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.

Woodsman Peter M. Falandes, a self-described “old codger” from Charlemont, chimed in about wild cats and beyond. Saying he has a good knowledge of local wildlife after spending “a lot of his life in the woods,” his typed letter touched on mountain lions and Canada lynx.

Falandes doesn’t know what the fuss is about mountain lions. They’ve been around for decades, according to him, and he has even encountered two over the years, the first while partridge hunting off Legate Hill Road in Charlemont in 1959. The animal entered a clearing on a hill and, unaware of Falandes’ presence, walked to within 12 yards of him before detecting him. It then spun 90 degrees and “ambled off into the scrub pine.”

“As I was armed with bird shot, I did not consider shooting at this lion unless it made a hostile move,” he wrote; and there was no need to when the animal fled. … There was another close-range sighting of a lion shortly after this incident.”

Falandes’ second cat sighting occurred in 1982, in the middle of Lenox Swamp, also in Charlemont, but he didn’t go into the details. He did, however, give his assessment of the big-cat situation.

“Due to the lack of constant signs and/or sightings,” he wrote, “I think the lions are few in number with a large range, at least at this time.”

As for Lynx, Falandes has a more recent encounter to share, again in Charlemont, while hunting with a scoped rifle during the 2005 bobcat season. “I observed what I initially thought was a large bobcat but when I put the crosshairs on it, I realized it was a lynx,” he wrote. “The lynx was in the open and I was using a 6X scope at approximately 75 years, so there was mistake in identity. … A friend of mine had the exact same occurrence, only at closer range in Buckland.

I myself  experienced a similar sighting while sitting motionless in a deer stand overlooking a ravine across the street from my home eight or 10 years ago. I noticed movement along a stonewall and, once it got close enough, positively identified it as the largest bobcat I have seen. It stood perhaps 20 inches at the shoulder, long-legged like my male Springer Spaniel. In fact I have described it several times since as the size of 42-pound Ringo. I have seen several bobcats since, none approaching that size, but thought it could have been a large male like the 38-pounder I saw Conway trapper Eddie Rose carrying out of the woods along the Whately/Williamsburg line many years ago. After reading the description of lynx in a recent Vermont Fish & Game Department press release, it occurred to me that the animal I saw could have been and probably was a wayward lynx.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Here I go again, chasing ghosts, some tan, others darker, all with long, sloping tails bowed to the ground. Many credible sources claim to have seen these creatures in the area. Experts say they’re mistaken. So who do you believe — the credentialed ones who say cougars are extinct but can’t prove it, or honest citizens who report seeing them? It’s a quandary. Flip a coin. That’s about where we now sit.

More fuel for the fire was mailed to me by reader Bernice Brooks of Leyden. She clipped a Feb 15 “USA Today” article and sent it along thinking it may be of interest. The headline read “Central USA seeing mountain lion migrations: States long devoid of cougars find evidence of cats coming to stay.” The story discussed recent cougar migration to Midwestern states where they disappeared a century or more ago, at least that’s the official line. We’re talking about states like Nebraska, Arkansas, Illinois and Wisconsin; another not mentioned in the article but included in similar discussions is Michigan, where cougar sightings have increased dramatically over the past decade in remote Great Lakes country. So, the simple question is this: If the experts now agree that cougars are re-established within a day’s drive, why not here? Why not in the Adirondacks, the Greens, the Whites? Why not in the Poconos? It’s a question the most outspoken “ghost busters” don’t want to entertain, never mind attempt to answer. But the fact remains that, similar to here, witnesses in the five aforementioned Midwestern states had for years been reporting cougar sightings to a chorus of ridicule from experts, credentialed and otherwise. You know the line: “Another cougar sighting? What was he or she smoking? Ha-ha-ha.” Well, apparently the laughter has quieted in the heartland, where the same experts who 10 years ago denied the validity of cougar sightings now say there is indeed a resident cougar population. Sound familiar? It should. The same thing happened a generation ago in Florida, where people reported panther sightings and were informed by wildlife officials that it was impossible, Florida Panthers were extinct. They’re singing a different tune today, with a viable, reproductive panther population lurking in Sunshine State swamps.

Imagine that. Florida panthers weren’t extinct after all. Hmmm? Wonder why they insisted they were, why they refused to admit even the most remote possibility they were back? I guess they’d have to answer that. Now a similar scenario in the Midwest, where the well-intentioned fellas with patches on their shirts admit big cats back. At first they identified confirmed sightings as escaped exotic pets, then young, wayward males displaced by territorial adults in the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming. And who’s to say that wasn’t the case. But now the explanation’s changed. Wayward females have entered the formula as well, and we all know what comes next. Yep, you’ve guessed it … kittens, like the immature cougar spotted 50 miles southwest of Milwaukee and confirmed by DNA testing to be a cougar. So it looks like what’s happening there is exactly what the experts said could not happen there, in Florida a generation earlier, or in the Northeast now. And do you want to hear a good one? There’s information “out there” that experts aren’t even sure Eastern and Western cougars are different species, perhaps only a variation of the same.

All I can say is this: Believe what you want but be very careful what you say in public, who you criticize, how adamant you are in your opposition, because your day of reckoning could be near. And when that day arrives and these sightings can no longer be dismissed as escaped pets, LSD flashbacks or delusions, the experts with the gilt-framed degrees hanging behind their desks will have some explaining to do. Lights, camera, action, it’ll be there on the 6 o’clock news, in print, on-line. Backpedaling experts will be scurrying to defend their earlier opinions, stuttering, stammering, excuse after excuse, in disbelief that the information they pulled out of a book somewhere was wrong. It’ll be pure entertainment for me and other idiots. Comic relief.

There is a way for the fellas to escape this potential future indignity. Seems pretty simple from this perch. All they have to do is admit they can’t be certain Eastern cougars were ever extinct.

That way, they’re covered.

It’s bewildering how wildlife officials continue to turn deaf ears and blind eyes toward Northeastern cougar sightings. They should know better given what happened in Florida about 20 years ago, not to mention what is happening today in Arkansas, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan. You’d think doctoral-level scientists worth their salt would learn from their mistakes, or at least be cautious about routinely dismissing credible sightings. But that doesn’t seem to be the case, and it doesn’t surprise Buckland Yankee Roger Ward one smidgen.

Known to his friends as Hezekiah because of his Biblical middle name, Ward could be on the right track in his assessment of some highly credentialed experts. “You know what we say about those people up here, don’t you?” he said. “We say ‘They’ve had too much college and not enough grammar school.’”

Too much college, not enough grammar school? That’s a good one.

Ward has fresh personal experience to draw from, a case that brought MassWildlife authorities to the scene “four or five years ago.” The incident involved a pony Ward’s daughter was boarding at Peter Bravmann’s Conway horse farm. The animal appeared to have been killed and partially eaten overnight and, because there had been a couple of big-cat sightings at the nearby Crafts Farm on the Buckland road, there was reason to suspect a cougar kill. The authorities didn’t want to hear about it, though; concluded that the pony had died of natural causes, then a predator, possibly a bear or coyote, had come upon it and nibbled on the hindquarter. Ward, a longtime woodsman and hunter, wasn’t convinced. Neither was the property owner.

“Bravmann said the animal was perfectly healthy the night before, dead and chewed up the next morning,” Ward said. “I went up there and saw the carcass. It had claw marks on the neck that looked suspicious. The tracks looked more like a cat than a canine to me, but I’m no expert.”

The reaction of the MassWildlife officials called to that scene shouldn’t be surprising; it fits a pattern of  “official response” to other potential cougar evidence along the Eastern Seaboard from Florida to Canada over the past 25 years, according to “The Eastern Cougar: Historic Accounts, Scientific Investigations, New Evidence,” edited by Chris Bolgiano and Jerry Roberts and published last year. In the meantime, there has be indisputable evidence uncovered in Florida, Arkansas, Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin — evidence as convincing as road kills — along with newfound cougar populations in the Upper and Lower Peninsulas of Michigan. So if the big cats have already recolonized those states, what’s to stop them from expanding into other wild historic haunts like the Catskills and Adirondacks in New York, the Green and White Mountains in New England and the Appalachians in the mid-Atlantic states? The simple answer appears to be: not a thing.

The Florida controversy of the 70s and 80s is a persuasive example, one the authorities ought to pay special attention to when evaluating potential cougar re-emergence elsewhere. Similar to today in the Northeast, increasing Florida panther sightings were being reported around deep, dense Florida swamps back then. Wildlife officials initially responded to those sightings the same way they treat Northern sightings today — mistaken identity, escaped pet, outright hoax — and stubbornly dug in their heels . A reproductive, native population of Florida panthers believed to be extinct since the first decade of the 20^th century was out of the question, they said. Well, guess what? They were wrong. Indeed there is a native population, and its range is moving north and west due to an unavoidable population increase.

Simultaneously, experts have been forced to admit that Western cougars have repopulated Minnesota, Illinois and Wisconsin, and now the evidence is there to place them in Michigan’s Great Lakes region. It’s a simple formula: Adult males push out immature males, which are forced into new habitats and are, in due time, followed by young females that ultimately mate with the migrant males to expand the species’ range. Reforestation of previously cleared land is the key, and there is no shortage of that here in the Northeast, not to mention Appalachia.

The aforementioned new “Eastern cougar” book documents the entire story of the Quabbin scat sample collected in April 1997 on the Quabbin Reservation by animal tracker John McCarter. Then a teacher at Paul Rezendes’ Tracking School, McCarter came upon the kind of cougar evidence state and federal wildlife officials demand before attaching “legitimate” status to it. The site in the Franklin County town of New Salem included a partially buried beaver carcass, aggressively scratched earth, and several covered scats. McCarter collected scat samples, shipped them off to two respected laboratories, and both used DNA analysis to identify their specimens as Eastern cougar scat. That said, the official assessment from MassWildlife was that a domestic “Eastern cougar” had escaped and passed through the Quabbin.

UMass graduate student Noah Charney followed up the McCarter discovery with a field-research project at the Quabbin but came up with no further evidence of resident Quabbin cougars. His most interesting discovery between May 2004 and May 2005 was remains of a moose carcass found at the Quabbin. He collected samples at the scene, had it analyzed and found no biological cougar evidence. “The remains were old and not ideal for research,” he reported.

Apprised of the cougar-sighting data this space has collected over the past two months, Charney is reviewing it and plans to follow up on a plaster cast of a suspected cougar track found in Buckland and a photo taken of a similar track in a Shelburne orchard.

Stay tuned. A coordinated effort to find cougar evidence could get interesting.

Experts say there is no tangible evidence to support an Easter cougar comeback.

I suppose the most pertinent question is: How hard have they looked?

I tried to get off the big-cat chase last week, just mentioning it in passing at the end of the column; but apparently readers haven’t had enough yet, thus the e-mails and phone calls reporting additional cougar information over the past seven days.

As I sat at my desk Wednesday morning mulling options for this week’s column, first an e-mail from Marilyn Berthelette greeted me to report a Feb. 13 cougar sighting on North Taylor Hill in Montague, then a phone call from Roger Ward to report a confirmed sighting in Alstead, N.H., where his brother was a longtime chief of police. But let’s not digress. When I sat down to pen this narrative, I intended to focus on the Whately Glen, and several sightings there. So let’s travel to that idyllic spot some three miles west of Sugarloaf Mountain. Once known as Sanderson’s Glen, it’s a location I happen to know a little bit about. Fifth great grandfather Deacon Thomas Sanderson lived and ran grist and sawmills there until his 1824 death, and the family remained there until the mid-1930’s, when the property changed hands.

The first cougar sighting I ever heard of occurred at the Glen in the early 1970s, when the basin for the upper South Deerfield reservoir was being cleared. A couple of local boys were having lunch when, to their amazement, a cougar walked right past them. Since starting this cougar chase 2½ months ago, I have received three additional reports of cougar sightings in the wild, densely wooded area. Let’s take a look.

Our first sighting was reported by Chet Ostrowski Jr., whose family ran a farm for many years just northeast of Trinski’s Pond, where he was surprised to spot a cougar along the northern perimeter of the Great Swamp, as dense a jungle as you’ll find in Franklin County. “I never said anything about it because I thought people would think I was crazy,” Ostrowski said. “I happened to see movement up against the woods and it ran up a deadfall, gave a blood-curdling screech and disappeared into the woods. It was about 100 yards away when I saw it; had to be six feet long. It all happened very fast.”

Ostrowski isn’t alone. Two other witnesses, totally unfamiliar with Ostrowski’s tale, came forward to report cougar sightings in the area — ones difficult to dispute.

The first report came from John K. Parker, who lives a stone’s throw from Trinski’s Pond, on Hobbie Rd in the Mill River section of Deerfield. His sighting occurred some 15 years ago, when his son was still napping daily and he and his wife had discovered that a ride in the car could lull him to sleep. It was during such a slumber ride, about 3 on a Thanksgiving afternoon, that Parker’s cougar sighting occurred.

“Living in sight of White Birch Campgrounds, our natural route conducive to napping was the slow-paced Whately Glen Road that connects North Street in Whately with Conway’s Roaring Brook Road. When we headed east from Conway onto the Glenn road, after passing the last house and a pond/swampy flatland, we headed into the woods. Almost immediately, this monster cat with a long tail streaked across our path, left to right. Having witnessed much wildlife activity in our yard, with bobcats, fisher cat, coyotes, bear, turkeys, and deer, it didn’t seem unreasonable to add ‘lion.’”

A more recent sighting, not far from Parker’s or Ostrowski’s, was made by then 16-year-old snowmobiler Greg Barlow on a February morning in 1997, while riding his sled through the Glen from Deerfield to his hometown of Conway. Barlow recalls following a snowmobile trail along the Deerfield side of Roaring Brook, between the two reservoirs, when some movement on the right side of the trail caught his attention. He assumed it was a coyote at first, but when it crossed the trail in front of him he knew he was observing something special, a big cat.

“I know what I saw and it was no bobcat or fisher;” Barlow said on the phone, “it was a mountain lion, gray-brown with a long tail almost as big around as a soda can. It was 30 yards away and bound right in front of the sled. I could see its huge muscles and head. There was a lot of snow on the ground but it cleared the snow pretty good and was long, a big animal.”

Barlow was way ahead of his traveling companions so he stopped and he stepped off his sled. The cougar took some “huge bounds” through the deep snow, then stopped some 30 to 40 yards away and turned facing him. “It looked right at me, big eyes and whiskers, shorter ears, then took off when it heard my friends approaching.”

How many more reports like this must we hear before attaching credibility to cougar sightings?

Stay tuned … I still haven’t even touched on the other side of the story, that of the Doubting Thomases.

Mountain lion tales are coming out of the woodwork.

This week, during a brief stop at The Recorder, two people in the newsroom stopped with tales of sightings, one by reporter Diane Broncaccio, the other by the sister of the Composing Department’s Susan Smith. It all started the way most cougar discussions begin — Smith telling the story about her sister’s sighting in her East Colrain back yard, Broncaccio overhearing the conversation and chiming in with a tale of her own, one she dubbed “my cougar story,” which occurred in Heath. A similar scenario could easily unfold at the barber shop, super market, church, town hall, ballgame, tavern … you name it, the conversation could take off there. All you need is one person bold enough to admit publicly that they’ve seen a big cat and the stories begin to piggyback. And that’s precisely what has happened in this space over the past month: One teaser tale has turned into a running commentary that’s now in its fifth consecutive week; and let me warn you now, this won’t be the last you hear about it here. There’s simply too many stories for one newspaper column. More than I would have ever imagined. In fact, an interesting tale just arrived in my Inbox this morning, one that occurred eerily close to several other recent sightings. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. That one can wait while we address others from the ever-growing pile of printouts on my desk.

Today we’ll begin with Rocky Stone of Orange, a typical reporter of big-cat sightings, timid but credible. An Athol native and current coach of the Athol High School football team he once played for, Stone is a class act who has “followed the recent columns concerning cat sightings with much interest.” So, add it up, he waited a solid month to throw his hat in the ring. Prior to his “coming out,” he had shared his story only with his father, Chuck Stone, a sports and news reporter for the Fitchburg Sentinel and the Athol Daily News.

Stone’s tale goes back to 1956 when, as an 11-year-old boy living on Highland Avenue in Athol, he spotted something out his bedroom window that left an indelible impression. “It was a very large cat and I assumed it was a black panther that had escaped from a zoo or circus,” Stone wrote in an email.

When sheepishly informed, his father filed his son’s report in his memory bank and, during the mid ’60s, discovered a couple of newspaper articles he thought would be of interest. One story, probably from the Rutland Herald, told of  numerous panther sightings around central Vermont; another, by longtime Maine outdoor writer Gene Letourneau, told of a cougar carcass found in New York state. The Vermont paper was offering a $100 reward for its cat. Rocky Stone squirreled away those clippings 40-some years ago and dug them out recently to contribute to this column’s cougar chase. Think of it, would a man who invented a tall tale at age 11 still be able to locate clippings his father sent him in college over 40 years ago if he wasn’t certain of what he saw from his bedroom window? Very doubtful.

“Interestingly, a few years ago I read an article (when and where I’m not sure) about mountain lions which stated that black colored varieties do appear in the species every so often,” he wrote. “So I am certain that what I saw from our house in ’56 was a black-colored mountain lion. The pursuit of the mountain lion in the Northeast is analogous to the search for UFOs, people frequently spot them but the government officials always seem to be in denial.”

Coincidentally, an earlier email sent by Donna Scott of Ashfield also described a dark-colored big cat she saw “around dusk four years ago” in Conway, off Route 116. She spotted something approaching the road and “jammed on her brakes.” The creature crossed the road in front of her and ran up a hill on the other side of the road. “It looked like a panther (grayish colored) and I was mesmerized by how graceful it was.” she wrote. … “It was gorgeous, about four feet long (minus the tail) and its back would maybe come just above my knee. It was definitely feline looking and running. Very sleek and graceful. Gorgeous!”

Excited by the sighting, Scott telephoned her father, an outdoorsman and hunter “who knows a lot about nature,” to run it by him. He told her it sounded like she had seen a cougar, but he was confused by the color. As far as he knew cougars were brown. He suggested she research it to see what she could come up with, so she went to the encyclopedia and came away convinced. “I was astonished to see that what I saw was actually a cougar, and they can be grayish,” she wrote.

“Yes,” said Tom Valiton of Buckland when told of the color issue. “Remember I told you that there’s no mistaking the brown of a cougar, that it’s unique, nothing like a deer. Well, she’s right. It’s a gray/brown. No mistaking it.”

Valiton should know. He was on the scene of a cougar kill in Texas during his years in the Marine Corps and was featured in this space last week for seeing the same big cat twice within two weeks on Hawks Road, near the Shelburne-Deerfield town line.

Because Ms. Scott owns a retail store in Ashfield, she had ample opportunity to discuss her sighting with customers. She was surprised to learn how many had similar tales to share. “Since my sighting I have had over a dozen people stop by and tell me about theirs,” she wrote. “One day when I was unfortunately not in the store someone I had never met, a hunter, stopped by and left a message that he had pictures of cougar tracks and even a picture of a gray cougar taken about two miles from my sighting the following winter. But he was scared to show the picture!”

Scot says she’s had “discussions with natural biologists, but I know what I saw.”

Along the same vein is a contributing email from John Lucas, formerly from Shelburne and now living in Cadyville, N.Y. His uncle from Millers Falls mailed him two of my columns about cougars and he dropped me an line to question why official responses to big-cat sightings try to cast doubt on the witnesses. Lucas’ most recent sighting occurred on his expansive New York state property “several years ago, when a very large cat crossed our field at a Thanksgiving dinner. Fortunately we had several friends and relatives here and it was seen by all of us. There was no question it was a mountain lion.”

Lucas reported the sighting to a local outdoor columnist “who claims to be an expert on outdoor life,” and the scribe tried to tell him it as a fisher cat. Then, following several other reported sightings in the area, the same columnist dismissed them as nonsense.

Last fall Lucas says he was walking his dog through a field he owns when a mountain lion passed 50 feet in front of them “in high gear. I have never seen an animal run so fast. My dog just froze and stared, he weighs 60 pounds. This cat was twice his size.”

Lucas went on to compliment me for “supporting the sightings down there. We need someone like you up here. Our sportswriter is Dennis April. I think he gets his information from the Internet and should be on the comic pages.”

To be fair, I must admit I’ve received credible reports from trained professionals who doubt the existence of mountain lions in New England. That discussion is for another day. First, we must get through the other side of the story, the one wildlife officials seem determined to sweep under the carpet. It gets interesting.

Very interesting.

This mountain lion story we’ve been chasing the past few weeks has legs — good, strong, healthy legs that are taking us on a wild ride through Franklin County and beyond. Yep, we may be onto something here, judging from the steady response.

The reports keep coming, all of them worthy of attention. Seems that once witnesses start disclosing what they’ve seen, others are more willing to join the conversation, no longer concerned that they’ll be greeted with ridicule and scorn. Hopefully it’ll continue.

So far, 12 eye witnesses have contacted this space, seven by e-mail, four by telephone, and one by personal visit, snapshots of cougar tracks in hand. Also, what originally set this runaway train in motion was a cat track in fresh Conway snow observed during deer season by me. I queried two abutting landowners and found that both had either seen a big cat there or knew someone who had. Also, a farmer who lives above me reported three sightings in a cornfield this past fall. All tolled, that’s 18 sightings or evidence of big cats. Can there be any doubt there are more people out there with tales to tell? Don’t bet against it.

Twelve of the reported sightings occurred in Conway, Shelburne, Deerfield or Ashfield, many within a small area on both sides of the Deerfield River. Three other big cats were spotted in the Montague-Wendell area, two were seen in southern Vermont border towns, and another was reported in Colrain. Interestingly, two of the people who contacted this space reported two separate sightings, one of them actually two in the same location over a two-week period. That man, my old baseball coach and hunting companion Tommy Valiton, knows a big cat when he sees one. He was once on the scene of a Texas kill and helped a friend field-dress the animal.

“The one I saw here was in 1990, on my way to a stress test in Springfield,” said Valiton, who lives in Buckland. “I was traveling with my wife and a friend and we were taking the back road to Route 91, through the Old World.”

As they traveled through a wetland, there, right in the road, was a big cat, which acted confused, according to Valiton. “It went one way, then the other, looked at us and took off. We go a good look. Then two weeks later, I’m taking the same route, this time with my bride, and it crossed the road right in front of us in the same place.”

Not long after that, at a Shelburne Falls social gathering of Frontier Regional School teachers, members of a bowling league, colleague Al Richards from Sunderland approached Valiton.

“I took the back road in and you’ll never guess what I saw.”

“Let me guess: a mountain lion?”

“Howdya know?

“Because I’ve seen two recently.”

Richards was impressed.

The other person who reported twice seeing a big cat is Sean King of Colrain. The first sighting took place “several years ago” traveling home from bowhunting along Jacksonville Stage Road in Halifax, Vt.

“I knew immediately it was a cat by the way it moved. The last thing I saw was its long, skinny cat’s tail going over a stone wall. It acted exactly like a house cat only it was bigger than a dog, 80 pounds or so. I felt as though I had seen a ghost.”

His second sighting occurred while driving up Colrain Mountain, not far from the sculptor’s iron rendition of a black panther along the east side of the steep road.

“It was a cat the same as the one I had seen before, with the unmistakable cat’s tail. It crossed the road right in front of me. And just to make my story completely unbelievable, it crossed within sight of the sculpture.”

Eighty-two-year-old Robert Remillard of Northfield is no stranger to big cats or stories about them. He called on the phone to offer some historical perspective about a big cat he witnessed in 1940 on a foggy slope in the village of Green River, Vt.

“I saw it briefly on a side hill, then it bound into the fog and disappeared. There were other cat sightings around that time in southern Vermont. One I remember was in Dummerston, where a cat walked between two girls through a ravine. It created quite a stir.”

In fact, Remillard said the Brattleboro Sportsmen’s Club offered a $100 reward for the cat, a pretty hefty price in those days. Then the Bellows Falls and Rutland newspapers offered $50 rewards.

Remillard has carried an interest in big cats ever since. He once attended a presentation by United States Fish & Wildlife biologist Virginia Fifield, who was stationed in western Mass. during the 1980s specifically to investigate cat sightings. Over a decade, Fifield responded to many reported sightings but was able to confirm just one cougar track in a Goshen mud-hole puddle.

Remillard said he attended Fifield’s evening talk at UMass with his brother. “She said you could tell a cat track because they left no claw prints, and that cats followed the food chain. Wherever there are a lot of deer (or turkeys), they’ll be there. There was a woman from Four-Mile Brook Road in Northfield at the meeting who had seen big cat. Makes sense. There were a lot of deer up there at the time.”

The cat tales keep coming. There are many more right here in a pile on my desk. Let’s run with it.

I can’t say I’m surprised that last week’s cougar column drew some feedback from local eyewitnesses. In fact, truth be known, I was hoping to stir the pot. Seems like a great cabin-fever topic.

The controversial subject of New England mountain lions has lain dormant in this space for some time despite knowledge of many reported sightings either in the press or by word of mouth over the past decade. I have not turned a deaf ear to such reports, just stopped commenting on them, not wanting to “beat a dead horse.” But like I said last week, when the big cats start showing up in your back yard, it’s time to pay attention.

By mid-morning of the day last week’s column hit the street there were two e-mails waiting in my Inbox, one from equine enthusiast Laurie Neely of Orange, the other from longtime Sunderland native and current Montague resident Karle Kushi. The next day another response came by way of the telephone. It was old friend and semi-neighbor Joe Judd, who unbeknownst to him had been mentioned anonymously in the column he wanted to discuss. Two of the three respondents reported seeing a big cat; the third had seen and photographed a track that had been brought to his attention by the landowner. Interestingly, two of the three witnesses had been rebuffed by authorities when reporting their sighting. The officials understandably do not want to spawn public hysteria.

Kushi reported seeing a big cat and later tracks left by one in north Sunderland 30 or more years ago. “They’ve been around the area for a long time,” he wrote. “My wife had one jump across the road in front of her car about five years ago on her way to work at UMass. It happened on Turners Falls Road, just before Randall Road, where the power lines cross, coming from the Montague landfill.”

Neely’s observation, coincidentally also on her way to work at UMass, occurred last fall in the Wendell State Forest. The big cat crossed Farley Road in front of her vehicle. “There is no doubt about it,” she wrote. “I had a clear view, maybe 50 yards away. … I was driving toward Millers Falls from Wendell. It was crossing north to south, into the woods from the side of the road that borders the Millers River. Dog-sized, light brownish in color, it had a very long tail that curled up toward the end.”

Believing she had made an important observation, Neely reported the sighting by telephoning the United States Fish & Wildlife Service in Hadley and posting it on the Five-College Bulletin Board. Many responses from people who had seen big cats appeared quickly on the bulletin board, two of them reporting cougar-sightings in Leverett and Montague, “in the hills that are pretty-much contiguous with Wendell State Forest,” according to Neely.

“A number of people (from the bulletin board) contacted me to say they too had seen big cats, and that the F&W office had a policy of not responding or verifying cougar sightings??? Indeed, my message was never returned.”

Judd, who spends a great deal of time in the western Franklin County woods, has never seen a big cat himself, but he was alerted to the presence of one in his neighborhood, as I was, and went to the scene of a sighting, where he discovered a clearly discernible track and photographed it. Knowing many high-ranking MassWildlife officials personally, he disclosed his discovery, offered the photo to substantiate the presence of a big cat in Shelburne and was snubbed by an old friend.

“I was a little surprised by the response,” Judd said. “Apparently, they don’t want to publicize these things. I’ll come by with the photo Saturday afternoon after 3, so you can take a look.”

I looked it over and it looked like a cat track to me … a big one.