Interesting observation from a recent coastal Maine transplant with Connecticut Valley roots — an upright lady and former Recorder scribe with no reason for or history of, um, lying. But what the new South Amherst resident witnessed definitely left an impression. She was stunned.

The sighting occurred on a Sunday-afternoon drive with her 13-year-old son; traveling north on Amherst’s Northeast Street, perhaps a mile from the Main Street intersection — from the sounds of it, not far from the estate of Stan and Dot Gawle of Shelburne fame. Following a BMW Z3 convertible with its top down on a pleasant fall day, the mother and son caught something out of the corner of their eyes, a large animal bounding through farmland on the east side of the road and racing across the road, forcing the Beemer to pull to right and stop to avoid hitting it. Once safely across the road, the critter moved through farmland on the west side of the road, toward UMass’ Fraternity/Sorority Park, before disappearing over a rise and into a patch of woods.

Yep, you guessed it, another Eastern cougar sighting, this one not 10 miles as a crow flies from the Quabbin Reservation, where documented cougar evidence was confirmed in 1990s. The woman figures she had six seconds to study the animal, “long enough to really stare,” and what she saw was incredible.

“It was a tannish/light-brown animal about 7-8 feet long — maybe a little longer?? — including tail, which was outstretched and long,” she wrote in an e-mail. “The animal was maybe three feet tall, but outstretched and running, so hard to tell.”

She went on to describe the creature as having a “cat-like profile on its head with some kind of darker coloring edging the face, but I was focused on the length so didn’t look closely at that. It had a taut body with a shape that reminded me of a small lion.”

Admittedly no wildlife expert, she assumed at first she must have seen a bobcat but was troubled by that identification, so much so that she decided to do some online research upon returning home. She pulled up pictures and “realized that what I saw didn’t look a thing like a bobcat — wrong coloring, no stripes, way too big, no fluffy face — so I checked out profiles of cougars and — bingo! — that was it.” She called to her son for confirmation and he agreed they had seen a cougar.

Like many others, our latest witness took it upon herself to report the sighting to “a state wildlife office, and they could not have been less interested. I didn’t mention I saw it about a mile or two from two elementary schools.”

You get the feeling that one of these days the authorities will have no choice but to accept such a sighting as real. It’ll probably require a road-kill, and even then they’ll write it off as an escaped pet.

This witness described what she saw as exciting, and although she’d be the first to admit her limited wildlife acumen, “I know it was no damn house cat or dog.”