At least two people now claim they've recently seen a lion roaming on a West Virginia mountainside. And we don't mean a mountain lion, either -- we mean a lion lion, as in an African lion, as in 250 to 300 pounds of gazelle-killing majesty.

That's what Jim Shortridge of Frankford, W. Va., said he saw when he went bow-hunting last week.  The Mountain Messenger of Lewisburg, W. Va., picks up the story :

As he was about to carry gear from his pick-up to his hut-stand, he heard something coming through the trees. "I thought at first that it was a deer, but it didn’t sound all that much like a deer," he explained.

And then, there it was, a huge male lion, mane and all. "I don’t scare easily," Shortridge said, "but that thing was a monster. It must have weighed between 250 and 300 pounds. He could have had me for breakfast. It made the hair stand up on my neck, I can tell you."

Shortridge went back to his truck and stayed there for the next 40 minutes as the lion walked 10 to 15 feet away, the paper reported. He then went to his hunting stand and...

( Wait. Let's stop a second. You've just been stalked by a lion -- in the mountains of West Virginia, no less -- for 40 minutes. Wouldn't the more prudent choice be to leave the area? )

...now, back to our story: Of course, the lion promptly re-appeared.

Shortridge had a bow, but no gun; he waited the lion out from his hunting stand, went home and called the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources.

Shortridge's call was the second the department had received about the lion, the newspaper reported.  The AP reports that state and local officials set up a video camera at the scene  -- and left 20 pounds of raw chicken there, which was devoured. Unfortunately, there apparently is no video record of the devourer -- and the story's not quite clear about which came first, the camera or the chicken.

"Anything could have eaten that," Greenbrier County Animal Control Officer Robert McClung told the AP.