells the last time hated, liberal, Harvard elites from North of the Mason Dixon Line found their way to the White House and stirred up the dangerous reactionary-right fringe.

Enough! Back to four-legged black panthers.

Who knows what to make of these New England sightings? It’s nothing new. People have reported big black wildcats here dating back to the 17th century. But remember, back then they were also trying and convicting unfortunate souls for witchcraft, hanging Quaker women on Boston Common, banishing dissenters, finding Satan himself in the shadows; ghosts, too. So maybe that was the origin of Puritan-day black panthers, big, black, evil cats possessed by the devil himself. Who knows? Can’t rule it out. Despite sightings up and down the Eastern Seaboard from the Maritimes to Florida, black panthers do not exist here. They’re strictly a Southern Hemisphere phenomenon.

Of course, we have in the past touched on this subject here, examining all the potential reasons for reports of big black wildcats. One theory is that low light might be just right to make a grayish-brown cat wearing its winter coat appear black. Another is that random pet black panthers have been released or escaped. Could be either, I suppose. Then again, who’s to say some early explorers or slave-ship crews didn’t come ashore in South or Central America and acquire a black panther one way or another from an indigenous tribe, caging it in the ship’s hold and bringing it ashore here? Anything’s possible, I guess, and such a case would have probably gone unrecorded.

But let’s not get carried away. Enough of the wild speculation, attempts to explain the unexplainable. All I can say is there have been two credible black panther sightings in central Vermont and the local newspaper is eating it up while state officials distance themselves. So keep your eyes open. Randolph, Vt., ain’t that far north of here. No sir. So Satan himself may soon pass through a mowing near you.

If you happen to see him lurking on the edge, give him a friendly whistle and yell his name. It’s Lucifer.