Wild Sorrow (10 page)

 

I opened a window in the bathroom slightly and another one over the kitchen sink to pull fresh air through the house so I could work by the light of a propane lantern. It was a week before Christmas, and I still had to finish making gifts for Kerry, Roy, Momma Anna, and an old
curandera
I knew named Tecolote. For Kerry, I was making a deerskin vest that had pockets for his camera lenses and accessories, since he was an avid photographer. For Momma Anna, I had already finished a large elk hide bag with appliqués of horses sewn onto the front. For Tecolote, I had used deerskin and the wolf's hair that I had saved from his spring and fall sheds to make a small, soft pillow. Tecolote lived so simply that this would be a true luxury. For Roy, I had two possible ideas: I had braided some horsehair that I could make into a hatband for the trademark cowboy hat he always wore; or I had made an outline of his favorite knife and could make a leather sheath so he could wear it on his belt. I had one big, gold elk hide left. I spread this across the kitchen table so that it hung over on all four sides. The skin was large, smooth, and nearly perfect. As I stared at it, I thought of the northern Plains Indian tradition of using the contemplative time of winter to create images on hides depicting the year's leading stories, and allowing these symbolic accountings to accumulate into a spiral of annual pictographs. These became incredible painted story hides called winter counts. Together with the oral element of storytelling to explain and enhance these images, the winter count served as history, art, philosophy, and myth for the cultures that produced them.

Were I to create a pictograph of my own experience in the past year, I certainly would count finding Cassie Morgan's body as one of the leading stories. But hers was not the only body I had found this year. Another image I might paint on a winter count hide would be the spectacular vision of the twin spires of Chimney Rock with the moon rising exactly between the two steeples, and a wildfire blazing up the slopes. A burning man might be another image from my summer assignment on an incident management team deployed to that wildfire. Last year's leading story for the winter count might have featured a man trampled by buffalo—something I'd watched happen, helpless to do anything about it. And I could go back farther, with still more life and death tales.

Smitten with the idea of making a winter count with my last hide, I decided it would be the horsehair hatband for Roy. I went to the long, narrow closet on one side of the pass-through between my cabin's one main room and the small, shed-roof bathroom that had been attached well after the cabin was built so the landlord could rent the place. As I rummaged through my closet looking for painting supplies for the hide and a silver conch to use for the hatband, I came across the shoe box containing my mother's poetry, something I hadn't looked through in a long time.

Perhaps the sad stories of the Indian children away from the comforts of home and family had something to do with it, but I took the box down from the high shelf and brought it back to the table so I could peruse the contents by the light of the gas lantern. Besides the poetry, the box contained the one photo I owned of my mother, taken when I was just an infant. I studied the color image: a blonde-haired girl who looked a lot like me, her long, curly locks flowing wildly across her shoulders. She was sitting on the steps of our Kansas farmhouse wearing a flimsy, flowery blouse that must have shocked the staid families in the farm community where we lived. She held a bunted infant in her arms and smiled directly into the camera lens, a gorgeous smile of youth and hope with a hint of mischief. In her amber eyes, I could see the sadness that was like a signature scent lingering around her person—something most people would miss when they saw this attractive woman in the photo. But that sadness was what I remembered most about my mother—even though I was only a small child the last time I saw her. She left when I was four, and if I tried hard, I could still recall the sound of her voice, but little else.

I ran my finger along the edge of the photograph, as if I might be able to connect through my fingertip with a time when I was nestled against my mother's bosom, held tightly in her arms, her radiance and beauty surrounding me. In the picture, I was only a tiny, blanketed shape, a stretch of pale, smooth forehead, one eye, and a button nose peeking out from the swaddle.

I put the photo back in the box and rifled through the poems. I picked up a short one jotted on a torn piece of paper.

I knew instantly I wanted to give a copy of this to Diane. I thought perhaps I could burn it into a piece of deerskin to use as a bookmark, but my leather burner needed electrical power, so it would have to wait. I set the shoe box on the nightstand beside my bed, to keep it handy for when the electricity came back on.

A sudden knock at the door surprised me, and Mountain jumped up from a deep sleep and went on full alert. It was late, almost midnight, and I was in my pajamas. I drew my handgun for the second time that night and went to the door to answer the summons. I looked through the peephole and recognized a neighbor from down the road. I opened the door a crack, keeping it wedged against my foot so Mountain couldn't get through.

“Yes?”

“I'm your neighbor, next place over.” His voice was hard and had a bitter edge.

“I know.”

“I lost a steer, and I'll tell you straight out: I suspect your wolf for the kill.”

As he said this, Mountain stuck his nose in between my knee and the door and gave a loud snort. He wheedled and pushed, trying to wedge the door open, but I kept my foot in place behind it, the door wobbling back and forth with our struggle. The neighbor looked down at the wolf and curled his lip in a snarl.

“If I ever see that wolf on my property, I'll shoot him. You got that?”

I blinked, stunned. “Listen, he wouldn't take down a steer by himself. In fact, he wouldn't take down a steer at all. Wolves hunt in packs, and he's not hungry, so he wouldn't go through the work. I just had a hungry pack of coyotes raid my cooler out back where I'd put my food to keep it from spoiling. It had to be them, and even then, the steer had to have gotten stuck or been sick or hurt for coyotes to—”

“Miss,” he interrupted, holding up a hand with the index finger pointed at me, “we've all been pretty tolerant up to now with you having that danged wolf as a pup. But now that he's grown, he's a menace. And I meant what I said.” He jabbed the finger toward Mountain, who was watching through the opening of the door with his ears down. “I'll shoot him, sure as I'm standing here.” He turned to go, then turned back. “You know, it's as dark as a tomb at your place. Why don't you turn on some lights?”

The Lures

Shortly after dawn, I met Charlie Dorn at the Coldfire Ranch to help with the setting of the traps. Dorn had arranged for a state Department of Transportation crew to bring a road-killed deer for the lure. We worked to get the traps into place, wearing thick rubber boots and rubber gloves that had been prewashed and were relatively free of human scent. Charlie used a reciprocating saw to cut the deer into three parts so we could put meat in each of the traps. “I doubt we'll get those cubs unless the den is somewhere close,” he said. “If they're as young as you said, they don't go out hunting with Mama yet.”

“What will we do then? The cubs will die without their mother.”

“Let's just see what we get, and then we'll go from there. With the mama cat wounded, the cubs probably aren't getting much to eat anyway.”

My heart ached for this desperate family of mountain lions. Cougars formerly ranged far and wide on this continent, but had been extirpated in all but fifteen states—and in those, they were still shot, poisoned, trapped, and sport-hunted to the brink of near-extinction. These elusive and mystical cats were one of the last vestiges of wildlife, and their offspring had a survival rate only near fifty percent in the best of circumstances.

When Charlie and I had placed the meat lures, I went to my Jeep and brought out the pelt of a quail, which the Tanoah often called the “walking bird” because of its tendency to run and apparent reluctance to fly. When I found feathers like these, I generally gave them to Momma Anna for use in her dreamcatchers, but I remembered Sevenguns's advice about cats being attracted to live prey that moves, and so I hung some feathers in each trap to flutter in the breeze and hopefully attract the attention of the cougars.

 

When we had finished, I headed back toward Taos. Once in range, I pulled over and used the Screech Owl to put in another call to the power company. But I was forced to leave a voice-mail message again. I made a terse recording, saying I had been without power now for several days, had left previous messages and not gotten any response, and wanted a call back immediately to let me know when the technician would be at my place. I left the cell phone number and hastened to add the directions to my place as well. A few minutes after I'd hung up, the Screech Owl went off with a shriek.

“Are you the one from the BLM?” a man's voice said.

“Yes. Are you from the power company?”

“Something has happened to an elk on the BLM land north of Tanoah Pueblo. Forest Road 109, back in two miles on that road. There's a meadow there with woods all around. The elk is down in that meadow.”

“What's happened to the elk?”

There was no answer.

“Is it a cow or a bull?”

Silence.

“Who is this?”

I heard a click, then nothing.

I called Dorn. “Charlie, I just got a strange call. Some guy said that something had happened to an elk two miles back in on Forest Road 109.”

“Probably an elk-versus-car report.”

“I don't know. This guy sounded strange. Not like he was reporting hitting an elk. Besides, I know that forest road. It's too primitive to drive more than a few miles per hour on it. There's no way you could hit an elk on that road unless the animal decided to lie down and watch you as you slowly ran over it.”

“Well, I'm on the way to the shop to drop off these boots and gloves and this saw. Let me unload them and I'll come right out.”

I went to investigate the report, bumping slowly down the old forest road, which was little more than two tracks in some grass and brush. The trail led up into some foothills near thick forest. I kept one eye on the rearview mirror and another on the rutted dirt track ahead of me, thinking this could be a bad place to get lured into and trapped—an irony after I had just helped to create those same conditions for the cougars. At the top of a little rise, I could see down into the bowl of a meadow surrounded by gentle slopes leading up to dense woods on all sides. There, in some short grass near a small pond, was an elk cow. She was down.

I looked in every direction. No vehicles, no sign of people. A haze of cold hung in the pines that surrounded the meadow, and a patch of clouds had drifted in front of the sun, leaving the ground in shadow. I grabbed my rifle, checked to make sure I had some ammo, took another look around in all directions, and began to hike down into the field. As I walked, I turned my head, sweeping my eyes to the left along the ridge where the road came in, across thick stands of timber, and then to the right where the woods deepened and the road continued on. I turned and looked behind me, walking backward as I did, scoping the land behind me, taking a sure bearing on my Jeep in case I had to run for cover or make a getaway. But it was at least a hundred yards to the elk, and after a certain point, I knew I was committed to that destination.

When I approached the cow from the back, I slowed. I could see a dark, red-black pool on the grass below her. She tried to raise her head when she heard me approach, but she was too weak. She had lost a lot of blood. I came carefully around her head, staying a few feet away so as not to frighten her. The sight before me was so appalling that I cried out—and at the same time my stomach started to heave. I felt rage rising with the bile that fought to come up. I wanted to kill whoever had done this.

The elk's front legs were roped together above the hooves; one back foot was tied to a stake driven into the ground. Her loose back leg trembled uncontrollably. Her belly had been slit open. Before her on the ground lay her unborn calf, coated in a gelatinous skin that must have been the cow's placenta—the baby had been pulled from her body. As I looked closer, I realized that the calf, too, had been brutally eviscerated. The cow breathed wet, heavy breaths and stared at me with an eye that telegraphed terror. Something that
walked
like me had done this, something that
smelled
like me, that
looked
like me, something
the same as
me. And now, what was
I
going to do to her?

I choked back a sob as I raised the rifle. But it was anger—at whoever had done this—that helped me to steady the stock against my shoulder, to tip my head to the side as I aimed at the elk's brain pan. I swallowed, then took a deep breath and let it out. After I pulled the trigger, I screamed, “Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!” My voice echoed along with the gunshot in the empty meadow and against the stands of forest around me.

I went to touch her to make sure she was gone. A dark circle right above and behind her eye glistened black. Her thick neck was still warm. She didn't move. I inspected her baby. The calf, too, was warm to the touch. This had happened right before I arrived, in spite of the phone call earlier. Someone had downed the cow somehow and then timed it so I would get there . . .