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.