I know some readers are sick of this stuff. A few good ole’ boys have even felt compelled to compose scathing letters to the editor. Then again, there are those who can’t get enough. So what to do when you sit in my chair and a story like this one drops into your lap?

It came via snail mail. I arrived at work and found a plump envelope resting on my desk, one that had the look and feel of a resume. The absence of a return address told me it was no resume, though, and piqued my curiosity further. I briefly suspected hate mail but quickly ruled that out. I have never received multi-page mail of that nature. Hate mail is typically short, vicious and to the point, often grammatically, uhm, challenged. I was convinced it was something worth reading, probably about cougars, maybe salmon, perhaps biomass or Wal-Mart or some other controversial issue I’ve chimed in on over the years. I couldn’t resist opening it and taking a look, so I peeled back a corner of the sealed flap, worked my index finger inside the inch-long hole and tore a jagged line along the fold. Sure enough, cougars.

The tidy letter (I only found a few minor typos in five single-spaced pages) began with a formal, six-line business address topped by my name in the upper left-hand corner. Then the intro began with a razor-sharp, barbed treble hook: “You seem to have run out of information relative to mountain lions but have established a proven record of honest interest in these animals locally. Consequently, this is a belated Christmas gift in hopes you can use it coupled with your investigative credentials to advance knowledge of mountain lion presence here.”

Hmmmmm? Interesting, indeed, but no time to carefully read it, organized in three bold-faced, labeled segments, “Published,” “Unpublished” and “Unsubstantiated.” Nonetheless, I skimmed through it, got the gist, and arrived at the end, where it was signed “CAU,” followed by the postscript: “Name omitted due to location and the traffic it may cause if you printed my name and address, but I will respond to any information or questions printed in your column if I know
the answer and subject demands response.”

The writer is an artist who believes in local cougars because he and his wife have seen them. The first sighting occurred several years ago on Route 2 in Shelburne as the couple drove past the old Mt. Mohawk Ski Area. Years later, his wife turned on two 500-watt floodlights to illuminate their backyard from the deck and came face-to-face with a big cat passing through. That animal “whirled around and stared directly into her face, waited, then turned and bounded off, tail high. As she described the ears and tail, there was no question but what this was a mountain lion like we had seen on the Trail.”

The man even ventures off into the common subplot of government conspiracy and secrecy, accusing MassWildlife’s Western District office of receiving, reviewing, substantiating, then burying photographic evidence of a Berkshire County cat furnished by a private citizen. I’d rather not go
there; have heard it or similar accusations many times in the past. They’re not worth chasing for many reasons, foremost that there is zero chance of confirming such a tale through state wildlife officials. Zilch. Especially now that you must first go through an annoying state Executive
Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs filter before speaking to any state employee. If something must be hidden, it will be. You can thank dandy former Gov. Mitt Romney for that. But let us not digress into politics. Back to the letter, which delves into a fascinating discussion on color manipulation under different concentrations of light, according to our source, the reason big-cat reports vary in color from black to gray to brown depending upon where and what time of day they are seen. And remember, this analysis comes courtesy of an artist who is familiar with
the way color changes under different light.

The first hint of this color-altering dynamic appears early in the narrative, paragraph five, when describing the Mohawk Trail sighting, a road-crossing from the overgrown ski area to the old Taylor farm, now Kenburn Orchards Bed & Breakfast: “As the animal traveled through the shade into the sunlight and out, it changed from gray to auburn to a light sienna (rust) and then back as it passed in front of us.” Get the point? The animal appeared to be several different colors during the same brief sighting by a trained eye. It gets better later, when the writer returns to an in-depth color discussion to conclude his piece.

Because I do not understand the relationship between light and color nearly as well as my source, I am about to do something I usually avoid like the plague when writing: lengthy quotes. To me, extended, uninterrupted attribution in a piece like this is lazy. A writer should be able to capture conversation by paraphrasing and writing, not quoting, except for short snippets delivered for sudden impact, maybe humor. I often find myself feeling the same way about dialogue in fiction, even from the masters, including my own favorite, the great Hamsun. I would rather be told what was said and why, not read quotations. But that’s just me.

Nonetheless, here I am about to violate one of my own golden rules by quoting verbatim my source’s scientific analysis of why the color of cougars can vary so from sighting to sighting. Sorry. Here it is. Rather than using quotation marks, I’ll use italics to identify his words:

Finally, I wish to debunk some of the misinformation we are fed by the fish and game, DCR or whatever it is called now. For too long, they have been fabricating information about … how the animal could not have been a mountain lion because they misidentified the color. I write not as a hunter or any kind of outdoorsman, but as a professional artist with the requisite training and about 50 years experience. Part of that training includes initial and continued intensive study in color and color theory as well as improvement in observational skills. … It is because of this
training and experience that I know our DCR is either lying to us, doesn’t know how stupid they actually appear or, since most are male, carry the color-blind gene, or perhaps all three. Here’s why:

Animal colors in this area as opposed to the tropics appear to be made up of a color and a tint (white) or shade (black) of that color. Burnt sienna (rust or iron oxide), such as that of a fox, for example, is a dominant color. Add more black and it turns a darker color, such as that of a blue Doberman. Add lots of black and you get a brownish black, such as a black bear.

The base of a rust color is composed of burnt sienna (red) and gold (yellow). A cougar’s color is on the gold side of this base. It appears that the color is generated by mixing the yellowish ochre color with that of its complement, which would generate a neutral gray or muddy brown. The surface of the animal appears to be a coppery-bronze rust color depending on light. However, as one looks inward below the surface toward the skin, it appears to get grayer and more neutral. This can be explained in several ways.The first possible explanation is that the deeper you look, the darker it gets, therefore harder to see color. It might just be that the pigmentation appears only on the very tips of the hair while the rest is the neutral of the color. One might think of this color-changing as perhaps a defensive response that allows the animal to hide in some types of lighting.

Furthermore, color changes with light. For example, take a walk in the woods with the sun at your back and the foliage will appear one color. Turn around and it is completely different. In addition, the sun reflects off the surface in places where the fur is compressed, and is absorbed in others as the animal stretches, creating lighter or darker variations of the same surface. In the animal world, think of the ridgeback, where the light splaying on the texture seems to create a different color along the back, where you look into the fur.

The animal I saw was in and out of the sunlight and at different positions relative to where I was. When I was in a position where the animal faced me or was at an angle in the light, it was a rust/bronze color. But as it moved across my path, I looked directly into the ends of the deep fur and it was gray. This occasionally shows up in photos of the animal and should help explain why there have been different color sightings by various people.

Since most cougars hunt and travel in the poor light of dawn or dusk, the colors of the beast would probably appear to be deep yellow- to grayish-ochre. Seen in front of the light, however, they would appear black. Finally, in any group of similar animals, there will always be variations. That the state uses this color “mix-up” to prove its point and confuse the issue is either innocent ignorance or blatant subterfuge. Take your pick.

So, readers, chew on this analysis whenever contemplating the reason why witnesses dating back to colonial New England have been reporting black or gray panthers. Apparently, it’s all about the light under which they see them. And remember, the preceding explanation came from a man who knows color and the effects of different light on it. That’s why I printed it as it came to me. Frankly, I couldn’t have said it better myself, and may have been inaccurate if I tried to paraphrase.

Why chance it?

A thick envelope sat on my desk when I arrived at work. The paste-on return address told me it had been sent by Kim Richter of Heath, color photo of a cougar on the left. “Uh-oh,” I thought, “here we go again.” The mail, electronic and snail, seems to flow hard every time I write about cougar sightings, be they close or faraway.

For those who missed it, the cougar I wrote about last week was in the east-central New Hampshire town of Barnstead, where someone saw a “mountain lion.” When a state wildlife official responded to the scene, he also saw it or another big cat with his own two eyes. Of course, a New Hampshire Fish & Game Department bigwig immediately doused the story with enough cold water to drown the big-cat, never mind the tale.

Imagine that. Stunning.

Ms. Richter, herself one of many Franklin County residents to report a personal cougar sighting in my weekly column, caught the report and wanted to alert me to black panther sightings that are raising a ruckus around Randolph, Vt., with lots of chatter in The Herald of Randolph. A story with legs and reader interest.

Apparently, our Heath source and her husband have been recently familiarizing themselves with an idyllic new piece of property they purchased in the Randolph area; going to the coffee shops, the general store, chatting, reading papers, listening to local radio, watching local TV, kind of feeling the pulse, the lucky dogs. Where better than Vermont to poke around, acclimate? I too love the Green Mountain State, its people’s gentle way, its liberal politics going all the way back the Ethan Allen and his boys, many of whom had direct connections to this slice of WMass paradise we call home. Too bad we didn’t secede and join the Republic of Vermont as proposed just after the Revolution, when WMass rabble-rousers decided it was time to shake free of the debt-grip being applied by Boston’s mercantile elite. But let us not digress (Long live Dr. Howard Dean! Here’s to you, pinko U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders!), back to panthers, the lower-case black ones; no, not the urban dwellers who attracted police bullets and jail cells the last time hated, liberal, Harvard elites from North of the Mason Dixon Line found their way to the White House and stirred up the dangerous reactionary-right fringe.

Enough! Back to four-legged black panthers.

Who knows what to make of these New England sightings? It’s nothing new. People have reported big black wildcats here dating back to the 17th century. But remember, back then they were also trying and convicting unfortunate souls for witchcraft, hanging Quaker women on Boston Common, banishing dissenters, finding Satan himself in the shadows; ghosts, too. So maybe that was the origin of Puritan-day black panthers, big, black, evil cats possessed by the devil himself. Who knows? Can’t rule it out. Despite sightings up and down the Eastern Seaboard from the Maritimes to Florida, black panthers do not exist here. They’re strictly a Southern Hemisphere phenomenon.

Of course, we have in the past touched on this subject here, examining all the potential reasons for reports of big black wildcats. One theory is that low light might be just right to make a grayish-brown cat wearing its winter coat appear black. Another is that random pet black panthers have been released or escaped. Could be either, I suppose. Then again, who’s to say some early explorers or slave-ship crews didn’t come ashore in South or Central America and acquire a black panther one way or another from an indigenous tribe, caging it in the ship’s hold and bringing it ashore here? Anything’s possible, I guess, and such a case would have probably gone unrecorded.

But let’s not get carried away. Enough of the wild speculation, attempts to explain the unexplainable. All I can say is there have been two credible black panther sightings in central Vermont and the local newspaper is eating it up while state officials distance themselves. So keep your eyes open. Randolph, Vt., ain’t that far north of here. No sir. So Satan himself may soon pass through a mowing near you.

If you happen to see him lurking on the edge, give him a friendly whistle and yell his name. It’s Lucifer.

Well, well, well … fancy that, a Granite State cougar sighting, this one by none other than a New Hampshire Fish and Game Department (NHFG) official responding to a reported — yeeeup, you guessed it — cougar sighting. The way this potentially hot story with legs ran its short, uneventful course underscores the absurdity of “official responses” to 21st century New England cougar sightings.

Our latest Northeastern “mountain lion” tale occurred in Barnstead, N.H., an hour or so east and slightly north of the capital city, Concord. Not surprisingly, New Hampshire Fish and Wildlife spokespeople are saying little, very little, in fact, only that: “Mountain lions are known to exist in the wild in states no closer than Iowa and Florida, so it is not thought to be a dispersing wild animal, but rather is most likely an illegally released pet.”

Hmmmmm? Well, I guess that’s what they always say, ain’t it?

So let’s dig deeper, take a look at this story, and evaluate the official response, one often repeated in recent years; also one that only a fool could accept without scratching his or her head in bewilderment. Think of it. Despite the fact that a wildlife official employed by NHFG responded to a cougar call and actually saw one, the state agency is distancing itself, denying even the remotest possibility that this big cat could be a wild traveler passing through from parts unknown, maybe even seeking a place to settle down. Impossible, they say. Why? Because: “Mountain lions were extirpated from their range in the eastern United States by the late 1800s, with the exception of the endangered Florida panther,” states the NHFG press release to quickly put a lid on the story, one that drew media scrutiny from Boston, Worcester and beyond, places interested in cougar sightings because similar ones have occurred in their own backyards.

It seems wildlife officials, the ones we pay to evaluate such occurrences, want no part of any cougar sighting — zero — always falling back on that same, threadbare escaped-pet theory, which, of course, makes a lot of sense to all of us. We know full well there are pet mountain lions everywhere; next door, around the corner, just down the road, you name it, they’re there. Absolutely. So don’t bury your head in the sand.

Hey, and while we’re at it, did you know mountain lions can make great pets with proper handling? Don’t we all know someone who owns a pet cougar? Haven’t we all seen the bespectacled, little old lady walking her leashed cougar past the house, plastic bag dangling from her free hand, nervously looking at the ground, anywhere but eye-contact with passersby or homeowners trimming the hedges as her feline squats next to the mailbox? Of course. Where have you been? Open your eyes, Dude.

Anyway, NHFG was so determined to stop this latest story dead in its tracks that it promptly marched its top dog, none other than Wildlife Division Chief Steve Weber, to send out the agency smokescreen. “Survival of this type of animal is typically extremely low,” he said in the press release, “as they normally do not have the developed abilities to catch prey on a consistent basis, and/or may have been de-clawed. If the animal does survive, we would expect to collect hard evidence of its existence in the form of a pictures, tracks, scat and/or DNA evidence.”

Before we proceed, let us not forget that before the turn of the 21st century, just such DNA evidence was discovered at the Quabbin. That tell-tale site included a buried beaver carcass and lots of wildcat scat, which was professionally collected, then analyzed by two nationally known labs. The analysis revealed Eastern cougar DNA; you know, the same species press releases keep telling us was “extirpated more than a century ago in these parts.”

The Quabbin case is the only “indisputable” evidence thus far uncovered to prove cougar presence here. But there is other “pretty convincing” evidence, including the most recent. Another was the two Acton cops who saw a cougar with their own eyes and documented it in separate police reports after responding to a late-night cougar complaint. How could it be clearer that no matter who sees a cougar, the official word is going to be a pathetic denial that it couldn’t possibly have been one; or, better still, if it was indeed a cougar, then it wasn’t wild?

For anyone unfamiliar with the many other cougar sightings I’ve chronicled over the years, they’re all right here, all of them occurring over the past five years. And do you know what? There were many concurrent reports I didn’t write about for one reason or another.

If all these sightings and official denials don’t stir your curiosity, or maybe even make you a tad suspicious, then it’s time to disconnect the feeding tube … pronto.

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

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

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

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

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

No way. The thing was huge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It could happen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmmmm? Imagine that.

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

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

End of story.

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

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

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

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

Sounds good … but certainly not undisputable.

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

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

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

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

You’d think so judging from the number of reports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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