Ghost Cat

 

My mother, who turned 100 last summer, has been coming to Cornwall all her life. She says the biggest difference is the return of the forests. “When I was a child it was all open land,” she says. “All farms.”

Most of the Northeast was farmland until the railways opened up the great midwestern grain fields, in the mid-nineteenth century, and, after that, big agriculture slowly moved west. Cornwall farms lasted longer than most, but here, too, in the last half-century, open pastureland has reverted to woods and brush. Which is not good habitat for cows, but it’s great for mountain lions. The lions were here long before we arrived, but around a hundred years ago they were hunted out, the species extirpated, and the  habitat destroyed for pasture. 

Now the habitat is coming back, and it seems the lion is too.

It’s a fabulous animal: our native Mountain Lion is the fourth largest cat in the world. He has more than 40 names: cougar, and puma, and panther, catamount and painter and mountain screamer. (His scream is something you never want to hear.) He’s big, around 120 pounds and 8 feet long, and he’s beautiful, lean and supple, with a tawny pelt and a level green stare. He’s powerful: no other species preys on the mountain lion, and it takes a whole pack of wolves to overcome him. He’s shy, elusive and solitary, with crepuscular habits. His primary prey is deer, though he’ll eat rodents. He’s rarely aggressive to humans.

But is he here in Cornwall? Last year the DEP declared the Eastern Mountain Lion officially extinct. However, this doesn’t include the Western Mountain, a close cousin who has officially appeared in Connecticut. The lion killed last summer, on a highway near Greenwich, was a Western, from North Dakota. Mountain lions are fabled roamers, and the Western lions seem to be reclaiming the east.  I asked the Fish and Wildlife Department about this. “Why wouldn’t mountain lions be back? All the other big predators are back in the northeast – black bears, bobcats, coyotes,” they said. “It makes sense for the lions to be back.”

Certainly Cornwall has the others. And we’ve had a lot of mountain lion sightings. My friend Jane saw one on Cream Hill Road. My friend Julia saw one, carrying a cub in her mouth. And my cousin Martha, sitting on her glassed-in-porch one evening, watched a mountain lion slide quietly along the outside of it, two feet away. It was stalking something, maybe a field mouse.

I’m kind of jealous of the sightings. I’d love to see our lion.

It’s a gorgeous notion, that if we loosen our grip on the landscape it will revert, sliding silently back into its own deep current, filling up again with the beautiful wild creatures that walked so lightly on it once. My mother would like this.                                                            

                                                                                                 January, 2012