A tuft of hair on each ear and a ruff under the throat.

February 15. 

To Cambridge and Boston. 

Saw, at a menagerie, a Canada lynx, said to have been taken at the White Mountains. It looked much like a monstrous gray cat standing on stilts, with its tail cut down to five inches, a tuft of hair on each ear and a ruff under the throat.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 15, 1858

February 14. February 15. February 16

Saw, at a menagerie, a Canada lynx . . .with its tail cut down to five inches, a tuft of hair on each ear and a ruff under the throat.  See September 29, 1856 ("Dr. Reynolds told me the other day of a Canada lynx (?) killed in Andover, in a swamp, some years ago."); October 20, 1857 ("It is worth the while to have a Skinner in the town; else we should not know that we had wildcats.");September 11, 1860 ("George Melvin came to tell me this forenoon that a strange animal was killed on Sunday. . . From his description I judged it to be a Canada lynx . . . I measured the stuffed skin carefully . . . Tail stout and black at the abrupt end, 5 inches . . . tuft on ear ( black and thin ) , 1½ inches . . .Ears, without  broadly edged with black half an inch or more wide  the rest being a triangular white. There was but a small muffler, chiefly a triangular whitish and blackish tuft on the sides of the face or neck, not noticeably under the chin."); September 13, 1860 ("They who have seen this generally suppose that it got out of a menagerie; others that it strayed down from far north. They call it Canada lynx."); October 17, 1860 ("While the man that killed my lynx (and many others) thinks it came out of a menagerie, and the naturalists call it the Canada lynx, and at the White Mountains they call it the Siberian lynx, - in each case forgetting, or ignoring ,that it belongs here, - I call it the Concord lynx.")