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.

The first Indian trails I ever walked are carved into the Sugarloafs, north and south, one snaking its way up the south face of Wequamps to King Philip’s Seat, the other meandering through the cliffs on the west face of North Sugarloaf to another shelf-cave we were told had Native significance. How I found them I can’t recall. It must have been word-of-mouth on Graves Street and Eastern Avenue. But does it really matter? All I know is that we walked those trails often during the pleasant months, getting away from adult supervision, never a bad thing then or now, free play, even a little mischief now and then. Big deal. Out of sight, out of mind; no harm, no foul. Can you think of any other cliches to raise the ire of devoted AP stylists, if there are any left?

I’m sure I could still find those ancient trails with little effort, the more difficult of the two being the one on North Sugarloaf. To get there, you had to go to the end of Graves Street near a little electrical sub-station, then angle southeast to the base of the cliffs and follow it to pick up the trail, an obvious footpath sunken deep into the hard red clay. I don’t even know if kids still walk it. I hope so. But one never knows in these paranoid times. Could be that those footpaths haven’t been used for years. We always called them Indians trails. That’s what I believe they are. Who else could have made them prehistoric deep?

Since those youthful days of explorative bliss, I have read much about our indigenous trails, honing my knowledge and fine-tuning my eye for historic landscapes and their traversing trails. The trodden paths that greeted Bradford and Alden, Winthrop and Saltonstall during New England’s contract period later became their highways to manifest destiny, widened and diverted here and there over time to become Boston Post Road or Bay Path, suitable for wheeled vehicles after improvements and corduroy roads through troublesome depressions. Over time, the secondary roads were discontinued and abandoned, but they still exist in our wooded highlands, many lined with stone-clad depressions and above-ground foundations that provide clues of what used to be.

When you ponder it without getting carried away, it’s really quite simple. Do you really think Rev. Thomas Hooker and his Puritan flock cut their own path to Hartford in 1636? Of course not. They followed existing trails to the Connecticut Valley, then used waterways and other paths northward to places like Northampton, Hadley, Deerfield and Northfield. Once those towns started to fill up with pre-birth-control congestion, settlers looking for space branched out into what became our hilltowns by following existing trails and staking their claims along them. They’re still there under a dense forest canopy, a lost world with fascinating historic relevance.

I continue to learn more about these long-lost hilltown roads and farms. Soon, I will start putting to use a new tool — my DeLorme Earthmate PN-40 hand-held GPS unit — to mark the roads, cellar holes and landmarks along the way. I think it’ll enhance my perspective, snuggle me closer to the land stained with my ancestors’ sweat and blood.

It’s great. Here I am 56 years old and still enjoying free play in the woods. Hopefully my grandsons will follow my footsteps long after I’m gone. Better still, maybe they’ll even use the intuitive computer skills I’ll never have to help me master the new toy.

That would be fun indeed.

I’ve had a letter sitting here on my desk for a couple of years, one I’ve “been meaning to get to,” if you know what I mean. But here I sit, finally getting back to it, prodded by the man who sent it, dignified octogenarian Edward M. Wells of Leyden, Franklin County roots nearly as deep as the Sunderland sycamore.

It was Mr. Wells who showed up at my door a month or so ago inquiring about the letter. Did I still have it kicking around? If so, he thought he’d float it past Irmarie Jones or someone else who may be interested. It brought me back to my school daze many years ago, the Harris-tweed, bespectacled teacher, chalk-dusted shoulders, asking how many more days I’d need to finish the essay due last week. Well, let’s just say Mr. Wells got a 21st-century response, no resemblance to my trusted 1970 friend, Sixties Defiance. The story of Robert “Bud” Coombs’ had indeed interested me; loved the writing style, too. I did intend to do something on it. Just needed a little poke, I guess. Well, Mr. Wells was there to dig his dusty pointer stick between my ribs. So here I sit, wondering where to start.

Accompanying the essay was Mr. Wells’ handwritten letter, dated June 2, 2007, prefacing the little tale, deft touch, that had been written for the Christmas holidays by his late cousin’s Tucson, Ariz., widow. Her name was Jean, wife of “Bud” Coombs, he from, you guessed it, Coombs Hill in Colrain, just a hop, skip and a jump west of me, on the site of the old Fort Morris of French & Indian War fame, one of four garrisons available to Coleraine’s earliest Scots-Irish settlers when danger loomed in the howling wilderness. Bud’s people had farmed that idyllic spot looking east at Monadnock since the start, parts of four centuries turning up stones and Native implements while tilling the soil.

But this is not a history of Coombs Hill or Coombs Farm or that old “South Fort.” No, this story has Franklin County Fair flavor, one that some of the older readers among us will remember well. It’s about what the annual September gathering on Petty’s Plain once meant countywide to farm- and schoolboys alike. Sadly, this weekend there will be no schoolboy athletic competition akin to the days of Bud Coombs and my own father, himself a former fair sprint champion, then a Deerfield teen representing Greenfield after putting Deerfield High in his rearview due to “issues” with the school administration. Like they say, the apple doesn’t fall from the tree. Maybe I too should have fled. But I stayed … and ultimately paid.

Enough of that, though … back to Bud Coombs and his Franklin County Fair day in the sun, as told by his sweetheart in her stylish, heartfelt essay that touched on a little of everything pertinent to country fairs and those who attended them way back when. Times have changed. Now the grandstand is filled for demolition derbies; in my day, fireman’s musters. Not back then, in 1942, bombs disrupting daily lives worldwide, subsistence hilltown farms struggling to make a go of it with laborers off to war on faraway continents. Like many other agrarian highland lads, Bud Coombs was strong like bull and fleet afoot but unable to join proud Arms Academy’s athletic teams because daily farm chores precluded it.

The story begins in the barn, where Bud and his father are performing morning chores as part of their daily routine, the reticent teen hinting that he’d like to break free, no school, and take the old Chevy to the fair. His father, painfully short on words, one-ups him, tells him to take the big red Oldsmobile, quite a treat for a 17-year-old rolling down dusty Brook Road and across the lush Greenfield Meadows to the county fair. Yes sir, he was living large.

He climbs the gentle slope to the fairgrounds, parks the Olds out of harm’s way and heads for the gate. Once inside, young Bud goes directly to the grandstand area to catch the track meet, where the county schools — his Arms, Greenfield and Turners, probably others — vie for bragging rights annually in a spirited competition fueled by town and school pride. Remember, those were the days when every Franklin County town had its own summer baseball team, and inter-town rivalries were intense, more so than today, when kids have traded their Louisville Sluggers for joysticks. But let us not digress, or take cheap shots at today’s youth. Back to the ’42 fair, nine months removed from Pearl Harbor, the world aflame, young Bud quick-stepping down the midway to the track.

He arrives at in front of the grandstand and the Arms coach, short of competitors, is nervously pacing, furiously scanning the bleachers, the track, anywhere for able bodies. He spots Bud. Can he run? Timidly, Bud nods. Yes, he can run. He’s promptly rewarded with Arms maroon and white to don, a pair of “roomy” track shoes to lace up. He puts on his new uniform, receives quick lessons in stance and how to burst from the blocks at the report of a revolver, and proceeds to win the 220- and 100-yard dashes, helping his school secure the Franklin County track championship, quite a feat against the larger schools. A story fit for the big screen, that of Bud Coombs’ day of glory at the fair. Yes, a wartime tale worth repeating.

Before departing for home, back up Brook Road to Coombs Hill, Bud is named captain of the fair team and spends the rest of the day walking the lanes, flirting, eating hot dogs, cotton candy, candied apples; playing games and riding the Ferris wheel with adoring Arms coeds, frightened by rocking at the peak. He arrives home a little late for evening chores and his father is already at it. He doesn’t say much, just nods and softly kicks a milking stool toward a waiting shorthorn. Bud sits firmly, grabs a teat, pulls and twists, producing that familiar hollow splash off the base of an empty bucket.

“Good fair?” his father inquires.

“Yup.”

More splashes.

Humble souls, those country folk from our bucolic Franklin hills. Don’t say much. Never did. Never will.

Just enough.

A little Buckland birdie gave me a call Sunday. He was responding to an unintentional call placed by my wife from our caller-ID directory. She hit the speed-dial, noticed it was the wrong number and hung up before anyone answered. It went through and left our number on the recipient’s caller-ID, so he called right back and I answered; Red Sox-Blue Jays game on the tube; refreshing pre-autumn breeze wafting through the parlor.

“Hi Hezzie,” I said. “Did the fellas ride you about your comments in my last column? I didn’t name you but I knew it would be no mystery to the boys at Fox Towne (Coffee Shop).”

He chuckled, comfortable in his skin.

“Don’t ever change, Bags, please,” he said. “I got a kick out of it. It’s no secret around here where I stand.”

The subject changed quickly, right to the previous day’s Kennedy funeral; what a powerful event it had been, the legions along the road, average people waving goodbye. I told him I had thrice seen young Teddy tell his tale of losing a leg and Sen. Kennedy telling him they were going to climb the hill together if it took them all day; that I could not control my emotions the first time or last, far too overpowering. He understood.

“The tears seem to come easier the older you get,” he confessed. “I don’t know why. They just do.”

Then it dawned on me: Hezzie had been a state man, an active Democrat; he must have met Teddy somewhere along the way.

“Funny you’d ask,” he said. “I spent yesterday afternoon searching for a signature of his that I saved from Mohawk Park. We kept the receipts around the office in a ledger for a couple of years. Then we’d throw them out. Well, that year I went through the ones we were discarding, pulled Kennedy’s out and took it home with me. I know it’s here somewhere. When I find it, I’m gonna frame it and hang it up.”

He couldn’t remember all the details of the weekend Kennedy visit but figured it was probably soon after Bobby had been assassinated. Teddy came into Mohawk Park in a camper, “like a Winnebago,” stayed for a couple days, “probably Friday and Saturday,” and had a tribe of kids with him, Bobby’s and his own.

“Maybe, even, Bobby and Ethel were there, too,” he said. “But I don’t believe so. I know their kids were. Bobby was probably gone and Ted had them.”

Teddy rented a cabin and spent a couple of days entertaining the kids around the confluence of the Cold and Deerfield rivers, swimming, picnicking; happy-go-lucky, pleasant to deal with.

“I wanted to give him a freebie but he wouldn’t hear of it,” Hezzie said, “insisted on paying, cash.”

At one point during the stay, the kids got a little frisky, throwing stones into the Deerfield River like kids do, and one of them hit the bath house.

“They were good kids, didn’t mean any harm,” Hezzie said. “But you know kids.”

Me? Yeah, I know. Used to be one.

Anyway, the startling sound of that stone hitting the building attracted everyone’s attention. Teddy didn’t overreact, order a timeout, get out the whipping stick, or even raise his voice. “No,” Hezzie recalled, “he just calmly said something like, ‘Boys, we must be more careful. What would we ever have done if that stone had broken a window?’”

End of story, indelible, Franklin folklore circa ’68.

Kennedy mystique.

I recently befriended an interesting octogenarian, I think 87, spry, a collector of coins, stamps and other stuff. His name is Harry. He considers me a good friend. I’ve had him to my home, helped him out with eBay, taken him for rides, stopping on whims to meet people in the hills of Conway and Ashfield while poking around old roads, probing cellar holes. He’s fun to be with, great company, lots to offer, loves local history, conversation.

I’ve known Harry maybe a year and avoid political discussion like the swine flu. The hints have been there from the start that we are not political soul mates. Far from it. So why go there?

The other night I called him to check if an order I placed on eBay had arrived in a timely fashion. It had. Then he delivered a dire warning to a trusted friend: our country is in very serious trouble, Obama must go. Our president is the agent for a communist takeover, has been planted from afar, serious stuff, could be the end of America as we know it; never again land of the free, home of the brave. Obama’s here to orchestrate a coup, dismantle free enterprise.

Just the other day Harry received a letter in the mail. There’s a movement afoot to impeach Obama. We must unite and get it done. Listen to Glenn Beck. He’s on every night at 5, the most watched man in the world; trusted, too. He knows what’s going on and is brave enough to expose it. Every night on TV. Tune in. Very serious. It’ll happen before we know what hit us. Then it’ll be too late.

Harry didn’t hesitate to to issue the warning; said because it’s on TV, it has to be true. You can’t just tell lies on television. It’s illegal. Beck knows what he’s talking about. He’s trying to save us.

Don’t get me wrong. Harry is a good man, a sweet yellow peach, salt of the earth. He means well, loves his country, has a big picture of the Virgin Mary in his apartment, and has been twisted by the right-wing propaganda machine. The stuff they’re saying should be illegal. That’s for sure. It isn’t. It’s pure manipulation based on lies. Very sad what America has become, what Reagan and the Bushes allowed Rupert Murdoch to do in the name of freedom of speech and the press, both inalienable rights, to build a corporate-media behemoth of misinformation.

I fear where it’s leading. I really do. Take a look at these gun-toting crackpots in the street, listen to the Tucson, Ariz., preacher praying for Obama’s death by the same brain cancer that took Teddy Kennedy, building a frothy flock along the way. They too want our president dead and aren’t afraid to say so publicly; would like him arrested and executed for murder of the unborn; call for it on mainstream radio talk.

It’s frightening. It’s serious. It must be stopped.