Here is a story about a man who invented the microwave oven and shot a cougar in Maine — an apparent stretch, but read on.

A while back I got a letter from Scott Spencer of Bedford, whose grandfather Percy had humble beginnings in Maine, never finished grammar school, yet rose to the board of directors at Raytheon and held more than 150 patents — Yankee ingenuity personified.

Scott sent along a letter his grandfather wrote to a New York outdoor columnist in 1949 about an experience when he was 14 in Enfield, Maine.

He had leaned his rifle against a tree along a pond near the family farm when debris from an overhanging limb began dropping into the water.

"In looking up . . . I saw a black face in the foliage. I probably thought at the time it was a fisher, so picked up the little 38-40 and took a fine bead between the eyes and fired. A tremendous big black body came tumbling out of the tree into the water, and I think I exceeded all records in returning to my home, as the sight was a little too much for me."

The boy and a hired hand who opined that it was probably no more than a big porcupine went to look. Only a small patch of black showed above the water.

"We got a pole and poked around, and he knew then it was bigger than a porcupine. We waded in and between us dragged the creature out. It was a big black cat and weighed 104 lbs., with paws as big as a St. Bernard dog, with tremendous claws."

A naturalist and taxidermist up the river confirmed that the animal was a black cougar. And there the trail ends, for there is no mention of whether the Spencers had the money to get the animal mounted.

Percy Spencer maintained a home in Bradford, New Hampshire until his death in 1970. I wonder if he ever told anybody what happened to the carcass, or whether anyone took pictures. Oddly enough, 1949 is the date of the first modern-era cougar sighting I ever heard about in New Hampshire.

When I was 13 or so, Rudy Shatney pointed out a big spruce tree in Henry Ricker's pasture and said "That's where Gerard Hurlbert and I saw a mountain lion in 1949." There was no reason to make such a story up, and later I had occasion to mention it to Gerard, a solid, no-nonsense farmer, and he conveyed it just about word for word.

The Woodman Museum in Dover has a New Hampshire cougar taken in Lee in 1853. The last confirmed kill here was one shot somewhere on the Magalloway in 1885, which may be the carcass Leonard Hawes of Pittsburg remembered seeing as a boy. The last confirmed kill in Maine was in 1906.

Yet persistent, reliable reports of sightings turn up every year throughout northern New England. The best recent sighting was a cougar that loped across a field in Colebrook in front of three men haying.

Some day, perhaps, we'll have more facts than conjecture in one of the region's longest-standing wildlife mysteries.

• Story originally published by:
The Union Leader & New Hampshire Sunday Times / Manchester | John Harrigan - Jan 13 2002

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