What follows is from Page 1, column one of the March 11, 1896, Edition of the RANGELEY LAKES newspaper. The position the story took in this edition clearly demonstrates that, as with today, anything sensational got ‘front page billing’ to therefore sell more papers. After great scarcity due to exploitation and after 20 years of scarcity… deer, moose and caribou were making a reappearance in the Big Woods of Maine. With that, according to the comments of the sage old logger actively quoted, the wolves and panther followed. Puma concolor, also known as mountain lion, cougar, puma, panther, painter, Mountain ghost and catamount is referred to as an ‘Indian Devil’ which I have seen used in other mid- 19thcentury publications in Maine. Hardly flattering to Native Americans and politically incorrect and rightfully so by the standards of our day, so apologies extended. At any rate, the article below is printed just as it was in 1896. I found it interesting, and it shares the place and hunter’s name of the last known mountain lion taken in Maine, which I had never seen referenced before.

Happy Mud Season and be sure to get outside and slog through it to make some outdoor history of your own!

FOLLOWING DEER AND CARIBOU.

Panthers and Wolves are Said to be Coming Back into Maine.

After a long period in which the deer seemed almost wholly to have vanished from the Maine woods, wise game laws judiciously enforced, have in the last two decades, resulted in repopulating the wilderness with antlered game. Once more the moose, deer and caribou range the forest in numbers commensurate with those it sheltered in the years before pot hunting (market hunting) had been made a source of profit, and before the city sportsman had become a yearly feature in the Pine Tree State. Notwithstanding that, year after year the list of hunter visitors to Maine and the record of animals killed have shown a constant and considerable increase. The antlered creatures on foot in the woods, so far as can be observed, have gained rather than diminished in numbers, says the New York Herald. But while the wasteful killing of game by unsportsmanlike gunners is tolerably well-checked by an efficient system of wardenship, there have been for the past year or two, signs and rumors of the appearance in these chosen hunting grounds of certain old time enemies of the large game, which cause old woodsmen to shake their heads and prophecy new difficulties in keeping the Maine woods stocked with deer and moose. Wolves have been seen and heard, not only near the Canada border on the northwest, but as far to the south and east as the Katahdin Iron Works country near the geographical center of the State.

In the same region the Indian Devil’s or panther’s cry has recently been heard for the first time in many years, and the deep imprint of his huge cat feet has been discovered in the snow along the deer trails. The plentifulness of the deer in Maine has come wholly from the natural increase of those originally in the State at the time the game laws were put in operation, but largely also from the migrations of these animals from Canada, and there are indications that the wolf and Indian devil are following them across the border. What this means, some of the old hunters and lumbermen whose memories are good of events that occurred in the first half of the century, have very definite impressions. “It was fifty-five years ago, in the winter of ’40 and ’41, that the deer were more plentiful in Maine than I ever saw them before or since,” said a veteran woodsman the other day who “drove” the West Branch of the Penobscot river many seasons and is thoroughly familiar with Maine forest lore. “The summer before they ate to the ground every stalk in my brother’s oat field, in full sight of the house, and there was no way they could have been kept away from it unless someone had stood guard night and day. I killed twenty-seven deer that winter without going far to find them and could have got twice as many if I had wanted them. Five of them I killed in the mile and a half between my house and Foxcroft village. The next winter the wolves came from the northward and, in one season, they cleared the country of deer in their ‘yards,’ penned in by the deep snow. The deer didn’t have a shadow of a chance of escape, and the wolves ranged the country destroying them at will. They seemed to kill for the pleasure of killing, and wherever they found a ‘yard’ they left not a deer alive. They sucked the blood of the deer they killed, ate perhaps a little of the flesh and then went on to find another yard. They did their work so thoroughly in one winter, which working as I did in the woods every season, I did not in the next eleven years, even see a deer. When the snow went away the next spring the few deer that had escaped the general slaughter kept near the habitations of man, as if for protection against a worse enemy. Some of them came into the farmers’ dooryards and into the very streets of the towns. Others went to the southward, the wolves following to the seacoast. There the snow being lighter than in the north woods, the deer in the following winter had a better chance for their lives. Some of them crossed to Mount Desert, and that island was one of the places where deer might be found up to the time that people from the cities began to go there so much. Along the seaboard the people, being mostly sailors and fisherman, did not hunt the deer a great deal, but their houses and settlements served to keep the wolves from coming too near, and so some of the deer survived. “After the deer were gone the wolves turned their attention to the caribou, but these animals, being migratory and great runners, soon got out of the country and shifted to new feeding grounds over New Brunswick. The moose, being a fighting and powerful animal, could make better head against beasts of prey than the deer or caribou, and though there is no doubt many of them were killed by wolves that winter, there were more of them left alive the end of the winter than deer. But for a long time, moose were mighty scarce in Maine.

“The Indian Devil was about in those days but the mischief to the deer he does isn’t worth mentioning in comparison with that wrought by the wolves. A single deer at times satisfies him, and for that he often must wait a long time, trying to steal upon the unsuspecting animal or lying on a bough overhanging a runway, ready to drop on the back of a buck as he passes beneath the tree, For another thing he is a shy brute, so far as man is concerned, and even when prowling about he keeps well away from the clearings; so the deer have a chance to get away from his neighborhood if they have a mind to travel. “It was after the deer had been killed off and the caribou driven away that the backwoods farmers had the most reason to remember the visit of the wild beasts from Canada. In the absence of their natural prey, the hungry creatures came into the pastures and farmyards, and there never was another time in the history of Maine when so many colts, calves, sheep and pigs were killed by wild animals. This led to the offering of bounties for wolf and panther scalps, and many a farmer made his losses more than good by the wild beasts he shot or trapped or poisoned. Many were killed, others I suppose went back to Canada or followed the caribou over the New Brunswick border. At any rate they mostly disappeared, although some wolves were still in the Maine woods as late as the time of the civil war. The last panther killed in Maine was shot thirty years ago, near Eagle Lake, in Piscataquis County, by a hunter named Noyes. Those people who think that the fine hunting of today in Maine, and it is first class and no mistake—is going to continue, are nothing more of hinderance than comes from human poachers, are likely to have an awakening before the year 1900 comes along. There is no special trouble to be feared from the Indian Devil. He kills deer, to be sure, but he does not exterminate them or drive them out of the country. With wolves it is another thing. They are fierce and cunning and forever on the track of the deer and caribou. When they come —and they are sure to come sooner or later—there will be a good many of them, and they will make sad havoc among the antlered game. There are plenty of them beyond the Canadian line and some already on this side of the border, and in one winter of deep snow they would make the count of deer, moose and caribou in our forests mighty small. I hope it may turn out better than I prophesy. But wait and see!”