The phone message arrived at my Greenfield home Friday afternoon. Colleague Mark Durant left it. There had been a cougar sighting in West County, and the man who reported it, Will Blattner from Washington, D.C., had photos. Ah, for the wonders of BlackBerry technology.

Blattner had somehow gotten my name, left his cell-phone number and e-mail address, and wanted my e-mail address so he could send the images. Because it was a sighting with great potential for someone who’s written about the subject for decades, I quickly accommodated him and soon received three images taken from the bridge on Zoar Road at the Charlemont/Rowe border, within view of the Steele Brook Road outflow. The photos show a wildcat, no mistaking that, but unfortunately the tail is obscured by the background, so I would call the shots ”inconclusive” but worth sharing.

The sighting occurred during one of Blattner’s many visits with his grandparents, Jim Carse and Donna Marder, longtime West County residents with homes in Rowe and Charlemont. Can’t blame a man for wanting to share that little slice of West County paradise with kinfolk, huh?

Anyway, Blattner and his grandparents were heading into Charlemont for supplies Friday, when they noticed another car pulled over, obviously observing something. Then Blattner’s grandmother pointed and said, ”Look!” and they all saw what they believed to be a young cougar.

”It was amazing, it wouldn’t move,” Blattner recalled. ”That’s when I snapped off the first picture. When my grandma and I got out of the car, it turned and started to lazily walk off into the forest. It looked like a large cat with a thicker muzzle, and one color (light brown) for the most part. We believe it may have been an immature cougar because of its size.”

Blattner, who works in a D.C. television studio, knows photography and said he wishes he had had a better camera. He knows doubters will question his shots, and was quick to point out that he and his grandfather had been ardent non-believers in Franklin County cougar sightings until this one crossed their path.

”My grandfather has lived in Rowe for decades and he never believed anyone who told him they had seen a cougar,” Blattner wrote, ”but this really seemed like a cougar to all of us.”

I ran the most revealing of three photos with my column, the one about which Blattner wrote, ”You can clearly see that he has a long tail, which proves he cannot be a bobcat.”

I zoomed in on all three photos, which grew blurrier with each enlargement, and I cannot say my eyes saw any proof of a long tail.

I printed the photo in the paper and titled the column “Inconclusive.”

It took a while for a spring cougar sighting in Colrain to reach this space, but here it is, brought to my attention a few weeks ago by longtime friend and Shelburne selectman Joe Judd, himself an outdoor writer.

The date of the sighting isn’t clear and the woman who made it wasn’t real forthcoming with information. “This doesn’t need to be in any newspaper,” said an objecting Gerry Vight, who lives in Griswoldville, graduated from Arms Academy “100 years ago,” and wasn’t interested in revealing her age, her maiden name or much else of a personal nature. But, after devoting two months to similar Franklin County cougar sightings, I figured I couldn’t just ignore it.

The sighting occurred “before there were leaves on the trees,” according to Vight, who was walking toward the woods in her backyard with husband Lloyd. Two weeks later, presumably the animal was seen by the Vight’s neighbor crossing adjacent Call Road. “Must have been coming up from the (North) river,” Gerry Vight said.

The big cat witnessed by the Vights was headed in the opposite direction, coming down off the mountain, the other side of which would put you in Shelburne’s Patten District. As an amateur photographer who has taken snapshots of wildlife and hilltown landmarks for decades, Ms. Vight was prepared, carrying a digital camera and binoculars. “I carry a camera at all times,” she said in her hilltown twang. “Never know what you’re going to see; had a bear in my backyard last night.”

Vight said she and her husband would have never seen the cat had it not jumped from one large stone to another, about 200 feet away. She tried to get a photo as it sat on the rock but her camera was out of auto-focus and the animal was too far away for her 3X lens. “If I had my 10X, I would have had it,” she quipped. “But all I got was a picture of the limbs in front of me and a blurry cat.

“We watched it through binoculars. It was a cat, a big cat, just sitting there on the rock, looking around. We both got a good look at it, at least five feet long. ”

Asked if she considered calling anyone to report the sighting, she replied, “Call someone? Who? By the time anyone got there, it would have been gone. I like nature. No reason to call anyone.”

One of the first people the Vights told about their sighting was Colrain road boss James Sturgeon. “He’s quite a hunter, you know,” said Gerry Vight. “He told us no one would believe us unless we had a picture.”

Strugeon was right. Few people took the Vights’ sighting or the newspaper report seriously, despite the fact that so many local residents with no reason to lie have reported similar observances, many in the Colrain area. Still, from this perch, that’s no reason to ignore it. So here it is. Chew on it for a while and spit it out if the taste doesn’t suit you.

Another witness with no reason to lie or desire for publicity came forward to report a cougar sighting on Routes 5 & 10 in Deerfield.

“What exactly are they, anyways?” asked Steve Nartowicz of Greenfield. “I call it a mountain lion. Is that right? Or is it a cougar?”

Fact is it doesn’t matter. Cougar and mountain lion are acceptable, as are catamount, panther and wildcat; same predatory beast, different names. The official name for the indigenous Norhteastern animal is Eastern cougar.

Anyway, back to the Nartowicz sighting …

Traveling to work in South Deerfield before 7 a.m. on the last day of January, Nartowicz had passed Savage’s Market and, some 50 yards behind another car, was approaching the right-hand curve into the Wapping settlement when something on the east side of the road caught his attention. Reflex caused him to let off the gas pedal and, when the car ahead of him passed the critter, it quickly crossed the road in front of him. In three quick bounds the animal was across the pavement and on the lip overlooking a marsh, where it decided to climb about four feet up a small tree and look back at Nartowicz’s slow-moving vehicle. When the vehicle reached the animal and Nartowicz looked it square in the face from 10 or 15 feet away, it jumped down and ran west, toward the South Meadows and the stone-crusher section of the Deerfield River.

“I really don’t know much about cougar tendencies so I can’t say what it was trying to accomplish by climbing that tree,” Nartowicz said, “but it just stood there suspended, tail touching the ground, like it was waiting for me to pass. Then when I got too close, it took off.

“I was shocked. It was definitely a cougar. I saw its ears, it nose, its eyes. I know what coyotes look like,” and probably also knows they don’t climb trees.”

For this middle-aged scribbler it’s usually difficult to assess cougar sightings, many of which have been brought to my attention, because I know nothing about the witnesses. This case is different. Very much so. I happen to know Nartowicz and his family, having grown up around them in my hometown of South Deerfield, and it’s difficult for me to believe he was spinning a yarn.

“What are the state officials saying, anyway? Do they admit they’re here?” he asked.

“No,” I responded. “They refuse to acknowledge the presence of cougars in New England.”

As you can imagine, he had trouble accepting that.

“Unbelievable!” he said, choosing instead to believe his eyes.

Can’t say I blame him.

Try telling Gary Cole of Athol that Eastern cougars are extinct. He saw one cross the road in front of him. So did his wife.

In a neat, flawless, hand-written letter, Cole recounted his summer sighting that occurred around 7 p.m. as the couple crossed the Route 202 bridge crossing the Millers River. About 40 yards up the road, just past the east end of the bridge, Cole spotted an animal moving left to right toward the road, obviously contemplating a leap over the fence to cross. He assumed it was a deer but soon knew otherwise when it appeared in the road in front of him in full broadside display. Sightings get no better than broadside in the middle of a highway.

“The first thing I noticed was the tail,” Cole wrote. “It looked as long as the animal itself.”

Typical of all cougar sightings, the defining feature was the long tail; it’s always all about the long tail and large body of the big cat.

As the “four- to five-foot-long animal” passed, it looked straight at the Coles, providing them with a rare sighting. He described it as dark tan with a darker underbelly.

“It came from a swampy area and jumped the fence to a swampy area on the other side of the road,” wrote Cole. “I said to my wife, ‘Did you see that?’ She said, ‘Yes,’ and that it looked nothing like the bobcat we had seen at our house.”

What surprised Cole most was the location of his sighting, a “fairly well-populated place in the Athol/Orange area. I can see why people might balk at telling about seeing something like this, but it made a believer out of me.”

Another believer in a place where the experts think they ought to be institutionalized, or at least prescribed meds, because “Eastern cougars have been extinct for more than a century.”

That’s the official response.

Go figure.

The cat craze has moved to the front page. Iamagine that!

Yes, there it was, front and center, in Wednesday’s Recorder. A sighting off Deerfield Street in Greenfield. At the condos across from the street from The Meadows Golf Course. Jumped up onto a shed roof. Long tail. We’ve heard it all before. Who knows where it’ll end?

Actually, I had already put together a column that didn’t include the condo sighting, so I’ll have to splice it into the existing narrative, always tricky, but too interesting to ignore and hold for another week. So, let’s proceed.

Since my last mention of cougars a couple of weeks ago — and prior to the Greenfield sighting — three more reports, one new, two old, plus a color snapshot of a large bobcat, possibly a Canada lynx, in Shelburne Falls. It’s getting wild.

First, the big cats, led by one reportedly spotted on the morning of March 21, in Northfield by Cynthia Daly and her husband. The Daly’s were traveling south on Route 142, about a quarter-mile from Route 10 and a half-mile west of the Connecticut River, “on property owned by Bob Cook of Cook Excavating.” The cat was walking a fence line. Another car headed in the opposite direction also saw it and stopped to observe.

Ms. Daly estimated the body length to be about 40 inches, with “a long tail which it held curled upward as it turned to look at us from the fencepost before leaping over.” Further description as grayish-brown with some spotting and a pale face, coupled with the short length, led me to suspect Ms. Daly had seen a bobcat, not a cougar, even though the tail leaned toward cougar.

En route to a doctor’s appointment at around 8 a.m., the Dalys were pressed for time and could not investigate further at the time of the sighting. But a couple of hours later, on their return trip, they stopped and found large cat tracks visible atop the crusty snow. Ms. Daly measured the prints at 3.5 inches across and expects they would have been wider in ideal tracking snow. She could clearly see where the animal had broken through the crust after jumping the fence.

The other two cougar sightings reported to me have fewer holes. The first came from an old South Deerfield acquaintance who’s been reading about the local sightings recently. He decided it was time for him to chime in with his tale. It occurred about five years ago with fresh snow on the ground in the woods between Route 116 in South Deerfield and Whately Glen Road in Whately.

“I’ve had a thorn in my craw for quite a while, almost called you a few times then decided against it,” he said. “Tonight, I said, “What the hell?” and gave you a jingle.”

His story began upon entering familiar woods at mid-afternoon during deer season, drawn there by fresh snow and the approaching dusk. Figuring deer would be moving out of their beds before dark, he walked quietly through the woods and came to a small clearing, where he spotted an elevation on which to “post-up” on. He walked there, kicked out a spot and sat down to wait for sundown.

He wasn’t hunkered down long before he spotted movement and focused on it, thinking it was a deer. When the animal moved into the opening, it cut his tracks and followed them toward his stand. Then it stopped, froze, turned and left the area.

“I think it finally winded me, but I know what I saw,” he said. “It was a Conway cougar, the size of a large dog with a fire-hose tail. There was no mistaking it. It got pretty close.”

Our final cougar sighting was reported by Greenfield’s Amy and Dan Yates, who spotted it in the Bars section of Deerfield in late January or early February 2003. They e-mailed a report of their sighting to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service address (easterncougar@fws.gov) devoted to investigating evidence that the Eastern cougar is back. The message was also sent to my home e-mail address.

The Yates were traveling south along the Deerfield River on Mill Village Road when, about a half-mile from Stillwater Road, Ms. Yates spotted an animal walking along the opposite bank of the river. She described it as “a large cat with a very long tail, light brown/gray colored.”

When they stopped their car and exited with a 35mm camera, the cat heard the doors shut, stopped walking and looked at them. “The safety of the river between us allowed us to stand still and take a better look,” wrote Amy Yates. “The cat sat down and watched us.”

Dan Yates snapped off some shots with his camera but had only a standard lens without the capability to zoon in, and the black-and-white shots revealed little.

“We watched each other for 5-8 minutes before the cat turned its back to us and walked up the bank toward fields along Lower Road. We watched it until it was out of sight, then drove along Lower Road to no avail.

“We definitely know what we saw — we only wish we’d had a better lens to get a good picture of it.”

As for the bobcat/lynx sighting in Shelburne Falls, it was reported by Bob Bassett, who lives on Purington Road and has seen it several times in his yard. The accompanying photo told the story. Bassett thought it may be a Canada lynx after reading about them here but, after sharing snapshots with knowledgeable outdoorsmen, has decided it’s more likely a 50-pound bobcat, a rare sight in and of itself.

A few new developments on the cougar front that’s gaining momentum like a runaway locomotive on a steep descent since first mention of it here 15 months ago.

Let me think … what came first?

Oh yeah, the guy from Templeton. He’s been reading about cougars in this space and had something important to share; been trying unsuccessfully to contact me. Was I intentionally ignoring his e-mails or were they for some reason not reaching me?

I wrote back after receiving what he claimed was the third message he’d sent. “No, I’m not ignoring you, this is the first e-mail I’ve seen. Please tell. When’s the best time to reach you?”

He promptly replied with a phone number and the best time to reach him. I called and had a quick chat from my work desk. Seemed like a credible source. Has a friend who worked at the Quabbin several years. Friend says, regardless of what they say officially, it is know that cougars are living on the state reservation. Figure there’s six of them living there and, with plenty of food, they’re not ranging far. Supposedly there’s a known rocky location people stay away from … shallow caves the big cats seem to like.

“Please keep your mouth shut,” his friend reportedly told him. “I could get in trouble for talking about it. We are told not to admit anything. But they’re here and people know it.”

Sure, it sounds a little wild. But remember, there was a beaver kill-site found by a professional tracker in 1997, scat was collected, tested and identified as that of a cougar, an Eastern cougar. Backed into a corner, the authorities said it was an escaped pet, not a wild beast. Now this.

Hmmmm?

It gets better. …

When I came into work a night or two later, a colleague told me to listen to a message on my voicemail, “You’ll be interested.”

Sure enough, I was. … It was a local state cop I’ve known for many years. A cougar crossed the road in front of his wife last week on Route 9, around Cummington. No mistaking it, a big cat. “Been reading your columns about the subject and thought I’d pass it along. Guess they’re here.”

More fuel to the fire. And, believe me, I don’t go looking for it. It’s been coming at me in a steady stream since last winter. Where it ends, only time will tell.

A couple of days ago, midday, another Recorder colleague e-mailed me a link to a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article about big-cat sightings in western Pennsylvania. The Sunday story is accompanied by a picture of a large cat track in the snow next to the boot of a Post-Gazette account executive who discovered it on a hike.

The report is nothing new in western Pennsylvania or elsewhere in the Northeast, where, according to the article, there have been more than 1,000 sightings of big cats with long tails in recent years. That’s probably a modest estimate given the many reports we’re received right here in the greater Pioneer Valley.

Although no one from a wildlife agency visited the Pennsylvania site to confirm that the tracks had indeed been made by a cougar, neither the Pennsylvania Game Commission (PGM) nor the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFW) was willing to deny the possibility.

“I never say never when it comes to these kinds of things,” said PGM spokesman Mel Schake. “There are enough of these calls coming in from around the state that there’s something out there. There’s now an effort to determine do we or don’t we have any of these.”

That brand-new effort is being led by the USFW, which as recently as six months ago would not even discuss the topic of cougar sightings. Apparently, times have changed. Now the agency is not ruling out an Eastern cougar comeback, and is reviewing scientific and commercial information to determine the status of the Eastern cougar. The study is being conducted out of the USFW’s Northeast Regional Office, right down the road in Hadley, the first study of its type since 1982. Back then, field researcher Virginia Fifield was stationed in the Happy Valley to investigate cougar sightings. She investigated many and confirmed one track in the Goshen State Forest mud.

If a thorough investigation is conducted, it’ll be interesting to follow … very much so.

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.”

A local realtor chimed in on cougars after a recent report of a Colrain sighting. The man made his first Ashfield home in an area I’m quite familiar with after decades of hunting, hiking and four-wheeling through a forest wonderland where kindred spirits beckon. Apparently, he felt as though he’d bitten his tongue long enough.

He began his short e-mail note by identifying his town of residence and admitting “I have been reading your (cougar) columns these past few months in earnest.” He closed by stating, “Just thought I’d add fuel to the fire!” The information sandwiched between those bookends is what’s important.

The first mention our latest source heard of cougars was shortly after he settled in Ashfield during the late 1970s, when United States Fish & Wildlife Service wildlife specialist Virginia Fifield was stationed here to investigate cougar sightings. The new Franklin County resident asked a neighboring landowner across the street for permission to cross-country ski through his pasture. Displaying the country spirit that once prevailed throughout our western hilltowns, the neighbor said he had no problem sharing his land for such activity but cautioned him about the cougar tracks he’d found there.

Hmmmmmm? That got the West County transplant thinking, and probably kept him alert, particularly when swallowed by the mixed woods he often exercised in. Then, during the mid-80s, there it was: moving, breathing evidence; a big cat in the Hawley State Forest. No, he hadn’t sampled any tiny florescent mushrooms gathered from the wet, shaded forest floor. Quite the contrary, he was mountain biking with friends before they “saw this long, slinky animal with a long tail cross the road. Not a coyote.”

Like most people confronted with such a sighting, they didn’t make a big deal of it; probably because they didn’t want to be accused of lying or, at the very least, experiencing a Sixties flashback right out of the Timothy Leary playbook. Who in their right mind would willingly cast such aspersions on themselves?

Must be that newspaper reports caught him at a perfect time to pry free a disclosure, although you’ll notice he hasn’t been identified. No, he didn’t say he wanted to remain anonymous, but he didn’t give the green light to use his name, either; and when discussing a potentially controversial subject like cougar sightings, I always err on the side of caution.

Undoubtedly what nudged the note out of this source was “a few recent mountain lion sightings crossing Route 112 (in Ashfield) and a recent discussion he had with a hilltown octogenarian from Goshen, the site of the only confirmed cougar track found by Fifield during her stay. The soon-to-be 90-year-old man attended the source’s daylily open garden and, out of the blue, started discussing mountain lion sightings in his neighborhood.

“He lives in Goshen, just south of the DAR (State Forest, where the Fifield-confirmed track was found),” reported the realtor. “He claims to have plaster casts of prints, lots of neighbor sightings and has talked to several wildlife folks.”

Huh? Is the man crazy? Eighty-something and talking to wildlife officials about mountain lion sightings? Doesn’t he know state officials are mandated reporters? What’s he after, an evaluation? Psychoanalysis? Shock treatment? A rehabilitation center, perhaps? Doesn’t he know it’s irresponsible to report cougar sightings, that Eastern cougars are extinct?

Apparently, at his peril, he ain’t buying it. After nearly a century on God’s earth, he’s learned to trust his eyes.

Not wanting to “beat a dead horse,” I had stopped reporting about Pioneer Valley mountain lion, or cougar, sightings by the late 1980s. Well, that horse has sprung to life, so I think I’ll ride it and see where it takes me.

Yeah, I’m fully prepared for accusations from wildlife officials that I’m being “irresponsible” for bringing the controversial subject back to light. But, hey, I’m in the news business and they seem to be in the business of sweeping this story under the carpet. In fact, that’s why I backed off nearly two decades ago, after reporting several local cougar sightings and discussing them with experts at the state level. The explicit instructions were to back off before I stirred up big-cat hysteria.

These same people who favored the “conservative approach” admitted that many of the cougar sightings had been made by “straight shooters” with no reputation for spinning yarns. Thus, there was no reason to doubt them. Nonetheless, the experts said, the sightings did not prove the existence of a reproductive population of big cats in New England, where they indisputably roamed during the first two centuries of settlement. More likely was a scenario by which someone had purchased a young cougar, run into problems controlling it and illegally released it. And, of course, there was always the possibility that “roamers,” probably young males from Great Lakes territory and beyond, had passed through the area in wanderlust, seeking out new territory.

Although both theories are certainly possible, perhaps even probable, from my perspective it doesn’t really matter where the big cats are coming from. The point is they’re being spotted throughout the Northeast, and have been for a generation.

Who cares if there isn’t a “reproductive population” at the present time. That’s not the issue. There wasn’t a reproductive moose population here 25 years ago, either, just sightings. But now a native population has been established, and it’s not uncommon to see a cow and her calves in a Franklin County pasture. Moose returned with the reforestation of southern New England and so have black bears. So what’s to prevent big cats from repopulating the region? That’s the question, and there appears to be no valid explanation why it can’t happen, if it hasn’t already, in the hinterlands of northern New England. So if there are indeed cougars among us, how long before they’re here to stay? Ten years? Twenty-five? No one knows.

Since a discussion began in this space a few weeks ago, I have received a lot of feedback, more than I could possibly present in one column, most by eye witnesses, one by a professional doubting Thomas I have great respect for. In fact, just a couple of minutes ago the Greenfield Postmaster was in my yard and he told me of a friend who’d made a plaster mold of a cougar track he discovered in Brimfield. On Saturday, I had another local man in my home, showing me sharp photos of a cougar track he found in a Shelburne orchard. That’s how wild this big-cat chase has gotten. They’re coming out of the woodwork. So, I’ll have to piecemeal the information I receive until it dries up, as I assume it will. But you never know, it may snowball.

This week we’ll focus on an interesting phone call I received a week ago, midafternoon. The man on the other end was Mike Pekarski, calling from his family’s smokehouse on Route 116 in Deerfield. He had a tale to tell. A good one.

Before I continue, it’s important to disclose that Pekarski and I have had many wildlife discussions over the past decade while I was shopping at his store, but he never told me he’d seen a big cat up close and personal. What made it even more intriguing was the site of his observation. Why? Because it was less than a mile from the tracks, big around as a softball, I witnessed in fresh snow with my own brown eyes during the most-recent shotgun deer season.

Pekarski’s story takes place on opening day of the 2003 shotgun deer season. I will not disclose the location other than to say it was in Conway, not far from the Deerfield River. Pekarski arrived at dawn and intended to sit it out till dark if necessary.

After arriving at his stand, secluded motionless behind a large hemlock atop a ledge for about three hours, Pekarski detected movement coming his way at 9 a.m., 9:30. As the animal approached, he realized he was watching something special. A big cat.

Totally unaware of the hunter’s presence, the cat walked to within 15 or 20 yards of Pekarski and stopped, providing a clear, unobstructed view for a frozen period of time he described as the longest 30 seconds of his life.

“It was the color of a manila folder, except for its black snout, and its head was big as a volleyball,” he recalled. “It was so close that I could see its whiskers. Finally, it looked up at the ledge, we met eyes and it turned and bounded out of sight. Its tail was long, probably 15 to 18 inches.”

Pekarski said the animal’s shoulders were wider than his rottweiller/husky mix dog’s, its track wider than his fist. If you’ve never met Pekarski, take it from one who has: He carries a pretty good set of meat hooks around with him.

“It was head and shoulders over any coyote; longer, too,” he said. “Minimum of  80 pounds.”

Not wanting to create a public spectacle, Pekarski has been selective, if not secretive,  about sharing his sighting. But he did run it by a couple of Environmental Police Officers, who paid close attention.

“They told me anything’s possible,” he said.

Anything, that is, except hallucinations.

As wildlife officials steadfastly dismiss Northeastern cougar sightings as misidentifications and mirages, big-cat witnesses keep coming forward from the Carolinas to Canada’s Maritime Provinces. And despite what the experts say, accepted Eastern cougar evidence has been gathered in the region, some as close as the Quabbin Reservation and the Goshen State Forest. So, although any reasonable investigator would admit there have been innocent misidentifications as well as intentional cougar hoaxes, it’s impossible to totally deny that big cats could make a comeback in New England, due to reforestation and the steady increase of our whitetail-deer density. Cougars gravitate to regions with high deer densities.

This week, the seventh straight we’ve devoted to cougar talk, let’s focus on a couple of specific topics: 1.) the potential presence of cougars in the Quabbin wilderness and 2.) the curious number of black-panther sightings, given that Eastern cougars are not supposed to be black. I’ve fielded a couple of e-mails from Quabbin-area eyewitnesses, which should not be shocking news in light of the fact that a sample gathered on that state reservation in 1997 was scientifically identified as cougar scat. Also, two credible 1956 sightings of a black panther by local residents have been reported here, one in Athol, the other in Montague. So it’s worthy of further discussion.

First, the Quabbin, where Kenneth Matthews had a tale to tell on a handwritten letter. Matthews lives on Wheeler Avenue in Orange and identifies himself as “a farmer, hunter, trapper and lumberman.” At age 92, he says “he still hunts and keeps a good garden.” Sounds legit.

His story goes back 30 years, to the mid-1970s, when he was on his way to work about a mile inside Gate 35 at the Quabbin. “I saw five deer cross the road in front of me and not more than 10 yards behind them were two of these large cats. They were dark brown; the larger one was sort of blackish on the shoulders, neck and head. I would estimate their weight at between 80 and 120 pounds. I have seen their tracks since then while fishing in Warwick.”

Another sighting not far from Matthews’ but a generation earlier was reported by Sterling Clark, who sent an e-mail about a big-cat sighting by he and his parents on Route 202 heading toward New Salem. “Probably 50 years, ago my parents and I were returning from Worcester on Route 122 and turned left onto Route 202. In a desolate area of that highway, before reaching New Salem, a huge cat bounded out of the woods on what would be the Quabbin area side, ran across the road in front of our car and bounded up a steep bank and out of sight like it was nothing. … It’s a sight I’ll never forget.”

Although the Eastern Cougar Foundation — “a non-profit, science-based, volunteer-run organization dedicated to recovery of cougars as the top predators in eastern North America” — does not accept sightings as evidence, it was involved in the aforementioned 1997 Quabbin scat-identification process. The sample was gathered by animal tracker John McCarter in April 1997 and tested first by George Amato of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, then by Dr. Melanie Culver of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Both scientific studies, relying on DNA analysis, identified the sample as cougar scat. Fecal analysis determined the cat had eaten a beaver.

Hmmmmm? Indisputable evidence, right?

Not so fast.

Although a November 2000 MassWildlife press release acknowledged the scat had been deposited at the Quabbin by a “free-ranging animal and not placed there as part of some elaborate hoax,” spokeswoman Susan Langlois would not accept the possibility that it had been dropped by a “wild” cougar.

“Since there has been no additional hard evidence collected in the ensuing three years, the escape or release theory looms,” she said. “One could speculate that a captive cougar escaped or was released in the area and survived long enough to feed on a beaver and leave this tangible evidence of its presence.”

The Quabbin sample identified as cougar scat is one of four confirmed Northeastern scat samples found since 1992 and listed on the Eastern Cougar Foundation’s Web site. Two of the others were discovered in Canada — one in central New Brunswick in 1992, the other in Ontario in 1999 — while the fourth was recovered by Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department agents around Craftsbury. The Foundation also lists the 1976 killing of a male cougar that had killed sheep, then the capture of a pregnant female two days later in Pocahontas County, W.V. Confirmed tracks have been identified since 1990 in Virginia, Maine and West Virginia. Around 1990, a track left in a Goshen State Forest mud puddle was identified as a “suspected” cougar track by wildlife biologist Virginia Fifield, then stationed in the Pioneer Valley to investigate cougar sightings.

Do we really need more evidence that cougars exist on the Eastern Seaboard? Depends on who you’re talking to. But at the very least it is appropriate to discuss the topic.

As for the discussion of black panthers in the Northeast, well, that gets a little sketchier. According to experts, black cougars or panthers are found only in South America, not North America, where cougars have tan coats with tints ranging from yellowish to reddish to grayish. That said, “sightings” of large black cats are not unusual in the Northeast, including the two 1956 reports chronicled here recently.

Sightings of big black cats are also common in the Maritime Provinces of Canada, according to Mark Pulsifer, author of “The Eastern Cougar in Nova Scotia,” an article published in the 1992 Summer/Fall issue of “Conservation,” the official publication of Nova Scotia’s Department of Natural Resources. Pulsifer found Nova Scotia cougar sightings to be quite consistent, as nearly all witnesses reported seeing a large feline animal, “tawny to black in color with a long, curved tail. Of special interest is the unusually high number of black or melanistic cougars reported in the province. Black cougars have been reported 42 times in Nova Scotia and 49 times in New Brunswick. In South America, where the black form is endemic, it is considered very rare. This unusually high rate of observed melanism in Nova Scotia has led some to suspect that the dark coloration of these animals is due to back lighting and/or the result of a wet pelt.”

Can there be any doubt there have been additional black-panther sightings reported in the Maritime Provinces since Pulsifer’s article appeared 14 years ago? Take it to the bank — just one more fascinating element of the cougar discussion that makes it captivating.

The fact is that little is known of the Eastern cougar because it vanished so long ago. The prevailing wisdom is that there are three species of North American cougars, the Western cougar, Eastern cougar and Florida panther. However, some scientists now believe all three may be the same species, varying in size slightly according to where they live. A rule of thumb with deer is that they get bigger the farther north they live, and the same could be true of cougars. So, perhaps the Florida panther, though slightly smaller than its supposed cousins, is the same animal. Before that question can be answered, someone’s going to have to come up with an Eastern cougar, and that has been no easy task for the past century. Some believe that day is quickly approaching; others dig in their feet and say it’ll never happen. It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out.

Said an Eastern Cougar Foundation expert: “I doudt there are any pure Eastern Cougars left.”

Sounds reasonable.