IN THE MONONGAHELA NATIONAL FOREST -- Todd Lester wants to nail a cougar -- bad.

Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette This adult male cougar is 200 pounds, much of muscle, not to mention inch-long fangs and even longer claws. His name is Tecumseh and he lives in West Virginia -- not in the wild, but at the Cooper's Rock Mountain Lion Sanctuary. The nonprofit haven bought him in 1998 when he was three weeks old before he could be sent to an exotic animal auction. Click photo for larger image. Related articles What's new, pussycat? A mountain lion sanctuary Highlights of cougar conference

So bad, that on this first Friday in April, after working his graveyard shift in the underground coal mine near his home in North Spring, W.Va. -- 11 p.m. to 8 a.m. -- he's loaded his hunting gear into his red four-wheel-drive pickup and hurried north. He's driven more than three hours, through a spring storm that's frosted West Virginia's highlands with several inches of snow, and arrived about 1 p.m. in the Pocahontas County town of Marlinton, in the gut of the Monongahela National Forest.

He's worried that it's getting late, but he hasn't eaten since 3 a.m. So he pulls into a Dairy Queen drive-through and orders a BBQ sandwich and a small Mountain Dew, which he drinks only when he needs to be extra alert.

Then he drives another hour up onto one of these clouded 4,000-foot ridges, parks on a lonesome gravel road, zips up his camouflaged coat, and steps into the woods on a faint game trail, stalking his elusive quarry with his loaded weapon:

A camera.

Yes, instead of a rifle, he carries a plastic device, the size of a lunch box, painted in a camo pattern. It's the first of 19 heat- and motion-sensitive cameras he will attach to trees during his two days off. They're part of a study -- and his personal crusade -- to prove that cougars do live in the wild in this part of the East.

That is, to prove to others.

"To me," he says in his shy, soft drawl, "it really don't matter, because I know they're here."

"Here" meaning not just West Virginia, but perhaps parts of Pennsylvania and other Eastern states where, officially, the native cougars -- also known as mountain lions, panthers, pumas and many other monikers -- were wiped out a century ago.

What never has stopped are sightings of these big cats throughout this region, such as those in February in Beaver County near Pittsburgh. Are the reports cases of mistaken identity? That was the state Game Commission's initial take on the local sightings, which never did amount to anything solid (same as with a recent spate in Lancaster County).

People have been known to make mistakes, not to mention photo hoaxes. Some that recently made the rounds purporting to depict a cougar in northern Pennsylvania actually were from South Dakota, says Mel Schake, the Game Commission's Southwest region information and education supervisor.

"A lot of those things do fly around, so you have to be careful," says Schake, who flatly states the commission's line on cougars in Pennsylvania: "They do not exist naturally." Officers became convinced the animal seen in Beaver County was a cougar, but figured -- as wildlife officials frequently do -- that it had to be a captive cat that was released or had escaped. Loosed captives do make the news, as in September when a St. Clairsville, Ohio, man shot and killed a cougar that had been de-clawed.

Biologist Matt Lovallo says he and others in the Game Commission "keep an open mind" in investigating credible reports, but have no credible evidence. He knows 100 Pennsylvania bobcats a year get killed by cars, so why not one cougar?

Bob Batz Jr., Post-Gazette Todd Lester, Eastern Cougar Foundation president and coal miner, adjusts one of 19 camouflaged cameras that he set up in the Monongahela National Forest near Marlinton, W.Va., in snow earlier this month. This is the second season he and the ECF have looked for cougars in this area -- about a four-hour drive south of Pittsburgh -- using the remote cameras, which are activated by motion and body heat. So far they have hundreds of photographs of wildlife, but no cougars. Click photo for larger image.

And yet, despite all that, could a few native cougars somehow have survived man's relentless extermination? Did they rebound along with Eastern forests and deer (read: cougar chow)? Or could some have migrated here from their documented habitats in Florida and the West, as has the coyote? Could cougars thrive here, too, if reintroduced?

Many people want to believe yes.

This complex issue is rife with controversy and conspiracy theories worthy of Bigfoot. Only in this case, the quest continues for photos, tracks and other hard evidence of Bigpaw.

The subject has become one big cat fight between those Lester calls "anti-cougar" and people like him who want to see Puma concolor returned to its rightful place as top predator in the East.

That's why Lester started the Eastern Cougar Foundation, a nonprofit group that works to document the presence of cougars in Eastern North America as well as protect and "build tolerance" of them.

To that end, this week the ECF is presenting the second Eastern Cougar Conference in Morgantown. Wildlife professionals, scientists, writers and others from as far away as Wales -- mostly pro-cougar but with some skeptics, too -- will be "Exploring the Contemporary Status and Future Outlook of Eastern North America's Largest Native Cat."

Pull back, and you can see that what they're pondering are the broader issues of man vs. nature, legends more instinctual than urban. There's no denying the landscape -- and our imaginations -- are thick with Nittany Lions, Pitt Panthers and countless other manifestations of a being often described as a "ghost."

"Large carnivores stir everyone's emotions," says Jay Tischendorf, whose Montana-based American Ecological Research Institute is co-sponsoring the conference with the West Virginia University Division of Forestry. A former Pennsylvanian, the veterinarian and wildlife consultant organized the first cougar conference a decade ago at Gannon University in Erie.

This one will cover the old arguments as well as the newest research, which Tischendorf says shows that cougars are returning to former haunts, especially in the Plains and the Midwest. As for the East, "I think today there are a few free-ranging mountain lions out there doing their thing. I don't know the origin of those mountain lions."

The goal of the conference, he says, is to work out ways to manage the future that "address everybody's concerns."

This is the middle of a road in territory where some (Pennsylvanians United for Mammal Advocacy, or P.U.M.A.) want to release young cougars in remote areas as a way to control deer populations. Others hold as tightly as pitchforks the view of their great-great-great-grandparents: Only good cougar is a dead one.

These felines make people feverish -- perhaps no one more so than Todd Lester.

Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Mariah tries to flatten herself and hide behind a branch in her enclosure at the Cooper's Rock Mountain Lion Sanctuary. When she arrived in 1999, she had been so poorly treated by her owners that she'd stopped eating and weighed only 70 pounds. Thanks to a diet that includes fresh deer donated by a neighboring hunting club, her ribs show no longer, and, in fact, she's kept on a strict diet. Click photo for larger image.

Think "animal advocate," and you wouldn't envision this 38-year-old coal-mining country boy. He couldn't have foreseen this, growing up deep in southern West Virginia. His favorite pastime used to be hunting 'coon, and he was state-champion good at it.

One morning in 1983, while searching for a wayward hound, he walked around a bend in a trail and saw a huge cat "with a tail as long as your leg." They stared at each other for seconds.

All his life Lester had heard tales of cougars in that country -- a nearby town is Panther -- but seeing one inspired "total awe." (Indeed, over two long days setting up cameras this spring, he is never more expressive than when describing watching that cougar vanish. "It seemed like it took a part of me with it.")

He was further scratched during a stint in the Air Force, when he got to work with a Florida trainer's cougars. He came home and, despite being treated by some like a UFO nut, couldn't stop looking for them. The closest he came were tracks, also found near his Wyoming County home, in 1996.

Thinking one cougar group wasn't scientific enough, he started the foundation in 1998. It has confirmed more than a dozen reports of Eastern cougars, ranging from a road-killed kitten in Kentucky to scats (feces) in Canada. But they need more proof, especially since they want to keep the Eastern cougar protected by the Endangered Species Act, where it's now "presumed extinct."

Lester used to range around the region every weekend investigating reports, but now he just goes out on the "hottest" ones. About 200 reports a year come into the ECF hotline -- 1-304-664-3812 -- that also is his home phone. When he's not mining coal, seeking cougars or discussing them on the Internet forum he moderates is his other full-time (but money-losing) job. His wife doesn't mind too much: She's secretary/treasurer.

He disagrees with some cougar people but is friends with most of them. One is Mark Jenkins, who runs the Cooper's Rock Mountain Lion Sanctuary and who sits on Lester's board (as Lester does on his). Jenkins says he admires the tenacity Lester shows in everything from Freedom of Information Act filings to his field work, adding: "He's from the heart."

It was Lester's idea to hunt proof with remote cameras. No official search had been done since one in the 1980s by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Robert Downing (now one of the experts and enthusiasts on the ECF board).

With $13,000 from two other wildlife groups, ECF last year bought 20 cameras. Working with Fish & Wildlife, the U.S. Forest Service and the state Department of Natural Resources, Lester set up the cameras in April in the Mon National Forest's Cranberry Backcountry.

Over six months, driving 3 1/2 hours each way as often as every weekend, he would spend a day checking all the cameras, changing batteries and film in a cheap motel room that night, and going back out in the morning to set them back up. Waiting for the 36-exposure rolls to be developed at a Wal-Mart, he held his breath, but he never got a clean cougar shot.

By October, the project had bagged 639 deer, 204 black bears, 40 coyotes, 20 bobcats, 10 raccoons, two opossums, two grouse, two turkeys and a rabbit. Plus several hikers and other humans, including one who held his bare "big foot" up to the lens. The album, which Lester proudly shows in the truck, is a collection of surreal images aesthetically worthy of its own gallery opening. They were useful to the other wildlife agencies.

Just not to Lester. So he's back out this season, in a different part of the national forest that covers nearly 1 million acres.

Tischendorf, who is one of Lester's admirers, puts the search into scientific terms: "It's a needle in a haystack."

Lester knows some people think he's wasting his time. He jokes that he could cross paths with a cougar now and not even notice it, because he's constantly looking at the ground, even while driving these dirt logging roads, ever vigilant for tracks and scat.

"You're just going to luck up when you do get a picture," he says as he trudges along another animal trail in the wet snow, which is good weather compared to some he's had to work in.

After he finds a spot that looks promising, he turns tree-hugger to strap the camera to the trunk. He aims it so its red laser beam strikes his jeans at the knee, then has to pull up his sleeves and expose bare arms to test the infra-red heat sensor.

When all's just right, he uses a global positioning satellite receiver to note the location (so he can find it), then padlocks the camera to the tree with a chain. He's found that bears like to "taste-test" and otherwise rough up the cameras, and he suspects one brute carried off Camera 14. All the remaining ones bear teeth marks.

A self-taught expert, Lester knows the fears many people have of predators. He'd relish restoring the element of natural danger that was here long before white men were. Cougars will attack humans, but fatal attacks are rare. The ECF says only 18 have been documented in the past 500 years.

Lester says scores of people die each year in accidents involving deer, which he argues are abundant enough that hunters could spare some for a relative few cougars. If a breeding population got established -- even if from former captive cats -- he wouldn't even mind allowing cougar hunting, as happens in the West. But he no longer hunts himself.

He doesn't wear his views on his sleeve, but on the back of his ECF fund-raiser T-shirt, featuring a full-color cougar mug and the words: "WANTED: Back East Where They Belong."

"I just think they're a magnificent animal," he says. "They're beautiful and they ought to be around."

Something pushes him on this mission, and it's not excitement: By early evening of Day Two of setting up cameras, he's apologizing for how boring it is.

But as he once again parks and pulls the second-to-last camera out of the bed of the truck, even he has to pause to look out over these wooded mountains.

They seem to go forever. The only sound is the wind. Nothing you can see proves that cougars are out there.

But then it hits you, how nothing proves that they're not.

Lester hikes up a grassy clearing, pausing to examine a scat (bobcat), and stops at a short, thorny tree that feels good to him. After about 20 minutes of fussing, he steps back and regards the high-tech trap he's set with his luckiest camera.

"I hope it nails a good cougar," says the hunter, heading back to his truck.

"With three kittens right beside it."