When I was a young and impressionable child, somewhere I picked up a book about Fearsome Critters.  It covered all of the legendary animals created whole cloth by loggers and other assorted woodsmen, from the drop bear to the sidehill gouger.  One of my favorites was the splintercat.  Not only was the description fascinating, but it was a kitty, and I was an eight year-old girl.  Mea culpa!  I liked kitties.  (Also, stickers.)

The splintercat is a feline native to the timber woods of North America.  Splintercats eat honey and small mammals, both of which are found within the trunks of trees.  Sadly for the splintercat, it is unable to obtain these items by customary means.  Where another animal might painstakingly dig out the honey, or wait patiently for the small mammals to appear, the splintercat takes a more direct route to dinner.

Leaping through the woods at high speed, the splintercat rams the trunk of the tree head-on.  (It has a very strong head; nevertheless, these shenanigans leave it with a headache which makes it notoriously grouchy.)  The tree dies, the branches fall from it, the trunk splits and takes on a silvery, weathered hue.  At this point the splintercat returns and is able to easily scoop out its meal.

The evidence for the splintercat was all around the lumberjacks who passed his story along.  Fallen trees and standing dead snags are often noted in the woods.  What more proof do you need?  In some parts of the country deadfall snags can be seen lying parallel all pointing in the same direction - proof some may say of big storms, but clearly proof of the splintercat's preferred hunting direction.

The splintercat is famous enough that it has an entire creek named after it, in the Oregon mountains.  This creek is said to be the heart of splintercat territory, so the name is only natural.  (Don't even ask about the etymology of Tiger Mountain, near Seattle.)  Splintercat Creek lies in the heart of the Mount Hood National Forest, which was once heavily logged before being set aside as protected land in 1883.

The economy of the splintercat is obviously such that its need for food is minimal.  After all, if there were very many splintercats, or if they had to eat very often, then the woods of the Pacific Northwest would be nothing but dead snags.  

I read once that the reason felines (from house cats to lions) sleep so much is that they're such successful hunters.  If lions weren't sleeping for 22 hours a day, the African grasslands would be utterly devoid of prey animals within a month.  The same can be said of the woods.

Thus, we can assume that the splintercat spends most of its time asleep.  And since it is a feline, it surely has the same heat-seeking capabilities of all other felines.  (I am fairly certain that cats have infrared sensory capability, much like the python and pit viper.)

Therefore, the answer for any prospective splintercat researchers quickly becomes obvious.  A heating pad, space heater, or heat lamp, strategically placed in a clearing, monitored by trap cameras, would surely bring back definitive evidence of the splintercat within days.