The following is an excerpt from the new book Heart of a Lion by William Stolzenburg (Bloomsbury, 2016):

Half past midnight, June 11, 2011, on a highway 70 miles outside New York City, a mountain lion met his death on the fender of a northbound car. He was nearly eight feet long, tip to tail, and a solid 140 pounds. He was the first physical proof of a wild mountain lion in Connecticut in the last century. Soon thereafter he was to become the most famous mountain lion in North America, in any century.

The news of his demise triggered a flurry of national press and gossip. That such an unlikely beast from so deep in the past had so magically materialized in America’s iconic megalopolitan corridor came with a certain irresistible irony, serving as fodder for wild speculations.

He was a drug kingpin’s abandoned pet. He was an escapee from a roadside zoo. To an ardent sect of conspiracy theorists, the Connecticut cat was the smoking gun, proof at last that wildlife authorities had been clandestinely airlifting the big predators into the eastern woods to rein in a runaway population of deer. To the multitudes of citizens who swore they’d long been seeing such lions roaming their streets and backyards and local woods—the same such lions that just three months earlier had been officially declared extinct by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—he was vindication in the face of all the authoritarian dismissals. He was undeniable evidence that eastern mountain lions—by the hundreds, maybe thousands!—were in fact still thriving beneath the experts’ condescending noses.

He was in fact none of those things, but far more. Six weeks after scientists sliced and probed and sent bits of the lion’s body to a genetics lab in Montana, his tests came back and his incredible saga emerged from the molecules. He was a three-year-old mountain lion from the Black Hills of South Dakota. And he had wandered under his own power for the better part of two years and more than two thousand miles across the eastern two-thirds of North America. His journey had spanned at least six states and, most likely, Canada’s largest province.