Wild Sorrow (20 page)

After we had gotten her back home, we lit the gas lanterns hanging from the ceiling, stoked the fire, and made sure that Grandma had coffee and some thick slices of pueblo bread with butter and homemade chokecherry jam for breakfast. I made ready to leave, pulling on my coat and hat, and said my good-byes to Bird Woman. Momma Anna stepped out the kitchen door with me. She pulled her blanket over her head. “Last time,” Momma Anna said.

“I'm sorry?”

“That what my mother say at river. Last time. She is ready now go join my father, join her ancestor, all the one who travel beyond the ridge.”

“I don't know. She still looks pretty spry to me. I wouldn't be surprised if she was still around next year for the old blue bath in the river.”

“Not next year. Not next time. Last time.”

Once again, Momma Anna and I were entering the cultural gap between my world and hers that concerned the matter of time. I was beginning to understand that the Tanoah did not see time as linear, but rather as a journey in which the self was always at the center, therefore always in the “now.” There was no other time. However, since there was both memory and anticipation, Momma Anna often referred to any time outside of the immediate—whether past or future—as “next other time.” The Tanoah sense of self was as a moving element in a moving universe. Like a hoop dancer stepping and twirling at the middle of a host of spinning hoops, the Tanoah were always ritually dancing at the core of life, and the events of their own journey, and of their ancestors', were always circling around them, never static. In other words, everything was always in motion, including the self, and especially the now. Therefore, for Momma Anna, there was no moving into the future or into the past, as she always took the now with her wherever she went.

I was quiet a moment. “I miss Grandma Bird already,” I said, meaning it.

“Me, too,” Momma Anna said. She started to go back in the kitchen door, but she turned and looked back at me. “This time, you think
Indun
.”

Top of the List

I started my workday on Monday morning at the BLM with a phone call from Diane. “You all right?” she asked.

“Yeah, I'm good.”

“Kerry stay at your place with you over the weekend?”

“Yes.”

“I wanted to make sure you were okay. Hey, that rope you found—they're working on it at the lab in Albuquerque. We'll keep our fingers crossed for some DNA evidence.”

“Yeah, good. Listen,” I said. “I've been thinking. If you can't tie the phone call about the elk to someone at the power company, all I've got to go on is that ATV chase I got involved in several days back. I'm going out to talk to the shepherd who shot the cougar again. I'm going to ask him if he has seen or heard anyone riding ATVs in the area where he grazes his sheep.”

“We're way ahead of you. Remember, you described it as a larger-sized all-terrain vehicle? That's a UTV. Only two people at Tanoah Pueblo own UTVs, or at least that's all that we know of now. And one of them has a strong motive and has moved to the top of a short list of suspects.”

“You have a
list
of suspects?”

“We do. Remember, I told you the Silver Bullet works fast and smart. And it gets better—we think we might have the date of death now, because of the housekeeper's schedule and the number of bottles of wine in the kitchen. Cassie Morgan ordered a case of wine delivered every two weeks, and she was in the habit of drinking a bottle a day, except on Sundays, according to her cleaning lady.”

“It sounds like you're making good progress. But the stakes are still high for me until we figure it out. So I'm still going to go talk to that shepherd. I need to check on my traps anyway, so I have to go right by him. I'll let you know what I find out. When I come back, I'll return the sweatpants I borrowed. Want me to drop them by your house?”

“That will be fine, just throw them in the front door. It doesn't lock, as you know. I'm on the way to the courthouse to file a complaint against the landlord to dispute that eviction notice. They have to hear my complaint within seventy-two hours, so I'd like for you to stand ready to appear as a witness.”

“You can count on me,” I said.

“Likewise.”

As I was walking down the hallway to leave the BLM, Roy called me into his office. He held up a bunch of papers. “You're scheduled to go to BLM ranger training this spring. Have you given any thought to what you're going to do with that wolf when you go?”

I had been dealing with this by avoidance so far, but here it was confronting me in the person of my boss. “I don't know. Maybe Kerry could come stay at my place with Mountain.”

“Kerry? I don't think he's going to be here. I heard he has applied for a public lands job posting in Washington State. Looks pretty good for him, too—I think he's the best-qualified applicant and has the most seniority.”

“My Kerry? A job out of state?”

“Yeah. Forest supervisor. He didn't tell you about it?”

“It must have slipped his mind.”

The Boss looked down. “Uh-oh. Looks like I just stirred something up,” he muttered.

“Could we talk about this another time?” I was barely able to contain the mixture of distress and anger that was welling up within me.

“Sure. Go on. You can get back to me later on that wolf-care thing.”

I left the BLM upset and confused. Not only was I conflicted and concerned about leaving Mountain with anyone else, but I was stunned that Kerry had not mentioned applying for a job out of state. My chest felt crowded, and I blew out a big breath to make room for all the feelings clamoring to be recognized.

Counting Sheep

When a winter day is warm and pleasant—like Saturday had been—the residents of northern New Mexico know to bring in more firewood for the weather that will follow. And—true to form—Sunday had been a cold and cloudy solstice with snow falling off and on throughout the day. This morning, too, had started cold but still when I came to work in the dark. Now, as the sun struggled to climb higher in the sky, it grew weak from the effort, and the winter wind charged triumphantly across the high mesas, pulling a train of frigid air and slamming it into the slopes of the Sangre de Cristos.

I found Daniel Kuwany huddled against the red-dirt wall of an arroyo, squatting on a square of soiled carpet. The wind made it impossible for him to have a fire, so he had pulled several blankets around him, creating a woolen cocoon. His flock conjoined in a narrow—a dark face occasionally popping up here and there out of the one great wall of wool that stretched from one side of the draw to the other.

As before, I kept Mountain on a lead hooked to my belt with a carabiner. As we approached, the shepherd stood and looked warily at the wolf. “Don't get up,” I yelled over the wind, signaling with my hand for him to duck back down out of the icy blast.

Kuwany squatted once more, and rearranged his blankets. One started to slide off his back, and he tried repeatedly to tug it back over him, but his attempts only unfurled more layers. I reached out a hand and grabbed a corner of the wool and pulled it across his neck and shoulders where he could clasp it from the other side. “Thank you,” he muttered, shifting his eyes from me to Mountain and back again.

I gingerly lowered myself into a crouch beside him, my legs and back still sore. I was thankful for the windbreak offered by the slope of the draw. “I wanted to ask you a couple of questions.”

He turned his head slightly, still shrouded by the blankets. “I never did see your cougar. I told you it was a ghost.”

I nodded and observed a minute of deliberate quiet. He had not seemed to mind that I had mentioned questions. I decided to try one. “Any more attacks on your sheep?”

“Nope.”

I smelled alcohol. Kuwany had been drinking, probably had a bottle tucked under his pile of blankets, thinking the booze would keep him warm. “It's pretty cold out here. That wind is gruesome.”

“Anyone ever come out here on an ATV? You know the four-wheelers with the
ying-yang
-sounding engines?”

“I know what it is.”

I remained silent.

“One guy got one of them big ones. He carries firewood in the back, got a big cargo box on it.”

“Do you know who it is?”

“He comes through here a few times lately. It always scares my sheep and they scatter. Makes a lot of work for me.”

“Someone from the pueblo?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I'd like to know his name.”

Kuwany turned to face me. He squinted one eye, and the corner of his mouth rose on that side, contorting his face into a skeptical expression.

I held his gaze and did not flinch.

“You know Rule Abeyta?”

I nodded my head, but didn't speak.

“He got one of them big ones. He comes all the time through here, even when I told him not to mess with my sheep. He doesn't give me any firewood for the trouble, neither, and I could use it. Nothing but sagebrush out here to burn.”

I simply nodded again, as if I were commiserating with him. After a minute or so, I started to get up.

Kuwany held up a hand. “Do you know a wolf like that can bring the fog?” He puckered his lips and pushed his chin toward Mountain, who had curled up in a donut next to me and tucked his nose underneath his tail. The shepherd went on: “When a lone wolf howls, it will sometime bring the fog in at night. That kind of fog, made by wolves howling, people get lost in that, sometime they stay lost forever.”

Trapped

I drove back far enough toward town to see a couple signal bars on the Screech Owl's network indicator. I planned to let Charlie Dorn know I was headed out to check on the cougar traps, but before I could pull over and dial, the thing sounded off with its customary shrill shriek. I looked at the screen before answering. The call was from the BLM.

“Well, what do you know?” Roy said. “She answered her phone. Will wonders never cease?”

“Very funny. What's up?”

“You got a call here at the office from Lorena Coldfire,” Roy said. “Under the circumstances, I figured I better not give out your cell phone number, so we took the message. They got a lion in one of those traps.”

“The she-lion? Or one of the cubs?”

“Sounds like they got your mama cat.”

Since I was close by, I took Mountain to the pueblo and left him with Momma Anna. When I got to the Coldfire Ranch, Lorena was parked in the place where I had previously pulled up to check the traps from a distance. “The cubs are nowhere to be seen,” she said as I got out of the Jeep. She had her binoculars trained on the trap containing the mother mountain lion. “I drove back to the house to call you the moment I saw her. Scout and Charlie Dorn are waiting on a crew to come with the trailer. They'll be along shortly.”

 

Charlie and I approached the cage on foot to assess the condition of the cougar. Weak with hunger and the gunshot wound, the tawny tiger sat upright in the cage, her injured thigh revealing the meat and sinew of her muscle where she had licked the hair and skin from around the black, oozing hole where the bullet had entered her body. Her eyes fixed on Charlie and me, and the dark tip of her long, muscular tail flicked up and down in the cage in a pendulumlike rhythm that tapped out the tempo of her mood—a panicked but calculating meter. Her broad face tracked us like a sunflower does the sun, turning slowly, her large, amber eyes trained on me, her broad, rose-colored nose emitting pulsing vapor clouds as her breath steamed in the cold.

“She's mighty thin,” Charlie said softly as we drew near.

The cat stood and angled her backside away from us, to the extent that she could move in the cage. Her chest quivered rapidly, the tips of the whitish fur on the prow of her breast fluttering.

“She's undefeated,” I whispered.

“What did you say?”

“Look at her, Charlie. She's starving, she has been shot, and she's letting us know she hasn't been whipped.”

We paused a few yards from the cage. I could smell the cougar's musk, see the rough patches in her sandy coat, the gleaming tips of whiskers that were—even now—probing for sensory input, helping the cat to compute every detail about us.

She stood on huge, tight-fisted feet, ready to defend the only remnant that remained of her freedom—the choice to remain wild, even in a cage. This was the sacred cat revered in ancient Pueblo myth for helping to defend the People against raiding tribes, the one who taught the People to hunt in a previous world—but who was so vicious and violent that she had to be sent through the smoke hole of the kiva into the next world, where she lived high in the mountains and fiercely protected the towering blue peaks of the realm. The Tanoah knew the puma as a wild thing that would never be tame, as an elusive spirit that was both majestic and terrifying.

As I studied the beast before me, a blast of icy wind whipped my hair from under my hat and out in a fluttering tail behind me. The cougar's head made a quick movement to watch this flapping yellow flag, and I remembered Sevenguns's advice about using something that moved to trap the animal. As the cat's eyes darted quickly back and forth, watching the flittering wisps of my mane, I felt the same sinking sensation in my spirit that I had felt when I fastened Mountain to the heavy chain. Somehow this was wrong. I had used my small but clever mind to figure a way to capture this cat in the name of saving her and her babies. But now that I saw her in the cage, I knew I could never truly capture her, nor could I save her, for she was both doomed and indomitable. Her experience of life, and of death, was far greater than mine. I wanted to dash to the cage and free her, to shout at her to run for her life and never come close to anything that walked on two legs again, to take her babies farther and higher into the blue world above and to never test her powers against anything so devious as a human being. If only there were another world, a smoke hole through which she could jump into the wild, sacred freedom in which she belonged.