A ghost is found..at last.

One thing can always be asserted about wild animals: they know how to stay the hell away from us. We are their Kali, their destruction, their perpetual chaos. It's no wonder so many species are being "discovered." Most of the animals with any intelligence find hiding places and stay there.

I was overjoyed this morning to hear on NPR that they had discovered a cougar cub that weighed 26 pounds near our house in the pine ridge region of Nebraska. I always had a feeling they were around by how our own animals acted and some evidence I had seen in the forest behind our home. I know they exist on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation because Mel's uncle saw the old man cougar, and a younger one recently. That and, well, every now and again a colt will turn up as, er, evidence. Anyway...

But then the heartbreaker: it had been hit...on Highway 20. So they found...a corpse. Doggone it. That part was heinous. It was probably trailing its mother and - hopefully - siblings when it met its end. But the State asserts there has not been a cougar here in over a century. Yeah, ok, so when was the last great trek to cover every square inch of this state undertaken to determine what animals exist here? Hm, let me see...never.

They said the same thing about cougars in the Catskills when Mel and I had a home at the foot of  Belleayre Mountain. Yet one morning, around three a.m., I let the dogs out and resoundingly disproved that theory. Standing on the porch, I heard a rustling in the foliage across the road. I looked that way just as a huge tawny cat activated a sensor light. I sucked my breath in pretty loudly because it stopped and turned my way in an instant. Then we both sat there staring at each other. It was a good six, six-and-a-half feet head to tail and that tail, wow, thick, beautiful. It was a magnificent cat.

Then it heard the dogs who (for once) came in right away instead of taking off into the field. It had no intention of attacking me or the dogs. It merely wanted to know who we were and what we were doing outside when it went to get a drink at the nearby Esopus Creek.

Cougars are so elusive, I consider myself truly fortunate to have seen one in the wild. And no, it was not someone's pet gone wild. Sheesh. It is simply a fact that this country still has truly wild places that should remain so. But urban development, and other manmade habitat destroyers have forced some of these animals to live where they normally would not.

So to know that there are still cougars out here, where they should be, actually makes my day. I only hope that the cub was not the last survivor; and that the public who is aware of the find does not go all hysterical and overreact by blasting away at the other cats should the ghost ever reveal itself to them.