Pull up a seat for this one, because I want to tell you about an animal that the State of Vermont is quite certain does not exist, and that a great many Vermonters will tell you, to your face, they have seen.
The catamount. That's the old New England word for the mountain lion — the cougar, the panther, same creature. Seven, eight feet nose to tail, most of it that long heavy rope of a tail, and it can take down a full-grown deer.
They were here, and they were hated. Bounty money was paid on them. And the last confirmed Vermont catamount was shot in eighteen eighty-one, up in Barnard — not far east of the road you're on. They stuffed it, and it stands in a museum in Montpelier to this day, glass-eyed, snarling at schoolchildren. Officially, that animal is the end of the story. Extinct in Vermont. Gone a hundred and forty-odd years.
Except nobody told the woods.
Because the reports never stopped. Not for a decade, not for a generation — a steady drip of them, right up to this year. A farmer at dusk sees something cross a field that is far too big and far too long-tailed to be a bobcat. A logger finds a track in mud with no claw marks — and a dog's track shows claws, a cat's does not. Somebody hears a scream out in the dark that stands every hair on their arms up, because a catamount in the night sounds appallingly like a woman screaming.
The state's position is straightforward: show us a body, a photograph, a clear track, scat we can test. Bring the evidence. And in a century and a half of these sightings, in a state now crawling with trail cameras and cell phones, that evidence has not come.
And the people who've seen one do not care in the slightest. They'll tell you they know what a bobcat looks like, they know what a coyote looks like, and this was neither. Ask around any general store on this road and somebody will have a story, or their father will.
Here's where I land on it, for what it's worth. The forest came back in this state. Eighty percent of Vermont was bare pasture, and now eighty percent is trees. The deer came back. The bear came back. The moose walked down out of Canada on their own and nobody invited them. And there are confirmed cougars turning up in the east now, thousands of miles from where they're supposed to be.
So when you look into those dark woods on either side of this road tonight — I'm not telling you there's a catamount in there. I'm only telling you that the woods are back, and that they are a great deal bigger and quieter than anybody driving through them realizes, and that something in this state has been screaming in the dark for a hundred and forty years since the last one died.