Whose Version?

The eastern cougar supposedly just barely persists in the dwindling refuges of the Florida Everglades. And yet this native feline predator once freely ranged throughout the various regions east of the Mississippi to the Atlantic Coast. In my neck of the woods, where this creature was known as a "painter" (dialectal corruption of "panther"), or (more colorfully) as a "catawampus", the species supposedly met its end in massive "round-ups" in which pioneer settlers in the region gathered by the hundreds, surrounded a patch of wilderness, and drove all the beasts therein to the middle where they were all mercilessly gunned down, from little squirrels to black bears. In this way the early settlers domesticated the land of what they viewed as annoying or dangerous "varmints". And so, the naturalist gospel states that the eastern cougar has been extinct from Appalachia for nearly two centuries. And yet the annals of folklore, from the time of firm settlement by Europeans to the present, have continuously recorded the presence of these large cats, usually in a melanistic rather than golden coloration. These sightings are all dismissed as "superstition", and yet if scientists do not seek them for study in the East, then they fulfill their own notion that this creature is indeed extinct. I once worked in a used bookstore, popular with the whole gamut of our local and even regional population. One day a young man and a middle aged man came in, asking for books on wild cats. I showed them where they might be found, and they then proceeded to tell me that on their recent hunting trip the two of them had encountered a big black cat the size of a cougar. In the course of the conversation I learned several things: that these two were experienced woodsmen, that they were natives of our region, that they were not college-educated, that their friends and relatives had reported seeing this beast repeatedly over the decades, and that they themselves believed what they had lately seen. Such men as these would no more mistake a black house cat for a cougar than you or I would mistake a rat for a groundhog. They were excited to find a picture of the creature in a book, of course from the Far West. Satisfied, they left without purchasing the book. No one educated them to presume that this species had gone extinct long ago in our region. They were from a very poor rural county. For them, the black cougar was a fact of their lives, just as robins feeding on worms in one's lawn. It only stands to reason. The mass-slaughter of the round-ups did not wipe out squirrels and other wildlife. The cougar, whether of the eastern or western varieties, is one of the shyest and stealthiest of all the big cats world-wide. If the greater presence of Man on the landscape (after the European arrival) made life more dangerous for this species, it would only make sense that a genetically recessive melanistic tendency would be suddenly favored, because it would give this feline added camouflage for night-hunting and day-sleeping in the shadows. If this creature still exists, the people living here do not need the stamp of approval by the scientific community to appreciate the crafty survival of this large mammal in the modern landscape, where so much of the farmland has gone back to wilderness.