A Southwestern legend returns

"WHAT \o7DO I DO \f7about a leopard in my yard?"

My mom is on the phone, and I'm not sure how to answer. She lives in the Catalina Mountain foothills north of Tucson where mountain lions can occasionally cause a stir. But a leopard?

She tells me that it all began with the barking of her Maltese dog, and when she looked out the window, she saw a large cat moving along the inside wall of her courtyard. The cat, which measured nearly 5 feet long -- with a tail of comparable length -- leapt over the wall and disappeared. I told her to call Arizona Game and Fish.

Tim Snow, a specialist with the department, arrived at her home a few minutes before I did, and although we searched, we couldn't locate any tracks in the dry ground. Tim told me that he gets a few reports like this every year from the Catalina foothills. What my mom had seen in her yard, identified from a lineup of various photographs, was a jaguar, the dappled cat, the world's third largest and the only one in the New World that roars.

I have been fascinated with jaguars since I saw my first one when I was 10. Although caged, the animal was alert, spring-loaded. Later I drew that scene from memory. With its head lowered, its eyes fixed straight ahead, partially lidded, penetrating, there was no escaping its gaze. This was a creature of mountain ridges and rugged side canyons. This was a creature that knew no boundaries, whose enclosure was superfluous. It is an image that haunts me again as I discover that jaguars are returning to the wild borderland country of southern Arizona.

Jaguars have stalked the imaginations of people for thousands of years. In southern Mexico at San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan, a 2,000-year-old, 9-foot Olmec head of carved basalt bears the paws of a jaguar across both colossal temples. If the Olmecs were intrigued by jaguars, the Maya, who followed them, were obsessed. The ruins of their cities on the Yucatan peninsula, like those at Balamku and Chichen Itza, are peppered with elaborate jaguar carvings, some with the cats painted red and encrusted with jade and turquoise or with carvings of human hearts in their claws. Spread the jaguar's skin, say the Maya, and you spread the heavens of a starry night.

I think about this one day while hiking through a canyon lined with thorn scrub and burnt cayenne walls, into the western flank of the Tumacacori Mountains in southern Arizona.