You reach it, O'Shea explains, by hiking 13 miles from a trailhead in Wanakena. Here O'Shea marches boldly into the twin controversies regarding the presence or absence of mountain lions and wolves in the Adirondacks. You can sense the author's glee as he plunges into the fray. The skeptical reader may disagree. Reports of black panthers in the Adirondacks, deemed credible by O'Shea, sound identical to stories I've heard of black panthers in Westchester County, near New York City, and along the densely settled Gulf coasts of Alabama and Mississippi.
Unsubstantiated sightings are slippery to handle.
Given the lack of evidence and the fertility of the human imagination, I'm inclined to believe, along with the critics O'Shea dismisses, that these apparitions tell more about the yearnings of those who report them than about objective reality. That said, O'Shea marshals intriguing evidence suggesting that wolves and mountain lions roam the Great South Woods. During the dozen years and more I worked as a park naturalist in New York, Maine, Florida and Mississippi, I often had amazing creatures described to me, only to see them later and find ordinary backyard animals that had been reconfigured in the eyes of their beholders. In the case of Adirondack wolves and mountain lions, I'd be glad to be proven wrong, and so, I'm sure, would the DEC biologists O'Shea lampoons. And we may be.