Cougar stalks the nation’s capital?

Bob Taylor will get a kick out of this one.

The Washington Post on May 16 led its Metro edition with an eight-column headline declaring, “Cougar sightings mount in Tysons area.” Accompanying the story was a photograph of a large mountain lion apparently sizing up its hapless prey.

Back in the late 1960s, when I was a young beat reporter, Taylor was the assistant city editor of the Bangor Daily News. He retired in 1991. Taylor’s biggest mission in life was laying out the Monday morning City Page, a task that required great guile and cunning because there was only a skeleton crew available to him on Sunday evenings.

“For Pete’s sake, save me something for Sunday night,” Taylor would implore the newspaper’s city beat reporters during weekdays. The Sunday night graveyard shift generally consisted of Ed Matheson, the cop reporter who hardly ever visited the news room; the late Jim Byrnes, who told great war tales about stories published 30 years ago; and me, who skied at Sugarloaf every weekend during the winter and strolled into work around 5 p.m.

Quite frankly, we all rooted for a fire.

Readers love fires, as long as they happen to somebody else. Fires are dramatic. There are victims to be interviewed. Fire photographs can fill up half the City Page. Lacking a good fire, Taylor sometimes went off the deep end. One Christmas Eve, while I was dusting Sugarloaf snow off my parka, he growled at me, “Day, there’s something I want you to do.”

As was often the case, Taylor had already written the headline which was, “Deadbeat reporter challenges Christmas spirit of local restaurants.”

My assignment was to go to three downtown eating establishments, order dinner — and then then tell the owner I was down on my luck and didn’t have the money to pay for the meal. Thankfully, the restaurant guys were generous, although one of them joked for years afterward I’d have to pay in advance for any future meals.

The “Bangor mountain lion story” popped up on one of those Sunday nights after a late trip back from Sugarloaf.

“What have you got?” Taylor asked scornfully.

“Some guy just called claiming to have been chased out of the Bangor dump by a mountain lion,” said I, having nothing better to submit. That started the wheels turning. One of the other three — Taylor, Byrnes or Matheson — recalled a police blotter report about a cop at Bangor International Airport firing shots at something he thought was a “big cat.” I called the cop. He stuck to his story.

Taylor tracked down a file photograph of a mean-looking mountain lion from the Encyclopedia Britannica. The cougar was flashing its fangs and looking scary as hell. We ran the photo under the headline, “Someone lying, or is mountain lion stalking Bangor dump?”

The switchboard lit up the next morning like the skies over Baghdad on the first night of the Gulf War. Readers assumed the encyclopedia picture was a BDN staff photo of a real cougar who was hanging out at the municipal landfill. City officials complained that residents were too scared to take their garbage to the dump. A local talk radio host roasted us for needlessly scaring the pants off everybody.

I rang up Wendy Melillo, the Washington Post editor on the “Tysons cougar sighting” and asked what kind of reaction her mountain lion story evoked. Tysons Corner is the upscale shopping district of the Washington, D.C. area. The notion of a wild predator stalking wealthy matrons on their way to buy a new Gucci bag at Neiman-Marcus was somewhat mind-boggling.

Melillo said there was no panic wave. On the contrary, she said many readers called the paper to share their own experiences of encountering wild life amidst the urban sprawl of Greater Washington. Thousands of Canadian geese, for example, have taken up full-time residence at the local golf courses. Deer have become so plentiful suburban homeowner groups claim they are both a nuisance and a safety hazard. Last summer a deer wandered down Pennsylvania Avenue and was apprehended by animal control officers trying to jump over the White House fence to graze in the Rose Garden. Several years ago, I encountered an adult raccoon patiently waiting on the rear deck of my Capitol Hill townhouse for me to put out the garbage bag.

As for cougars?

I’ll believe that when one of them attacks a member of Congress.

John Day is a Bangor Daily News columnist based in Washington, D.C. His e-mail address is zanadume@aol.com.