It’s been 140 years since the last Eastern cougar was taken in Pennsylvania, and though there have been literally thousands of reports since, not once has anyone been able to produce a shred of evidence, a verifiable track, a piece of scat, a clump of hair, to prove that the cats have returned.

And yet, the apex predator that once stalked these woods remains very fresh in our imaginations. And perhaps that’s because of what they represent. It’s not just their remembered majesty, the stealth with which they once moved through the forest, their ability to kill swiftly and without warning, that touches something deep in our own animal core. It’s not just that we were once their prey.

Perhaps it’s because they became ours, that the regal predators became victims of what I believe is the eighth deadly sin, the one on which all the others are predicated — fear. Wasn’t it fear of the wilderness and its handmaiden, greed, that led us to hack away at the forests of Pennsylvania until there was no place left for the cat to hide? Wasn’t it fear that led us to harry and harass them until the last one was shot in rural Berks County in 1874? And isn’t it still just fear that leads us to want to believe, as the woods reclaim the land around here, that maybe, just maybe, the big cats are coming back? Because if that’s the case, if they really are stronger than all of the fearsome things we have done to them, then maybe we can be absolved of our original sin?

And if not? Then what other horrors have we inflicted on ourselves? What else has our fear set in motion? Could it be that we so desperately want to believe that there is something terrifying in the deep woods because the thought that there might not be is too terrifying to imagine?

I was still mulling that question a few weeks later as I made my way down Snow Hill Road, a poorly paved snake of a two-lane at the edge of thousands upon thousands of acres of dense wood. Ahead of me, behind me, on both sides of me, the leaves on the ash and the maple, the hickories and the oaks, had just begun to turn. A hint of the roar of color to come. But the canopy was still so lush that it all but blotted out the sun. At ground level, my woods were still a forest of shadows.