The mellow purples and yellows have bled into the landscape along the edges and in the heart of wetlands while the white cemetery hydrangeas have blossomed and small, green, windblown apples are scattered on the ground below their trees. I know. I’ve been throwing them daily into the Green River for the dogs to retrieve, the pets getting washed and cooled in the process. They eventually eat the bitter fruit after carrying it around for a while and seem to enjoy it.

As for the beechnuts and butternuts I’ve been observing on my rambles, they’re still clinging to their branches, the spiky beechnut husks browning in the hot summer sun. I picked one Wednesday, split it, removed the husk, bit into the three-sided nut, and found the meat still green. I think it’ll soon be white. Then I’ll eat it. As for the butternuts, well, a friend has encouraged me to gather them when they drop, then lay them out to dry on my haymow floor. I’m not sure I will. Maybe if I get bored. He says they’re a lot of work but delicious; likely nutritious, too. We’ll see.

What the aforementioned signs tell me is that I’ll soon be throwing seven cords of firewood into the woodshed, a rite of late summer and fall for me. A proud, hardy New Englander, I actually look forward to autumn and do not in any way dread the approach of winter, a time for reading, writing and thinking, even occasional mischief, always happy to step outside and fill my lungs with cold, refreshing air that seems to clear the head with one deep, lusty breath and vaporized exhalation. But that’s still months away. Today, I want to report a Saturday-morning visit from a neighbor who brought interesting news.

There are apparently big cats in my neighborhood, a cougar among them. That’s right, a cougar. My friend says many people have seen the long-tailed beast around Meadow View Farm on Smead Hill, where I watched a flock of about 10 mature wild turkeys feeding through the pasture Tuesday; among them a long-bearded tom, his pastel-reddish head glowing in the noontime sun. I was there to chat with the lady farmer who toots her horn, waves and smiles in passing on her daily rounds. I was looking forward to speaking to her — one of the identified big-cat witnesses — because I have always found her cow barn to be a great place for lively banter, most often about wildlife sightings and neighborhood gossip, both useful to a man like me. I knew I would not find a reluctant, taciturn soul. No sir. The farmers atop the hill are my kind of folks, and we’ve had many spirited conversations over the years, be it in their homes, barnyards, fields or manure-stained runways between milking stalls.

You gotta love dairy farmers, especially those of the fairer sex, all a vanishing breed, none the least bit squeamish about slop and stench. They’re real people who know what life’s about, even if many of them still do vote Republican. Can you blame them? They’re just following the tradition of their great-great grandfathers from the days of Lincoln, then Reconstruction. Oh, how that Grand Old Party has changed since then, though; so much so that Honest Abe must be nauseous from rolling in his grave since his proud party became that of the intolerant, fanatical South. But let us not digress. Back to the story at hand, that of the neighborhood big cat.

As I broke through the Meadow View barn threshold into the milking parlor and skirted the first row of Jerseys, maybe five of them, I received the same friendly smile and greeting I have there grown accustomed to. I looked at the lady placing a milk bucket or some other contraption under a cow and said, “Well, I imagine you know why I’m here.”

“No, why?”

“I’m chasing a rumor. Word has it you’ve been seeing a big cat.”

“Nope, not me. Seems I’m the only one who hasn’t seen it. My brother did. He was amazed at the length of the tail. Neighbors on both sides of me have seen it, too, one of them way down by you. All I’ve seen is a bobcat running off with one of my chickens in its mouth. I think it’s a mother feeding her kittens. I used to have 38 chickens. I’m down to 18.”

That bit of information immediately corrected one inaccurate rumor. I had been told she saw the cougar running off with her chicken. Uh-uh. It just displays once more time how unreliable stories passed by word of mouth can be. It doesn’t matter in the big picture, though, because the rest of the tales checked out, sort of. A big cat is indeed the talk of that northern hilltop overlooking Greenfield’s Meadows.

I had been immediately interested in my Saturday visitor’s story because it was not the first one I’d heard recently about a cougar roaming my neighborhood. Another neighborhood farmer had approached me about a sighting more than a month ago, a day or two after I had reported in this space about a cougar being hit and killed by a car in the early hours of June 11 on a Milford, Conn., highway. A day or two after that story hit the street, a woman traveling Brook Road at a site than a mile west of my home had seen a cougar “clear as day” cross in front of her vehicle. She stepped on her brake to avoid hitting it, then thought about calling me but decided not to. She didn’t want people to think she was cuckoo. From the location of that sighting to Meadow View is less than a mile as the crow flies or the wildcat walks. So this most recent report made a lot of sense to me, got me wheels spinning. Add to that the fact that there have been many cougar sightings between the Mohawk Trail and Smead Hill over the 14 years I’ve lived in the Meadows, so, obviously, my interest piqued.

On the other hand, I knew cougar-sighting reports were bound to increase after our first New England road-kill, followed by the admission that the dead cat was not an escaped pet, as the experts had hoped. Nope. It was a real, live, wildcat that had traveled all the way from South Dakota. Given that, I figured people would be emboldened to report future sightings. Then this.

To me, these latest sightings are with the realm of possibility even if the animal doesn’t show up dead on a local highway. But that’s just me. Who knows? Maybe I too am a little cuckoo.

If the big cat is indeed lurking near my home, I sure do hope it doesn’t get the twin fawns a friend and neighbor is enjoying these days in his backyard. He says he’s been watching them feed with their mother in and around his vegetable garden for a month. Bloodstains in the broccoli would not be welcome. He’s cool about the deer munching on his garden, says there’s more than enough for him and them. My guess is that he’d prefer the cougar eats elsewhere.

Wow! Imagine that. The cougar killed more than a month ago on a Milford, Conn., highway was wild, not the escaped or released pet the experts were praying for.

Yes, the road-killed cat was wild indeed, had traveled all the way from South Dakota’s Black Hills, no journey for lightweights. So mark my words, admittedly those of a flunky with no shiny, gilt-framed degrees hanging above my desk: There have been other passers-through in the past and more will come in the future. Don’t doubt it for a second. See you later escaped-pet, misidentification and LSD-flashback theorists. Your argument no longer holds water. In fact, if a cougar can make it into the evening shadow of New York City in coastal Connecticut, what part of the Northeast is off-limits?

I’m sure hundreds of people who heard or read the news Wednesday morning felt vindicated. These folks had the courage to report cougar sightings only to be ridiculed by state and federal wildlife experts. The experts claimed the witnesses were sadly mistaken, even going so far as to accuse woodsmen and police officers alike of mistaking large house cats for cougars when traveling through deceptive lighting. Yeah, right! How would you like to be accused of such a thing after seeing a cougar?

When I reported regional sightings in print — about 50 this decade — I was called irresponsible by some and snickered at by others who said I must have run out of subject matter for my column. Either that or I was trying to stir something up to sell papers. Well, that was far from the truth. All I did was listen, believe what I heard and report it without hesitation. It seemed to me foolish to deny even a remote possibility that a predator that was historically here and still exists in the West could return with reforestation of our hills and dales over the past 150 years. But, no, the experts scolded, it could not and would not happen. Well, it’s happened, so now what do they have to say?

Do you suppose the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFW) regrets classifying the Eastern cougar extinct back in March? Can the agency possibly stick to it, especially when, in fact, the eastern and western cougars are and always have been the same cat? What should have been said was that the North American cougar no longer populates the eastern United States. Even that assessment would have been wrong, because young western male cats have been dispersing eastward for years now, with breeding populations also creeping eastward into Midwestern states where they vanished a century or more ago.

I must say I was surprised when even high-ranking Cougar Rewildling Foundation officials I contacted after the road-kill dismissed the possibility that the Connecticut cat was wild, despite the fact that a thorough surface examination of the carcass showed no obvious signs it had been a captive. No tattoos, not neutered or declawed, lean and mean. Both sources were sure testing would reveal that the cat had been held in captivity and either escaped or was released. Perhaps when the next big cat shows up they’ll reserve judgment and say it could well be a wayward male “disperser;” that is a young male searching for territory and females after being forced eastward by dominant western males.

Something else I found amusing Tuesday while reading through press releases and news reports was a semantics game authorities were playing. Having already classified Eastern cougars extinct earlier this year, they were careful not to use the word cougar once, choosing this time to call the animal a mountain lion. Although both names fit (so do puma and panther), there was no mention of mountain lions in the extinction press release or news reports. They then called the animal a cougar. Maybe I shouldn’t admit it but I abused my editorial power and cast aside my journalistic integrity Tuesday night by executing a simple search-and-replace throughout the AP story we ran, replacing mountain lion with cougar. Just a little touche, I guess. Fun and games. If they can do it, why can’t I?

Throughout my days of writing about local cougar sightings, the doubters have all said that if big cats were here, then they’d show up dead on the highway or alive and well on a hunter’s trail camera. Well, we’ve now had our first road kill. Likely a snapshot is not far off, if there isn’t another road kill first. My guess is there’ll be more proof that dispersers pass through the Northeast. The question is, how long before a wayward female follows?

Impossible?

Yeah, yeah, that’s precisely what the authorities will say.

Not me. My motto is never say never. It’s worked so far.

So, what’s up with this dead cougar that showed up on a Milford, Conn., highway early Saturday morning?

If this is the first you’ve heard of it, then it’s either shame on the news sources that feed you or shame on you for living in a bubble. The story spread like the Arizona wildfires, beginning at breakfast time Saturday morning when my inbox was inundated with tips and links to developing online reports. By Saturday afternoon, the story was running wild, growing by the minute, new information piling up on each hourly “milford mountain lion” keyword search. By now it’s old news, has been reported nationwide and into western Europe. And this cougar tale was no Internet hoax. No sir. The proof was right there, laying dead for everyone to see on that section of Route 15 called the Merritt Parkway.

“Are you sure it wasn’t New Milford?” asked the first man I called Saturday morning with the news. He was referring to the rural northern Fairfield County hilltown north of Danbury, where the green, rolling landscape is strikingly similar to Conway or Ashfield. No, I told him, not New Milford; the coastal town of Milford, snuggled between Bridgeport and New Haven, not a place where you’d expect New England’s first road-killed cougar to appear. But there it was. No denying it. Dead as a freakin’ doornail. Big, too.

It wasn’t like the 140-pound male cat came out of nowhere. Several cougar sightings had been reported in the posh New York City suburb of Greenwich, Conn., some 40 miles down the road from Milford. Someone there had even snapped a photo that was convincing enough to warrant town-wide warnings for residents to keep an eye on their children and pets. A prep school along the periphery of the sightings had even cancelled an outing. Then, just after 1 a.m. Saturday morning — Bang! — it happened, a compact SUV killed a cat on the Parkway. Officials, who say they’re certain the dead animal had lived in captivity and either escaped or was released, believe it and the Greenwich cat were the same animal. Two Greenwich citizens who reported cougar sightings after the road-kill beg to differ. So, apparently, does Audubon Greenwich, which has temporarily closed its hiking trails.

So now it’ll be interesting to monitor the situation and see where the story goes. Finally, after surging Northeastern cougar sightings over the past decade, a beast shows up dead on the road just three months after the United States Fish & Wildlife Service (USFW) had changed its Eastern cougar classification from endangered species to extinct. No wonder they were so quick to dismiss the dead cat as an escaped captive. The story had to put them in an uncomfortable place. But to be fair, spokespeople from the Cougar Rewilding Foundation (CRF), formerly known as the Eastern Cougar Foundation, also believe the dead animal was probably not wild and expect scientific analysis to reveal just that.

“Until we see DNA and results from the necropsy (autopsy), a former captive is the honest answer,” wrote CRF spokesman Christopher Spatz, a New York researcher who has diligently followed leads for many years and come up empty in attempts to substantiate the presence of Northeastern cougars.

Spatz’s CRF colleague Helen McGinnis concurred, opining the dead cat was more likely a former captive than a wandering male that had found its way from the Midwest to Connecticut. “Just look at the roadmap to see how difficult it would be for a cougar to get from Michigan, Indiana or southern Florida (the closest states where big cats are known to exist),” she wrote. Yet, although it’s true that such a trek would be challenging, it clearly isn’t impossible.

A thorough examination of the road-killed cat’s carcass revealed no obvious signs that it had been held captive — no tattoos or tags, no collar, not de-clawed, a lean physique more typical of wild animals. The Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection will have the cat analyzed to determine its origin, if possible. If they discover that it was indeed wild, or cannot prove otherwise, I wonder what the “official finding” will conclude? Maybe a weak, innocuous report that the neutered press will accept without question and forget about.

As a veteran scribe who’s reported many credible cougar sightings and spoken to several experts about them over the past 30 years, I long ago concluded that there is no evidence to support the existence of a breeding Northeastern cougar population. Still, I scoff at the notion that every cougar sighting I have written about was in fact a hallucination or an escaped captive. And how about this one: Now that the officials must lay out damage-control information to douse this Connecticut brushfire, the Associated Press reports that Massachusetts officials have over the past 27 years confiscated six captive cougars, most recently in 1993. Why, I ask, if this is so, has no one ever mentioned a word of it to me, likely the New England scribe who has written more than anyone else on the subject over the past 10? The fact is that despite being cooperative throughout my years of interviews and reportage, officials have, since the beginning — way back in the 1980s when Virginia Fifield was stationed in the Pioneer Valley specifically to investigate cougar sightings — always made it clear that they would prefer I didn’t draw attention to cougars. Yet not one of them alerted me to several seizures of illegally held Massachusetts captives? The silence doesn’t make sense unless I’m missing something. In fact, as time passes, this cougar-discovery business only seems to get more confusing.

Contributing to the confusion is the latest bombshell I uncovered just this week by asking a simple, logical question. When I asked if the experts had ever proven that North American cougars from the East and West were different cats, McGinnis wrote: “I am certain the eastern and western cougars are NOT separate species. They are not even a subspecies. The comprehensive study of cougar DNA throughout their North, Central and South American range, done by Melanie Culver and associates, published in 2000, concluded that there are only six subspecies of cougars and only one in all of North America. By the rules of zoological nomenclature, the North American subspecies is Puma concolor couguar. Although some cougar biologists question this conclusion and believe the Florida panther is a separate subspecies, no geneticist/DNA specialist who has further investigated Culver’s work disagrees with her. There has also been a study of viruses carried by various cougar populations that support Culver’s work.

“That doesn’t mean that all North American cougars are alike,” she added. “There are some distinct populations, including the Florida panther, for sure. Elsewhere, there are gradual changes in what constitutes a typical cougar, especially going from south to north. A cougar in Arizona is much smaller and has shorter fur than a typical cougar in Alberta, for example.”

Which makes a lot of sense. Think of it. The same can be said of white-tailed deer, which are larger in northern climes where life is tougher than in the warmer South. There is even an obvious difference between Northeastern deer from opposite ends of the region, with Northern New England whitetails dwarfing those from Pennsylvania.

So how about that? USFW classified as extinct a species — Eastern cougar — that never existed. What the agency should have ruled was that Puma concolor couguar no longer colonizes the Northeast. Of course, the same could have been said 25 years ago about states like Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri, all of which are now on the cougar map, some of them perhaps only as states where “dispersers” occasionally pass through. Dispersers are defined as wayward sub-adult males driven away from territory by dominant males. So who can say with any certainty, as these dispersers become more common and perhaps start extending their eastern range, that a breeding population will not also start creeping eastward as well?

There were many factors that led to Northeastern cougar extirpation by the early 20th century, not the least of which was human persecution. But also the forests had been cleared, deer (cougars’ primary food) became scarce and cougars vanished. Now, with the forests and deer populations back, what’s stopping the king of North American cats from following them, even in small numbers, beginning with dispersers? Even CRF won’t go out on a limb and make that prediction. But what’s to stop cat recolonization now that the forests have returned?

In discussions about cougars with wildlife biologists I respect, a recurring question by them has been: “If cougars are here, then why aren’t they being killed on the highways?” Well, now that day has arrived. I suspected, maybe even hoped, it would happen closer to home, or in the wilds of New York or Vermont; was not expecting it to occur a stone’s throw from the Big Apple. But something tells me there will be another, and another. Call it instinct, the same natural impulse that’s pushing dispersers eastward.

Never say never. That’s my mantra. That and don’t underestimate the forces of nature.