Track of the Cat (6 page)

Craig had been one of the most outspoken opponents of Drury's proposal to develop recreational vehicle sites in Dog Canyon. In a way, his very vehemence undermined his cause. His rhetoric was so heated that none of the brass wanted to align themselves with him.

"You're out alone a lot. Take care of yourself."

Did Harland Roberts think Craig was crazy enough to hurt somebody? To hurt her? Craig talked a lot about shooting visitors. But all naturalists talked about shooting visitors. It was a way of letting off steam.

Was it different with Eastern? Looking at his nervous rantings through the curtain of suspicion Harland had dropped he did seem a little insane.

Anna's mind jumped to the nearest conclusion: Sheila Drury was dead. If the lion didn't do it ...

It was absurd. She was clutching at straws, and melodramatic straws at that.

The autopsy would show something: congenital heart failure, brain aneurysm. Something that would prove Sheila was dead before the lion tasted her. But by the time the report came-if it ever did and wasn't simply lost in some FBI file- it would be too late. Not many days would pass before Paulsen's dogs would tree a cougar. It would be dubbed, after the required five minutes of deliberation, to be the cougar, and it would be shot.

"Damn! Damn! Damn!" Anna pounded the Rambler's steering wheel with the flat of her hand. The car swerved into the oncoming lane and a subcompact with Ohio plates honked, the driver mouthing obscenities.

"Think of something else, it's your day off," Anna ordered herself.

For twelve hours she managed to school her mind. Distract it, was more accurate: a Schwarzenegger movie, a couple of Tecates, a "new" Patsy Cline tape.

Near nine p.m., as she drove back to Guadalupe, Patsy singing "Too Many Secrets," Anna began again to worry at the edges of the Drury Lion Kill.

Beside her on the seat, atop an accumulated pile of rubble, were the slides she'd taken on the lion transect and of the Dog Canyon Ranger's corpse. Anna had taken them to Wal-Mart's one hour photo service and paid for the developing out of her own pocket.

Technically she should have turned the roll in to the clerk, filled out a form for funding, and waited the requisite eternity for the machinery to grind out one small task.

Patience was not Anna's strong suit.

Contemplating the envelope she had assiduously ignored all day, she wondered what it was she was so anxious to see. Sheila Drury's intestines festooning the front of her uniform like macabre confetti?

Most definitely, she wanted to see the blood again. If she remembered correctly, there'd been very little. Surely that indicated the lion had clawed Ranger Drury sometime after she had achieved corpse-hood.

That might be an argument that would quicken some kind of interest in Paul. Then he would stop the hunt. If he could. Corinne Mathers wasn't known for her willingness to listen to her District Rangers. Mathers acted like a woman with a political itinerary. Guadalupe was a stop along the way.

"Be fair," Anna chided herself, but this time she expected she was being fair. Maybe even generous. Corinne was a woman on her way up.

Mankins was in the Cholla Chateau with Cheryl Light, watching television when Anna pulled in. She could see the blue-gray light through the windows. Manny would be three sheets to the wind by this time of night.

Fleetingly, Anna wondered if his wife, Yolanda, cared that he drank so much beer. Guadalupe, like so many parks, was isolated, the employees living in rented government housing miles from anywhere. It became its own small, sometimes incestuous, society. Loneliness, boredom, and booze were occupational hazards.

The light in Craig's apartment was out. There was only the eerie purple glow of his snake aquarium light through the white curtain. Either he'd already gone to bed or he was camping on the West Side despite the invasion of the space aliens.

Anna smiled at the thought. Then she remembered Harland's warning.

Feeling a fool, she locked her door behind her after she'd brought in the groceries.

The slides were tossed into the bag with the onions and the chocolate pudding. Leaving the frozen goods to hold their own for a few minutes more, Anna took them out and carried them over to the desk. The little slide viewer was in the top drawer with pens and .357 cartridges.

With hope but no expectations, she peered quickly through the transect photos, then dropped the first corpse shot into the viewer and held it up to the light.

Nothing had changed. The images that she held in her mind were accurate.

The shots of the scratches and the puncture wounds were disappointing.

The light was so poor when she'd taken them that the colors were faded.

It was impossible to tell where the blood ended and the mud began. Not enough proof to impress Corinne Mathers with the lion's innocence.

Anna sat back. Piedmont had leapt silently to the desk top and was pushing the slide box back and forth between his paws. Soon he would grow bored and the box would be knocked to the floor with one sudden swat.

Was that the way it was with Sheila? Had she delicately made her way into the saw grass, protecting her arms and face, then, with the sudden swipe of one deadly paw, been struck down? And, before the lion dragged or worried at his prey, he was frightened away?

It could have happened that way. But, Anna didn't believe it. "Just being stubborn," she told Piedmont as she risked a skewered finger, rescuing the box of slides from his paws. She replaced it with another toy, a plastic ball with a bell encased inside.

The cat would have nothing to do with it. Anna had ruined everything.

With a flick of his sausage tail, he jumped down.

"Be that way," Anna said peevishly. She dropped the next slide into the viewer and held it up to her eye. One of the last shots on the roll: a picture of the paw prints she'd found behind Sheila in the mud. If Anna remembered correctly the two sets had been about a yard apart. It was hard to tell from the picture and she wished she'd had the presence of mind to put a pen or a dime in the shot at the time; something to give a size reference. The prints themselves were cookie-cutter perfect in the smooth surface of the fine-grained silt.

Anna put the second slide of the prints in and stared at it unthinkingly.

With an uncluttered mind, the obvious became obvious. The difference between front and hind paw prints was minimal but she had spent a lot of hours with her eyes on the ground studying lion sign. The hind paw's central pad was more heart-shaped, the sides convex rather than concave.

In these pictures both sets, front and back, were identical- even to the crease marks on the pads themselves.

Both sets of prints, the front and the hind, were forepaws.

"That can't be right..." she whispered, pushing her eye closer to the light source. She changed slides; studied the first one again. There were no prints from hind paws.

A lion with four front paws.

A lion that walked on its hands.

A lion eleven feet long that kept its hind paws on the stone.

A lion with its ass in a sling.

Anna listed the absurdities. "When is a Lion not a Lion?" she said aloud, putting her confusion into riddle formula.

When it's dead, she thought, and that's what this lion- or some lion-will be if the hunt's not stopped.

Again she looked at the slides. She was not mistaken. Proof.

Proof of what, she wasn't exactly sure. Proof there was something fishy about the Drury Lion Kill.

"Proof we should look at this whole situation a little more closely before we go bashing around in the wilderness with dogs and guns killing off the wildlife." Anna sat in the Chief Ranger's office. She'd been waiting at the door when Corinne Mathers arrived for work at eight a.m.

Chief Ranger Mathers was a small woman but big breasted and big hipped, with short, iron-gray hair that curled naturally around her ears. Her face was round, suggesting both plumpness and softness. Neither was accurate. Corinne Mathers had come up the hard way. There were only a handful of women Chief Rangers in the National Park Service. She'd started when "girl" rangers wore mini-skirts and were allowed badges exactly half the size of those the men wore. Mathers was smart. And she was harder than flint.

"Though I may not agree with your conclusions, you've been thorough, Anna. Good attention to detail, I'll give you that." The Chief Ranger tossed the slides down onto a yellow legal pad covered top to bottom with notes too small to be read upside down. Anna resisted the urge to rescue her fragile evidence.

"Then you'll stop the hunt."

Mathers took off her glasses-aviator style with gold rims-and pinched the bridge of her nose as if the little red marks there pained her. "It's not as simple as that, Anna."

"It's as simple as that. Just call off the dogs."

The Chief Ranger replaced the glasses and leaned across the desk. Her hands were folded on the legal pad, on the two ignored slides. "No. It's not." Deliberately, as if she wanted Anna to commit each word to memory, she said: "The cougar that we know to have killed Ranger Drury has already been dispatched."

6

Up on the Permian Ridge two miles north of Middle McKittrick Canyon a lioness had been shot and killed. Harland Roberts, Corinne Mathers, and two men from the New Mexico State Department of Fish and Wildlife had brought the body back to the park.

Anna's first lion had flies crawling from its mouth and blood, black as tar, matting the fur of its neck. The animal was five to seven years of age, weighed seventy-five pounds and was nursing at least one, possibly two kittens. The park's Public Information Officer released this information to the local papers suggesting it as the reason for the attack.

The kittens were not found.

The following day Anna rode Gideon up the four-mile trail to the ridge.

As long as the light lasted she combed the area looking for the den. Near dark, when she knew her time was running out, she hobbled Gideon in a grassy place and climbed part way down the slope into Big Canyon, a wild area just to the north of the park's boundary over the Texas/ New Mexico border in the Lincoln National Forest.

Perched on an outcropping of limestone, she called down into the forested recesses of the ravines. "Come on kittens, here kitty, kitties. Come on."

The pathetic absurdity of it stung her eyes but she hoped, her heart in her voice, it would trigger some response; a sound from the cougar kittens. For an instant, as the call died away, swallowed by the trees, she thought she heard something. Not mewing, but a strange bird's call, or the wind on a stony bottleneck: four notes from a half-remembered song.

Again and again she called but never heard the sound a second time.

Finally she came to doubt she'd really heard anything. Hope was such a creative companion.

Till the moon rose to light their way, Gideon had to pick his way down the mountain in darkness.

That had been nearly a week past. The moon was waning now, the nights dark till after midnight, the moon still up at nine a.m.

Anna could see it, pale against blue sky, over El Capitan. She forced her eyes back down to the 10-343 Case Incident Record she was typing up on the Drury Lion Kill. Offense/ Incident #50-01-00: DEATHS/ACCIDENTAL. Five copies. Five copies of every typographical error she made. This 343 had to be perfect, no strike-overs. This would be the official report requested by Sheila Drury's insurance company. Anna knew she'd end up redoing it half a dozen times unless she could con the secretary or the clerk-typist into typing it for her.

Carpeted half-walls corralled the two clericals in the central area of the administrative offices. The rooms with windows were parceled out to the higher-ups. Government Service and Private Industry did not differ in all respects.

Marta Freeman, the superintendent's secretary, was in the area furthest away. Marta, a determinedly blond, well-endowed woman in her fifties, was given to cleavage, knowing looks, and innuendo. Anna had never felt comfortable with her.

In the next corral, Christina Walters, the clerk-typist, bent over a computer terminal. Her pale brown hair, nearly the color of the oak veneer on the desk tops, fell in a curtain hiding her face. Anna wondered if she dared ask Christina. She scarcely knew the woman. Christina Walters had entered on duty a month or so after Sheila Drury. Most of Anna's time was spent in the field and they had different days off so their paths seldom crossed.

Anna knew she had a little girl who rode a pink tricycle around the housing area on Saturday mornings, wasn't married at the moment, and seemed competent enough. But this was the first time Anna had really noticed her, really looked at her.

Walters was good-looking with a brand of prettiness that was rare in the Park Service. She looked soft. Her hair curled softly, arms and neck and breasts rounded with a softness that somehow fell short of fat. Her muscles weren't corded from carrying a pack, her hands not calloused from shooting or riding or climbing. Her skin wasn't burned brown and creased by the sun and wind.

Urban, Anna thought. Christina Walters had a traditional urban femininity. Strangely, Anna liked it. On another woman it might have set her teeth on edge, but on the fair-haired clerk it looked good. Perhaps, Anna explained the phenomenon to herself, because Christina didn't push it: she chose it.

It crossed Anna's mind to put on a little lipstick and perfume when she got home that night. There'd been a time she'd lived in the stuff, a time she'd required it to feel attractive. With a sudden sense of achievement, she knew she could go back to it now just for fun, just for the sheer sensual pleasure of the commercial feminine luxury.

"Do you need something?" Christina was asking in a low voice with a hint of a drawl and Anna realized she had been staring.

"Do I look that desperate?" she answered with a laugh.

Christina Walters studied her gravely. "Yes."

"I'm afraid I'm fouling up in triplicate here." Anna almost said "fucking up" but there was something about Christina that made her want to seem a gentler person than she was.