By MARK FREEMAN

Chris Hightower spied one Friday in the street a block from Jacksonville's main drag. Three young ones wandered over and peered inquisitively into Caprice Moran's east Medford home on Easter weekend.

And one charged within 10 feet of Judy and Roy Stewart as they rode mountain bikes Sunday near Trail, then stopped for a long, scary stare-down before melting into the hillside.

"It had a beautiful shape," Judy Stewart says. "It took me a couple minutes before it registered, then it dawned on me what kind of danger we were in."

So went just a few of the recent clashes between man and cougar in the Rogue Valley last month, marking the start of what biologists expect to be another long spring and summer season of cougar-human encounters.

From Prospect to Medford to Sams Valley and beyond, cougars reportedly are turning up either boldly confronting humans or turning to livestock and pets for a spring protein fix.

Twenty calls last month - seven this week alone - from people spotting cougars or suffering losses of pets and livestock have come in to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Such encounters are expected into October, when the cougar's regular prey of deer and elk migrate out of the high country.

Similar instances occurred each of the past four summers, since a voter-imposed ban on using hounds while sport-hunting cougars removed the animals' main enemy - hunters.

Biologists expect the problem to grow increasingly worse as more cougars are born and forced to make their predatory living in areas where they previously did not - around people.