It’s late morning in early November and Carl Svendsen is traveling Bernardston Road north on his way to a northern Greenfield tool show at Indoor Action, when something catches his eye at the Emerson family tree farm, near the outflow of Lover’s Lane. Upon closer inspection from a range of 100 yards, the long tail and massive body tells him he’s looking at a “dirty-blonde” cougar. Unbelievable.

Svendsen quickly turns his vehicle around and stops to get a better look as the cat as it “meanders” toward an open ridge-top behind pastured horses; clearly a large, long-tailed cat. No question about it. Then, overwhelmed by the sighting, he backs up quite a distance and into the landowner’s driveway. He has to share his sighting with someone; anyone. Why not the owner? So he exits the vehicle and raps on the door. A man answers and he askes him to come quickly, there’s a cougar walking across his pasture. But by the time he gets his shoes on and arrives at a site where they can view the clearing, the cat has vanished, likely on the other side of the western ridge, headed toward Interstate 91.

“Seeing is believing,” says Svendsen, of Erving. “There was no mistaking it. I’ve read about sightings, now I’ve had one, and to think it happened in Greenfield, Massachusetts. I’ve been all around the country and see my first cougar in Greenfield? Who would have thought it?

“I was so excited that the guy I spoke to must have thought I was having a heart attack. I was just thrilled to see one. A beautiful sight.”

The homeowner questions him. Is he certain he didn’t see his house cat?

No way. The thing was huge.

Svendsen goes home to get his wife, tells her to come with him, he’s seen a cougar. They jump in the car and take a walk to where he last saw the animal. Nothing. “I’m no tracker and the ground was hard,” he says, “but the landowner saw a track he wasn’t familiar with and said he’d check with a friend of his who’s a game warden. He also told me his neighbors from the other side of the power lines claim to have seen cougars.”

Several other sightings have come from the area west of I-91, between East Colrain and the Mohawk Trail, not far from the Emerson site.

What will the authorities say when a cougar is killed in the road? It could happen. And if it does, they’ll have a lot of explaining to do. Why do they say they’re extinct? Why don’t they admit there”s a chance, even slim, that they never faded into total extinction?

At this point Eastern Cougars are ghosts from the past, kind of like moose and wolves and lynxes, which have reappeared with the reforestation of New England. So, why not cougars?

That’s a question no one has been able to answer with certainty.

Charlie McCracken of Greenfield sort of got lost in the shuffle, buried deep in my clogged Outlook Express Inbox, after coming forward with another Pioneer Valley cougar sighting. Upon receiving it, I read and red-flagged it, planning to revisit it in this space before it got buried.

”I always enjoy cougar-sighting articles and have to chuckle at the ‘disclaimers,”’ McCracken wrote, ”because I had one run in front of my service truck while delivering propane tanks to summer camps in the early 1990s at Damon Pond in Chesterfield/Goshen.”

The indelible impression was the long tail with a big ball of black fur at the end. In fact, because it all happened so fast, that’s all he saw clearly.

The way McCracken recollects it, he was delivering 100-pound tanks ”one bright, sunny afternoon in May” when a big, tan blur streaked in front of his Ford 350. He remembers thinking, ”Wow! That was a big dog or deer,” but it ran like a big cat and stood as high as the headlights on his one-ton truck. He knew then that the animal was much larger than his 80-pound dog.

”All I got a good look at was the big haunches and the long tail with a ball of black fur on it,” he wrote. ”It was no photo-op.”

He slowly got out of his truck to investigate the space between two summer camps where the cat ran, but it was gone.

Chalk it up as more fuel for the fire. Certainly not an acceptable sighting to wildlife experts, but still worth adding to the list of local folks with no reason to lie who think they’ve seen a cougar.

”Cougar sightings are nothing new around here,” a major Whately landowner and avid hunter who’s pushing 80 told me last week in his pasture. ”People have been reporting them for more than 60 years.”

And the authorities always have the same response: ”Eastern cougars are extinct.”

Maybe so.

First an old friend and new resident of Amherst who, on a fall afternoon in the car with her teenage son, saw a cougar cross the road in front of her on Northeast Street in Amherst. Then a sighting by another woman who spotted a cougar out the window of her Mount Warner Road home in North Hadley. Barbara Breuer says she was speaking to her husband, Matthew, on the phone when she got a good side view of the big cat running parallel to the road, then an eyeful from the rear before it disappeared. Mount Warner Road is not five miles from the Northeast Street sighting; certainly close enough to stir suspicion.

“I know it was no poodle,” she joked. “It had the tail of a cougar and the movement of a big cat.”

Breuer, who grew up in the Berkshires and is familiar with wildlife sightings, said she was stunned by what she saw, having never heard of cougars in the region. But now she’s convinced they’re here, despite what “the authorities” say.

Because Matthew Breuer thought the public should be aware that a big cat is lurking, he called the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton. He was concerned it could be a public-safety issue for hikers, joggers or trick-or-treaters. So, the sighting was brought to light Friday in a Gazette story headlined “Big cat in Hadley…cougar?”

The story had legs. “I’ve already had two calls from women who have also seen a cougar locally,” Breuer said. “One was in North Amherst, so it could have been the same animal. She told me (state authorities) confirmed the presence of a cougar not long ago at the Quabbin through scat analysis but refuse to acknowledge the possibility that they’re here.

“Why do they deny it?” she asked. “Do you know why? It seems strange to me.”

I told the curious, articulate lady that I’ve heard one interesting theory related to endangered species and development or logging rights, but had no definitive answer. The fact is that I, too, wonder why wildlife officials refuse to admit the possibility that cougars are re-emerging in reforested New England, despite a growing number of credible eyewitnesses who swear they’ve seen them.

If the big cats are, indeed, on the comeback trail, it’s only a matter of time before one winds up dead on the side of the road. Even Doubting-Thomas wildlife experts admit that.

It could happen.

Yes, it’s old news but still worth sharing because of recurring themes from previous cougar sightings; and this one even includes a police department that believed its eyes, was convinced a big cat was lurking, one that presented potential danger.

The town was Acton, about a half-hour northwest of Boston, the date Nov. 8, 2004. You’ve got to hear this one. It’s a doozey.

Shortly after 1 a.m. on that fall date, the police received a call from a concerned resident who was hearing surreal noises in the woods behind his home in a residential neighborhood. The report claimed something was growling, something that didn’t sound inviting or common. So two police officers responded to the scene, turned their engines off, exited their vehicles and listened. It didn’t take long, perhaps two minutes, before they heard loud, threatening growls from the woodlot. Then they heard the leaves on the forest floor rustling, twigs snapping and — bingo! — a “mountain lion” popped out into the open, soon followed by a mature whitetail buck estimated at 200-plus pounds, large set of antlers pointed down menacingly toward the predator.

“Apparently, the buck and cat had a standoff in the woods,” said Acton Police Chief Frank Widmayer, “then the buck chased the cat out of the woods. My officers saw it clearly in the light from their headlights and a street lamp. It was only 25 or 30 yards away.”

The police report from both officers described the animal as a large tan cat, five to six feet long, up to two feet high at the shoulders. There is no mention of a long tail in either report, which may or may not be significant, but the chief does recall his officers telling him they saw the tail. It’s true that not all cougar sightings include descriptions of a long tail, but most do; it all depends on the angle of the sighting. But tail or no tail in the police report, both officers believed they had seen a cougar. In fact, so convinced were they that the department posted an illuminated, flashing sign to warn people of a potentially dangerous situation.

The officers reported their sighting on the radio to a state Environmental Police Officer, who advised them to leave the scene and he’d investigate in the morning. He did and turned up nothing. But the EPO wasn’t the only interested party who took it upon himself to “look around.” A local woodsman also took a walk, camera in hand, and came away with photos in living color of what appeared to be cat tracks in the mud a quarter-mile from the police sighting. Then, many subsequent calls about big-cat sightings came into the station, the first some 19 hours after the police sighting, when a woman saw what she described as a mountain lion behind a dumpster. Two days later, shortly after 10 p.m., another “mountain lion” was reported by a supervisor at the Hartz Corp. in Acton; the man also saw his cat behind dumpsters. Then two more reported sightings in four or five days, one just after 11 p.m., the other just after midnight; all nighttime sightings, which is not surprising because cougars have nocturnal tenancies.

Aware that there had been many cougar sightings in nearby Westford, that just a day or two before his officers had witnessed one with their own eyes, and that a friend in a coffee shop had flagged him down to tell him about the cougar that had crossed in front of his car just prior to the police sighting, Widmayer thought it was time to take action.

“I’m no expert on tracks but they didn’t look like dog tracks to me and I showed the pictures to people who said there were definitely cat tracks,” said Widmayer. “The guy who took the pictures also said they were cat tracks.”

Widmayer took the necessary measures to alert his townspeople of the potential danger and it didn’t take long before the story hit the Boston TV-newscasts — reporters, lights, cameras, microphones, the whole shebang, a wild scene; “mountain lion on the loose in Acton; be alert, protect you pets and livestock.”

Widmayer e-mailed the photos around and showed them to the investigating EPO, who viewed them with interest, then told the print media they were canine tracks, an assessment he curiously hadn’t shared with Widmayer.

“I was actually surprised when I read that,” Widmayer said, “because I didn’t remember him saying that to me.”

Hmmmm? Imagine that.

Cat tracks are wider and rounder than those of canines and don’t display claw marks because cats walk with their claws retracted. The EPO who viewed Widmayer’s photos based his “opinion” that they had been made by a coyote on one indentation in the mud that he identified as a claw mark. But careful observation reveals that the indentation could be unrelated to the paw print.

So, do you suppose there’s an edict from the highest level of authority to deny a potential re-emergence of Eastern cougars? Is the first responsibility of wildlife officials to squash such rumors, deny the possibility of mountain lions? Who knows? But don’t discount it. It may be real. No matter how credible the source, how convincing the evidence, the authorities do indeed refuse to admit there’s the slightest chance Eastern cougars are back. The official, often-repeated response is that “Eastern cougars have been extinct for 100 years.”

End of story.

Of course, that was the same “official response” wildlife officials routinely uttered three and more decades ago, when people started seeing Florida panthers in the Sunshine State. Today the “extinct” panthers are back, alive and well, reproducing in the dense Florida swamps. The obvious question, one New England officials must answer, is: How can they be certain Eastern cougars were ever extinct? Could there not have been one here and there in remote wilderness back when three quarters of New England was clear-cut? Could the big cats not be coming back now that the deep forests have returned throughout the Northeast?

Never say never — that’s my mantra — and needed support can come from the people who experienced the Florida panther phenomenon three and four decades ago.

“All I know is that two of my officers saw that cat with their own eyes from close range,” Widmayer said. “How can I question that?”

Perhaps he should ask the experts. They’ll have an answer for him. You know how it goes: Eastern cougars are extinct.

Sounds good … but certainly not undisputable.

Seems I can’t get away from cougars, mountain lions, catamounts, pumas or whatever you want to call them.

The reports keep coming at me like the Connecticut River Coordinator’s office wishes Atlantic salmon were migrating up the valley. Thse days, there seems to be a flurry of big-cat sightings along the Montague/Leverett, MA., line, Sawmill River country between Dry Hill Road and Cranberry Pond. I’m not making it up. Three reports in less than a week. What can I say?

Believable reports? Who knows? I can only report what I hear if I judge it credible. Myself, no, I have never seen a cougar. Sometimes I wonder what I have started, because since the first mention of the subject more than two years ago, I have been besieged, swallowed by the whale of visual evidence, which is, of course, unacceptable to the authorities.

“Seems to be quite a few around,” laughed Montague Chief of Police and old softball buddy Ray Zukowski on the phone, “kinda like chipmunks, I guess.”

You’d think so judging from the number of reports

Anyway, the Montague sightings started with an outdoorsman from Chestnut Hill. He called to inform me that two lady friends had seen a cougar cross their path while walking up the wooded Dry Hill Road a day or two earlier. Several attempts to reach one of the witnesses by phone have been unsuccessful, although she did leave a message on my phone confirming the sighting. Then, while still in the process of playing phone tag, another man from Chestnut Hill sent an e-mail to describe a sighting by his fiancé “on Leverett Road along the Sawmill River,” just before dark. So impressed was this witness that she immediately contacted the man who alerted me, then they returned to the scene the next morning looking for tracks through fresh snow.

“The fact that she was willing to wade into a marsh-like area to look for tracks in 20-degree weather,” was all my source needed to know about the veracity of her report. New to the area by way of Holyoke and totally unfamiliar with mycolumn, he posted the sighting on MassLive’s outdoor forum and immediately got a hit from someone who’d recently seen a cougar near Cranberry Pond. Throw in the report that came my way from nearby Dry Hill Road, along with the fact that none of the reporters were aware of others’ sightings, and it’s worth mentioning, regardless of what my critics say.

So, there it is: more reports by people who haven’t followed my weekly column and have no apparent reason to lie. All I can say is take it for what it’s worth. No more, no less. In the meantime, I’ll play the fool and wait for vindication.

On the cougar front, two more interesting notes from readers; one arrived via snail-mail from an 80-year-old, Readsboro, Vt., poetess who grew up on her family farm in Marlboro, Vt., the other by e-mail from a Northfield resident. Both had something to share about western Massachusetts/Vermont cougar sightings.

First the poetess, Bertha F. Akley, a nature enthusiast who patrolled the woods of Marlboro around Akeley Mountain (“That’s the way my last name was spelled years ago.”) beginning during Depression days. She saw her first “catamount” cross the road in front of her at the age of 6 on her daily mile-and-a-half walk home from grammar school, and continued seeing them for years to come around Akeley Mt.

“I ran into the house that first time and told my mother I had seen a tiger,” she recalled when reached on the telephone. “How could I ever forget it? I was in the first grade.”

Mrs. Akley informed a local game warden about her daughter’s sighting and he assured her the little tyke had seen a “hedgehog.” The eye witness wasn’t buying it. No sir.

“I knew then and still know today it was no hedgehog,” she said. “What I had seen was a catamount, a big cat with a long tail.” And it made quite an impression on the young girl, whose passion can be felt in the poetry she sent me describing some of her cougar sightings. She saw their tracks, their tawny bodies crossing her path, and even stretched out on a massive beech limb above. She also saw a dead calf that had been killed and covered by leaves on the forest floor.

Akley wasn’t the only person seeing big cats around her family farm back then. So were hunters who traveled there from North Adams and Stamford, Vt. “They’d see them late at night along the road as they drove to their hunting camp,” she recalled. “They’d tell me what they saw and I’d tell the game wardens. They didn’t want to be bothered talking to the wardens. They were there to hunt.”

Akley says she was apt to catch a big cat lurking in an overgrown mowing or avoiding her as she walked the deer runs, searching for signs of wild creatures. After seeing the one on the beech limb, she says she always looks up as she walks the woods, never forgetting the sight of that slothful, muscular beast lying on that limb.

The last big cat she saw was in 1993 “up on the mountain,” where her roots lie.

“I had caught my shoestring in the brush and was tying my shoe, no idea there was anything there,” she recalled. “Then a catamount jumped out in front of me and went off. I chased after him but he went off and disappeared.”

Her credibility radiates from her poetry. You know it’s real. Her words paint the picture in vibrant color. The poetess with a tale to tell, tales of our elusive big cats, the ones people see and wildlife experts say has been extinct for a century.

And now, on to Northfield, where Judy Radebaugh had something to add about a reported sighting in her hometown, one I publicized at the time and later apologized. At the time, because the report had noted a long tail and faint spots, I speculated she had seen a bobcat, not a cougar. But then I learned that immature cougars wear spots until about 18 months old, thus the apology.

Anyway, Radebaugh, who lives with husband David on Main Street in Northfield, says she reads with interest every time there’s a story about a local cougar sighting; with good reason — a neighbor reported seeing one under her backyard apple tree and reported it to the police about a year ago.

“We were not at home but Sgt. Robert Leighton came in the evening and told us about the report,” Radebaugh wrote in an e-mail. “Matt Duska said that he watched it for a long time, said it had a very long tail, he knew it wasn’t a bobcat. About a week later, a couple who lives on Gulf Road saw a cougar (perhaps the same one) and that was noted in The Recorder.

“So, for those doubters I say, ‘there are too many people who have had the experience of seeing this animal to not believe what they have witnessed!’ ”

It seems that more and more “thinkers” are employing Radebaugh’s logic.

Two more cougar sightings, one in Pelham, the other in Shelburne. Where this investigative mission ends nobody knows, but the reports just keep on coming from credible witnesses with no apparent reason to lie. You be the judge.

These two reports came last week, following a column had by a vignette about a Shelburne sighting by Amamda Gaffigan Steele of Plainfield. The first feedback came from Athol by e-mail, the other by phone.

First the Shelburne sighting, which was related to Steele’s in two ways: No. 1, it was reported by her second cousin, Susan Stetson, No. 2 the location of a near-miss by her vehicle on Route 2 was a stone’s throw from where Steele encountered her early-morning big cat.

“When I read what Mandy had seen, I knew I had seen the same cat cross in front of me near Frank Williams Road in Shelburne,” Stetston reported. “It happened in mid-March around at 6:15 a.m., and (unlike Steele) I got a good look at its face and eyes. It was huge. I still can’t believe I didn’t hit it. It jumped right in front of me on Route 2 and I was looking it right in the face from close range. The body was grayish-brown. I could see its whiskers, a big jowl and huge eyes. I can still see that face. Huge eyes. Like Mandy’s, it had a long tail, but I don’t remember it curling up. It all happened fast, but I recall the tail being long, straight and thick.”

Stetson first thought the tail was “bushy,” but when told that a cougar tail is thick like a fire hose, it all made sense to her. A witness viewing a fast-moving cougar for the first time could easily misidentify a thick, winter tail as bushy because of the width. “It was definitely not thin,” she said; “that, I can say for sure.”

Stetson was traveling east, toward Greenfield, headlights illuminating the road at the time of her sighting. For those familiar with that section of the Mohawk Trail, the cat was moving north to south, crossing just west of Dr. Howell’s veterinary clinic toward the swamp bordering Goodnow’s Chip & Putt.

“My husband (Sody Stetson) is a hunter and he told me there’s a sheep farm right around where it crossed,” said Susan Stetson. She’s right. The sheep are owned by the Donald and Anne Call, Mohawk Trail antique peddlers.

As for the Pelham sighting, it was reported by Athol assessor Jean Robinson, who had exited Route 202 and was traveling west on Amherst Road, which winds down from the Pelham highlands to Amherst Center. Traveling with her were her two children, aged 14 and 10. The date was April 1, about noon, “And this was no April Fools joke,” she said. “We know what we saw.”

Robinson spotted the cougar crossing the road near the Pelham Reservoir, stopped her car and watched the young animal as it stood motionless, “as curious about us as we were about it,” said Robinson. “I only wished I had reached down for me cell phone and snapped a picture. Then maybe people would believe me.”

The Robinsons live in Petersham, Jean’s native town, where they routinely see bobcats, coyotes and many other wild species in remote Quabbin country.  “We know what we saw,” she said. “It was a beautiful cat. Faint spots and a long tail, no bobcat. I Googled cougars and found that young ones have spots for about 18 months. This animal was the height of my Lab and the spots were very faint, so I’d guess it was around 18 months old.”

Robinson stopped at an adjacent new housing development to inform a few residents what she had seen. “I just thought someone ought to know for safety reasons,” she said.

Robinson’s is one of many recent cougar sightings in the Amherst area. Others have been reported on Northeast Street, Amherst, and Mt. Warner Road, Hadley, both a hop, skip and a jump from Robinson’s “Pelham Reservoir” site.

Before we leave the subject of cougar sightings, I’d be remiss not to offer my apology to a Northfield witness who reported seeing a spotted, long-tailed cat cross the road in front of her and her husband recently on the way to a doctor’s appointment. At the time, I speculated that they had probably seen a large bobcat, given the spots. I was then corrected by a Buckland naturalist and writer who informed me that young cougars do, indeed, wear spots.

Call it learning on the fly, something that’s bound to happen during ongoing discovery missions like this.

Before 6 a.m. on a spring morning, Amanda Gaffigan Steele of Plainfield was taking a circuitous route to work in Hatfield, traveling toward Greenfield on Route 2 near the overgrown Mohawk Mountain ski trails when she noticed something unusual crossing the road near Jed’s Cider Mill. Of a grayish brown hue, the large animal carried a long tail that curled gently toward the sky. No doubt about it: big cat.

“You’re not gonna put my name in the paper, are you?” she asked, when called at home.

“That’s the plan,” I responded.

“Well, OK, but I hope people don’t think I’m crazy.”

It’s a fear cougar sightings stir in most witnesses’ souls; one of being written off as a lunatic. But still the reports keep coming, and coming, and coming.

You be the judge of this witness’ sanity.

Known as Mandy to friends, the pregnant, 34-year old Shelburne Falls native had just passed the moccasin place on the trail when the animal appeared in the road, crossing slowly from out of the brook hole near Jed’s toward the old Schechterle place. In no great hurry, it reached the guardrail, walked over it effortlessly and disappeared into the greening forest to Steele’s right.

“I never got a look at its face because it was looking the other way, but I know what I saw and it wasn’t a bobcat or a coy dog, a deer or bear,” Steele said. “What I noticed most was the long tail, curved upward. It was a mountain lion. I couldn’t believe my eyes.”

Overcome with excitement, Steele called he mother, Bunny Tirrell, on a cell phone, waking her from a sound sleep at home. “She said she was amazed by its powerful shoulders,” Tirrell reported. “Big, powerful shoulders. That’s what she told me.”

But her mom wasn’t the only person she phoned. She also called her grandfather, Bill Gaffigan, at his Buckland-side home overlooking Cricket Field. An experienced hunter of coons, cats, deer, you name, Bill Gaffigan has probably hunted it.

“I was reluctant to call him because he’s apt to give me a hard time,” Steele admitted. “But not this time. He believed me. He said people have been seeing mountain lions around here lately.”

She learned later that not only have there been many recent sightings, there had been some right around where she saw hers. That’s a fact. Many reports have come from within a mile or two of hers; even a track in the mud in an old apple orchard a stone’s throw from Jed’s, one a veteran local outdoorsman identified as a cougar’s, only to be overruled by state wildlife officials who identified it from photos as a dog track. The local outdoorsman didn’t buy it.

Where the beast Steele encountered last week will show up next is anyone’s guess. Could be Shelburne or Conway or Becket or Saratoga for that matter. Big cats cover a lot of territory. But if it happens to cross your path, don’t bother alerting the authorities. They have a pat answer written in bold letters across their desktop calendar pads. It reads: “Eastern cougars have been extinct for nearly a century.”

The “official” stance. Go figure.

Betty Waidlich may start getting strange looks again from people who recognize her making her daily rounds at the supermarket, gas station or beauty salon. A half century later, she’s letting the cat out the bag, so to speak — a big cat she told friends about in 1956, when she was stunned to see a “huge black panther” out a bedroom window from her Mineral Road residence in Montague, MA.

Waidlich remembers the year precisely because it was daughter Donna’s year of birth. The month was August. Newborn Donna and siblings Linda and John were right there with their mom for the sighting. “John was only two at the time,” Waidlich said. “But he still remembers it. I held him up to the window to see it. I guess it left a deep impression. Linda was 6. She remembers it very well. … My friends? Well, their response was, ‘What were you drinking?’ ”

The landed Waidlich estate sits on an idyllic spot near the confluence of the Millers and Connecticut rivers, behind the Turners Falls Airport — a location long known to wildlife enthusiasts as a sanctuary. So the Waidlich’s had grown accustomed to seeing wildlife but nothing quite as exotic as a panther.

“I don’t think a day has gone by without me thinking about that cat,” she said. “Then, when I read in your column that Rocky Stone saw a black panther out his window in Athol in 1956, I felt vindicated. I knew it was the same year I saw mine, and Athol isn’t that far up the Millers River.”

What drew the cat to the Waidlich property was a backyard fire pit, where the family had enjoyed many cookouts that summer. “Friends would come over with their kids and we had been cooking out regularly, usually steak. You know how kids are, they’d run around, leave bones and scraps, and animals would clean them up.”
Waidlich said she sensed there was something new in the area because her dogs seemed unnerved for a day or two, but she never suspected a panther.

“The dogs were acting funny, kind of nervous, and I knew something had been there because I could see where it had been scratching for food,” she recalled. “I’d say the cat probably hung around for a couple of days and moved on.”

The family had set up a tent for the kids near the fire pit, and Waidlich spotted the animal exiting the canvas shelter. “It emerged from the tent, made its way to the fire pit, rummaged around a bit and was gone, never to be seen again,” at least not by the Waidlich family.

Stone doesn’t recall whether he saw his cat before or after Waidlich during that summer of ’56. His best guess is earlier than August. He was looking out his bedroom window off Highland Avenue in Athol when he spotted the black panther in a neighbor’s yard. “I probably watched it for a minute,” he recalled. “It jumped up into an apple tree, jumped down, walked through a sandbox, dropped down over a steep bank and disappeared. After it had been gone a while, I tried to find a good footprint in the sand, but it hadn’t left a clear print”

A half century ago, big-cat sightings in the Northeast were akin to UFO sightings, very rare, so it took guts to go public. But there seems to be an upsurge in sightings over the past quarter century and people are more willing to share their tales. Take Jody McKenzie of Conway. She doesn’t need to dredge her long-term memory to describe what she saw. Her sighting occurred recently. No, it wasn’t black, but it wasn’t difficult to identify, either. It was a mountain lion. No doubt about it. And it may be no coincidence that the sighting occurred within a mile of the cougar seen by hunter Mike Pekarski and within the same distance of a set of tracks this scribbler saw with his own aging brown eyes, overlooking the Deerfield River. The sighting was also “in the neighborhood” of several others both reported and not yet written about by me. They’re in the hopper.

The McKenzie sighting occurred about 5 p.m. on Valentines Day. She had just returned home and was walking her golden retriever to the mailbox. When the dog started acting peculiar and growled, McKenzie looked up and witnessed the mountain lion crossing the back 40. “It was no more than 100 feet from us and there was no mistaking it. It was about as tall as my dog with a sleek, curvy body and a long tail that curled at the end. It was crossing where many deer and coyotes seem to have a path. The mountain lion looked our way but didn’t seem bothered by our presence. My dog stayed at my side, growling — she seemed to know she shouldn’t charge. … I wish I had a camera in my hand but I knew if I went into the house it would be gone by the time I got back. So I just enjoyed watching it move across the field.”

Eastern cougars (felis concolor couguar) are also known as catamounts, pumas, mountain lions, and panthers. According to MassWildlife, the last known animal in Massachusetts was in Hampshire County in 1858, about the same time of the last official record of such an animal in Pennsylvania. The tint of their brown coats range from yellowish to reddish to grayish, and possibly black, although I have found no confirmation through cursory Internet research. Stone and other say they’ve seen it written that black ones exist, but cannot recall where. There is a Florida panther that’s brown, but it’s a different species. Black panthers are associated with the Southern Hemisphere

Adult mountain lion body length runs between five and nine feet, including the 28- to 35-inch tail. Weight ranges from 80 to 210 pounds. An average adult male weighs 160 pounds, while a female runs about 135. Their diet in the Northeast would be made up primarily of white-tailed deer, but would also include moose and smaller mammals, such as rabbits, raccoons and wild turkeys.

This is the six consecutive week local mountain lion sightings have been covered in this column, and there are many reports sitting on my desk that have not been shared. Colleague George Miller warned Tuesday night that I better back off this story before “the men in the black suits come knocking.”

I’ll take my chances. … Stay tuned.

What caught my attention on a midday stroll through the toasty dining room was a cardboard box on the wooden porch floor, next to it a packet of mail bundled with a heavy red rubber band. In the bundle was a sturdy white envelope with a return address to Northfield.

Yes! The pictures from Judy Radebaugh.

I pulled the tab to open the envelope and removed three pieces of paper folded vertically in half, color snapshots inside, three pictures of cat tracks, large ones discovered behind the Radebaugh barn. The three pages were computer printouts of cougar tracks and a brief description of the native big cats believed by experts to be extinct. Not everyone agrees with the ”official assessment,” though, particularly those, like Radebaugh, who have seen cougars. Last year she shared a tale about a large, long-tailed cat she encountered in her back yard. Now this.

Word of her latest discovery came by e-mail:

”Don’t know if you remember me but I wrote to you about a cougar sighting in our back yard here in Northfield. Well, yesterday David and I found some tracks behind our barn and I photographed them. Then I went on the Web and found pictures of cougar tracks. I do not have a scanner so I’m sending them to you to see for yourself.”

The photos show cat tracks measuring about 4½ inches wide. When I saw the ruler in the first photo, I took a similar 12-incher out of my desk’s top drawer, clenched my fist and measured it. Sure enough, the tracks were slightly larger across than my right fist, similar to the tracks brought to my attention a couple of years back while deer hunting with a friend in Conway. A former trapper who spent many a day in the local woods, my buddy had until then been a total non-believer in cougar sightings. Frankly, he had seen no evidence where you’d most expect to find it: in the woods. But as we compared our fists to the clear prints in fresh, wet snow that day, he reconsidered.

”Definitely cat tracks,” he told me as we stood on a steep lip overlooking the Deerfield River, ”but not bobcat; way too big.”

Perhaps the tracks had been left by a Canada lynx, and maybe that’s also what left the tracks photographed by Radebaugh. But they were not bobcat tracks, described by the online Wikipedia as ranging in size from 1 to 3 inches and averaging about 1.8. An online description of Canada lynx tracks say they can measure more than four inches across, which fits the bill for Radebaugh’s and the ones I personally saw. But, according to several online sources, Eastern cougar tracks range from three to four inches across, so you can’t rule that out, either.

The mystery endures.

…  Imagine that! An audible alert tells me a new e-mail has arrived. I maximize Outlook Express and the message is from Radebaugh. More cougar news:

”In the past two days we have had reports from friends that have seen cougars crossing Route 10 here in Northfield. Just too many reports to dismiss.”

Unless, of course, you’re a state or federal wildlife expert.