Peter O’Shea turns into the hamlet of Wanakena deep in the Adirondacks of upstate New York, where the general store doubles as post office and plastic sheets still cover the open porch to keep out the late-winter cold. This settlement lies on the edge of more than 200 square miles of wilderness, including the largest tract of old-growth forest in the eastern United States. Here, O’Shea says, almost everyone has seen a creature that the experts insist no longer exists: the eastern panther.

“There isn’t a woodsman around who doesn’t say that it’s here in the Adirondacks,” O’Shea tells me. A retired city cop who still speaks with his native Queens accent, O’Shea settled in the nearby town of Fine almost twenty years ago and learned to become a master tracker. He snowshoes through spruce swamps, drives back roads and scrutinizes road kill, looking for evidence of wildlife. In his years in the woods, he has seen three bobcats and one lynx—smaller cats that unquestionably live in the forests of the eastern United States and Canada—but no panthers. His closest encounter came in 1985, when he followed a pair of what he believed to be panther tracks for half a mile until falling snow quietly erased them.

Despite having no firsthand evidence, O’Shea believes panthers still roam the eastern woods and that their numbers are increasing—at least in the relatively remote Adirondacks. He points to the frequency with which residents in the region claim to have encountered the fabled cat. He says he knows a hunter who recently saw a panther near Fine. (The hunter didn’t take a shot, he adds, “because the people who could get mountain lions don’t.”)

At the general store in Wanakena, where he has stopped to buy an apple, O’Shea encourages the owner to tell me the well-worn tale of the panther someone saw loping past the white house across the street three winters ago. “They later found a deer dragged twenty feet up a tree,” O’Shea adds, grinning and winking like a Santa Claus with his bushy white eyebrows, letting me in on a secret.

On bulletin boards for penny social notices, O’Shea pins up WANTED fliers depicting profiles of panthers and paw prints, and giving an address to report sightings to the Eastern Puma Research Center in Baltimore. Through a network of true believers like O’Shea, the center has collected accounts of more than 3,800 eastern panther sightings since 1983.

Those claims draw scoffs from skeptics who consider the eastern panther to be about as real as the Pacific Northwest’s Bigfoot, the apelike creature that most agree probably never existed outside human imagination. Government wildlife managers are among the doubters, saying the only wild panthers to be found in the East are the handful that teeter on the brink of extinction in Florida’s Everglades.

“Your article on eastern cougars should be very short,” says Paul Nickerson, head of the endangered species division of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Northeastern office in Hadley, Massachusetts. “There aren’t any.”

One thing is clear. Unlike Bigfoot, the eastern panther was definitely a living creature.

Once the most widespread mammal in the Americas, panthers—also known as cougars, mountain lions and catamounts—dwindled in the eastern forests as the nineteenth century progressed. Deer, a staple in the cats’ diet, disappeared from much of their range due to hunting. Humans took a direct toll as well, ruthlessly killing the panthers as varmints. As Philip Terrie explains in his book Contested Terrain: A New History of Nature and People in the Adirondacks, the poor farmers hated panthers not only because they preyed on livestock, but because, like wolves, they represented the “untamed and threatening” wilderness that made their lives so hard. “In 1837,” Terrie writes, “the first official town meeting held in Long Lake voted to spend town money on only two items: building roads and paying bounties for the corpses of wolves and mountain lions.”

According to O’Shea, conventional history holds that the last panther in the Adirondacks was killed in 1899, by a bounty hunter. But reports of panthers persisted in the mountain forests; a few were reportedly killed by hunters. The bounties were removed, and O’Shea believes a few of the wildcats survived. “I’d say the Adirondacks have twelve to thirty panthers,” he says, “probably half as many as the mid­nineteenth century, but probably all that the region can support.”

If only he could find one.

O’Shea takes me to a trail that leads to an opening in the forest where a freak windstorm in 1995 flattened more than a square mile of trees like dominoes. The blowdown created great new habitat for deer, O’Shea says, and panthers like nothing better than deer. We stomp on snowshoes through heavy, wet snow. Under the spring-blue sky, the day has turned too warm for good tracking; the hemlock branches drop fingers of snow on the dimpled surface of the snowpack, and the animal prints left during the night melt into indeterminate shapes. O’Shea soon strips off one of his four layers of wool shirts and hangs it on a branch for our return. He studies deep cloven prints in the snow and figures that three deer have been browsing the nearby trees. We follow the trail along a beaver dam hidden under the snow and reach the blowdown. Scattered trees still stand among a forest otherwise crudely combed to the ground. The trail has been cleared, but fallen trunks support spines of snow, creating a dense obstacle course.

“I’ve seen deer run through here almost like it’s a meadow,” O’Shea insists, but in this still moment I’d settle for a red squirrel. We certainly don’t expect to see a panther. “They lay up the day in an inaccessible place,” he says. But he doesn’t doubt that they visit this area while patrolling territories that can cover dozens of square miles.

As we turn back down the trail, I feel somewhat disappointed that we didn’t find a panther track. But I’m hardly surprised. After all, veteran trackers like O’Shea feel lucky to spot a few bobcats in their time. Most wildlife professionals would only chuckle at my disappointment. They’d say I’ve embarked on a fool’s mission.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Robert Downing spent five years tracking reports in the Appalachians from Virginia to Georgia as a wildlife research biologist for the Fish and Wildlife Service. Based at Clemson University in South Carolina, he mailed several thousand brochures and several hundred plaster casts of panther tracks to people at wildlife agencies throughout the East in his great hunt for the elusive cat. He sometimes investigated three or four sightings in a week. “I hiked hundreds of miles in the snow,” he recalls. By the end he had seen lots of deer and three or four bobcats, but no signs of panthers, not even tracks.

“I was very optimistic in the beginning,” Downing says. “And with the public I always acted like I might find one that day.” But with time he realized that at least nine out of ten people had mistaken another animal for the famously reclusive panther. “Most people were sincere,” he says. “But it’s human nature when you get a fleeting glance of an animal to think it’s exotic rather than common.” He recalls the story of a friend perched in a deer stand in southern Virginia who thought he glimpsed a panther slipping across a path into the forest. Several minutes later the animal returned. Once again his friend saw a long tail and low-slung head, but this time he realized that he was looking at an otter. “In nature you usually don’t get an instant replay like that,” Downing says.

The wildlife professionals don’t doubt that some people have seen genuine panthers. In fact, people have even killed a few panthers in the East. But these animals turn out to be mountain lions from the West or South America that someone probably released into the wild. “In Florida pet stores you can buy a Texas cougar for $100, no problem,” says Gerry Parker, a retired wildlife biologist from the Canadian Wildlife Service, who has written a book, The Eastern Panther. “Most states have laws against owning panthers, but state biologists know that thousands are kept in captivity.” In one celebrated case, a panther was shot in Quebec and sent to a science museum in Ottawa. While the press proclaimed the return of the eastern panther, the museum curator sent a sample to a DNA analyst. Tests revealed that the animal was a Chilean puma.

An occasional stray pet does not constitute an established wild creature. “To have a viable breeding population we would need at least fifty animals,” Downing says. “And if we had fifty animals in the East, they would get hit by cars, or treed by dogs, or be regularly seen by hunters.” Indeed, wildlife managers in the Everglades have little trouble tracking their fifty Florida panthers. And cars or hunters kill one or two of the endangered animals every year. In the West, where mountain lions remain more common, hunters legally track and kill thousands of them every year. Only the eastern panther seems to have developed the mystical ability to evade the authorities.

In the Adirondacks, many people would like to see wolves reintroduced, precisely because they represent a wilderness that has been all but lost. The same yearning gives panther sightings the quality of local folklore. People look to these animals as evidence that some mysterious wilderness still exists in the forests, despite the scientific pronouncements of the professionals. “They would give the woods a whole different feeling,” Downing says. He can remember investigating several deer that had been killed and covered with leaves much the way a panther would hide its prey. Although he ultimately attributed these kills to bobcats, he felt the initial excitement of suspecting that a panther lingered nearby. “You think, ‘Maybe I’m being watched right now,’” he says.

It is that elusive quality that has captured Todd Lester’s imagination. That, and what he believes to be an actual sighting of an eastern panther in the forests of West Virginia in 1983. After a night of coon hunting, Lester saw a reddish animal silently descend a hillside. Then it crouched on its belly, stared him in the eye “for what seemed like forever,” and moved on. “It turned and went up the hillside and took a part of me with it,” says Lester, who runs the Eastern Cougar Research Center in North Springs, West Virginia. When he told several local game wardens of his encounter, “they acted like I had seen a UFO,” he recalls.

Since then, Lester says he has confirmed five panther tracks in four counties. He has also uncovered several deer that were killed and dragged for several dozen yards before being covered with leaves. And he has collected almost 500 accounts of sightings since 1995, mostly from West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina. “Some of these animals could be escaped pets,” Lester admits, “but not every one. Most of the cats sold as kittens are declawed, so they would find it nearly impossible to survive in the wild. And if they were raised in captivity, I think they would go around houses and get killed.” He acknowledges that many of these sightings may be mistakes based on fleeting glimpses, but there are also accounts of hunters staring at panthers for minutes at a time. He has even seen home videos. “I talked with a guy who is a nuisance hunter who got called in when a calf was killed,” he says. “Usually it’s bears, but he looked at the tracks and told the game warden it wasn’t a bear. He got his bear dogs, but they wouldn’t track it. So he got his bobcat dogs, and they treed a mountain lion. He took twelve pictures and sent them to the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources, but he never got his pictures back. Now the department acts like they don’t know anything about it.”

Lester doesn’t know why the agency ignores these reports. “Maybe they don’t want to spend a lot of money studying them,” he says. “Maybe they don’t want to reimburse people for lost livestock.” In fact, the Virginia legislature voted in 1998 to compensate a man for twenty-five pygmy goats apparently slaughtered by a panther, but the governor vetoed the appropriation. In the Adirondacks, O’Shea has darker suspicions, namely that state wildlife officials don’t want to acknowledge the existence of this federally endangered species in their domain. He recalls a conversation with one of them who said, “Look, Peter, you got your retirement, now let us get ours without starting World War Three.” If the state admitted the presence of panthers, then environmentalists would force the wildlife agencies to take steps to protect the rare animals.

The wildlife professionals dismiss these theories as anti-government paranoia. “I think the state agencies would be just as tickled as anybody else if they could find one,” Downing insists. And unlike some endangered species that depend on wilderness, panthers shouldn’t interfere with such activities as commercial timbering. “Logging is the best thing you can do for deer,” he says. “And the best thing you can do for cougars is raise deer.” In fact, deer have become such a problem in parts of the Appalachians that he believes wildlife agencies should consider reintroducing panthers. In the past, scientists have balked at the idea of releasing western mountain lions in the East for fear that they could wind up mixing two distinct subspecies. But modern DNA tests have found that the differences between eastern panthers and western cougars may be minimal at best. Besides, any remaining eastern panthers would surely need fresh blood in their gene pool, much the way the isolated Florida panthers will hopefully benefit from the recent release of four Texas cougars.

At the Fish and Wildlife Service regional headquarters in Massachusetts, however, Nickerson shows no interest in shipping western cougars east. “That gets pretty complicated,” he warns. For one, he still views the western cougar and eastern panther as separate subspecies. For another, the western cougar isn’t endangered. Should a healthy subspecies be substituted for an endangered one and considered endangered, too? He would rather worry about rare animals that he knows exist. “We’ve got a lot of critters hanging on by their fingernails. We’ve got freshwater mussels down to one last population,” he says. “We need to do what we can to save them first.”

But rare mussels such as the tan riffleshell or the orange nacre-mucket will never have the same romantic appeal as the eastern panther. The ghost lion, as some have called it, survives throughout the East in the names of mountains, gorges, and other places where someone once saw the legendary animal. I live on Panther Kill Road in the Catskills of New York. Last summer, a restaurant called the Catamount Cafe (the shortened name derived from “cats of the mountains”) opened nearby with two tawny wooden panthers perched on the highway sign. Who’s to say that in the magical realm between the human imagination and the mysteries of nature these two carvings won’t leap to life one night and disappear into the forest made more majestic by their presence?