FRIENDSVILLE -- In the rugged mountains of Western Maryland, the woods are deep enough to hide most anything -- even a ghost cat.
Once upon a time, cougars ruled the forest of oak and evergreen, carving a reputation as sleek and silent hunters that rarely emerged from the shadows.
Alas, the secretive predators were chased away by settlers and loggers. By the turn of the century, the ghost cat was receding into legend.
Though the species has survived in the Western United States and in Florida, the Eastern cougar, Felis concolor, officially is no more in Maryland. Only stories and stuffed lions remain.
But the legend of the ghost cat has taken a new and mysterious turn. There are tantalizing hints of a cougar comeback near the town of Friendsville, in Garrett County.
The terrain is wild enough -- and somewhat eerie. Homes are specks in a sea of green, dusk comes early in the valleys, and shrieks in the forest can wake people up in the middle of the night.
Could a breeding population of mountain lions be creeping back into the state? Could the Eastern cougar -- a bit smaller and darker than its tawny Western kin -- be making a comeback like the bald eagle and black bear?
Many Marylanders want that to happen because the cougar symbolizes Nature in her unfettered condition, as she was before the spoilage of urban sprawl.
Linda Wolf, wife of a Friendsville orthodontist, believes the ghost cat is more than a myth. She says she saw a cougar this summer.
And Paul Schroyer of Friendsville has captured a mountain lion on videotape, arousing hope among skeptical state biologists of a restoration in Maryland.
Mrs. Wolf, 45, reported seeing a panther near her farm in June. She was driving down a desolate road about 5 p.m. when the creature darted 30 feet in front of her van.
The big cat was "grayish-black and furry, moving left to right," Mrs. Wolf recalls. "I thought it might be a bobcat -- we see them often up here -- but this animal had a long tail that curled up at the end.
"I only saw it for about 10 seconds before it ran up into a steep rocky area, just in front of our lane.
"I haven't seen it since."
A dozen reports a year
The report was one of about a dozen that come from Garrett and Allegany counties each year -- more than the rest of Maryland combined. That's not surprising, say wildlife officials. Garrett, Maryland's westernmost county, remains 75 percent wooded, with the state's most rugged terrain. Allegany is a close second.
If cougars still live in Maryland, "it would be a sign that we've maintained enough high-quality habitat for them to survive," says Leslie Johnston, district wildlife manager in Garrett for the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR).
One of her tasks is to investigate all cougar sightings in the county.
"We get reports from all over, of lions colored both tawny and black, and some reports are certainly from credible people," says Ms. Johnston.
Virtually none of the sightings are accompanied by proof of the ghost cat's existence. "We've never found their scat [droppings], a cache of their food, or even a deer that's been preyed upon," says Ms. Johnston.
Nor has anyone ever reported a cougar being hit by a car. By contrast, 11 bears have been struck by autos in Garrett County this year. "You'd think there would have been at least one cougar road kill, especially along Interstate 68," she says.
The making of a videotape
Paul Schroyer lives less than a mile from that highway. Last year, on a wintry day, Mr. Schroyer, 61, a retired pipefitter, spotted what looked like a mountain lion slinking through the snow across the road from his house.
The long-tailed animal, about 6 feet in length overall and weighing perhaps 80 pounds, moved gracefully along Bear Creek, a trout stream, less than 150 feet from where Mr. Schroyer and his daughter, Jenny, were standing. They grabbed the family's camcorder and filmed the dark-colored shape for five seconds before it darted behind a thicket of mountain laurel and disappeared up a craggy mountainside.
The Schroyers called Ms. Johnston, who watched the tape again and again. Her decision?
Cougar.
"That's one big cat," Ms. Johnston murmured.
The video confirmed the presence of one cougar in Maryland, she says.
"We've had hundreds of sightings, but this one is on tape."
Ms. Johnston treated the film as if it were photographic evidence of the Loch Ness Monster. She viewed the tape "hundreds of times" before sharing it with DNR wildlife biologists at a meeting in Annapolis. "I even watched it in slow motion," she says. "I wanted to be sure."
Before the conference, her DNR colleagues were skeptical. But when the tape was shown, "I heard a big 'Ooooooooooo,' " she says.
The question, says Ms. Johnston, is: Where did the cougar come from? Is it part of a long-lost pride of wild mountain lions that eluded man for a century, or a pet that was released or escaped?
"Some of the animals that have been spotted are said to behave like pets," says Ms. Johnston. "Whether this cat was one that was let loose, or part of a naturally occurring population, is hard to say."
"The point is, something is out there, and anything that symbolizes a wild situation really appeals to the public," she says. "It's kind of like an East Coast Bigfoot."
Most of the 12 subspecies of cougar found in the U.S. and Canada are considered endangered. Because Western lions generally stick to remote areas and are so shy, they traditionally have not been considered much of a threat to people. But in August, a rabid cougar menaced a group of California campers, who stabbed the animal to death. And in April, a 40-year-old woman was attacked and killed by a cougar while jogging in a California state park.
In Maryland, meanwhile, Ms. Johnston's DNR colleagues aren't counting their cougars quite yet. But they are intrigued by the Friendsville videotape.
It raises "exciting possibilities," says Glenn Therres, supervisor of non-game and urban wildlife for the department. "It would be a tremendous asset to the state if there was a naturally occurring cougar population in the mountains. But the probability of that is mighty slim -- though I wouldn't be surprised if there were cougars, captive at one time, now living in the wild."
Such animals, he says, face obvious hardships in trying to survive. "They often end up eating out of garbage cans, or the dog bowl on the back porch."
Cougar sightings occur at the rate of 15 to 20 a year for all of Maryland, says Mr. Therres, whose office has investigated reports of the big cats from Baltimore County to the Eastern Shore.
In 1990, multiple sightings of a "mountain lion" in the Randallstown area triggered an intense search that included police helicopters. Traps were set, to no avail. Last spring, a big cat was spotted by a homeowner in Snow Hill, about 25 miles from Ocean City.
Mr. Therres himself checked reports of a cougar near his home on Kent Island, where residents showed him "a bunch of dog tracks."
"Most of Maryland is just too developed to support a real population of mountain lions," he says. "Cougars hold a special fascination for people, but the fact is the animals just don't deal well with civilization. They need lots of land, and lots of deer."
Tracks, but no big cat
If the ghost cat exists in the Appalachians, it has eluded federal efforts to pinpoint its whereabouts.
For five years (1978-1983), Robert Downing, then a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, scoured those mountains from Virginia to New York, searching for signs of cougars.
Mr. Downing found tracks, scat and hair that could have been from mountain lions. Or bobcats. Chemical analyses of fur and droppings were inconclusive.
"Some things looked promising -- we found tracks that looked good -- but when we returned to those areas, nothing else was found," recalls Mr. Downing, now retired.
"I wanted to find evidence awfully bad," he says. "It changes your whole outlook when you walk through the woods, thinking there may be a cougar out there."
The black bear comeback
Of such dreams are cougar sightings often made, say state officials.
"People like the dramatic, the rare, the seldom-seen," says Tom Mathews, DNR's wildlife manager for Western Maryland.
"People out here used to feel the same about black bears as they do cougars. If you saw a bear, it was like seeing a white elephant," Mr. Mathews says. Now the state's bear population numbers about 200, and sightings "are no big deal."
If the bears can rebound, what about a cougar comeback?
"I'd be very surprised if we had a resident population of mountain lions breeding in Maryland," Mr. Mathews says.
And elsewhere in the East?
"That's a possibility."