Bittersweet (5 page)

He surprised her again. He'd asked her out for an elegant Saturday night dinner at the ranch. The girls were doing an overnight with friends, and he'd cooked a gourmet meal just for the two of them. She'd worn her
one best dress, a short, slim, silky red number with a low V neckline that Lanny had picked out for her to wear to his firm's Christmas party two years before. And she'd worn makeup, which she didn't wear on the job.

Derek had whistled when he helped her off with her coat. “Utopia is full of surprises,” he'd said, letting his gaze linger appreciatively on her neckline. He shook his head, faintly amused, and took her hand. “And that's what you're hiding under that game warden's uniform? There oughta be a law, Mackenzie. You should wear a dress like that every day.” She didn't tell him that she preferred her uniform, which kept her from having to make decisions about dresses and shoes and stuff like that. But she didn't pull her hand back, either.

“Pie fixes everything,” she thought now, as she cruised past the Lost Maples Café and on down the street. Maybe pie was what she needed to patch up that hole in her heart that had been left when her marriage broke up.

Not that she blamed Lanny for what had happened. They had gotten engaged in college, married when she graduated from the Academy, and settled down to a new home and new careers—Lanny as a civil engineer working for a large architectural firm in Austin, Mack as a first-year game warden, responsible for a patrol district in the Hill Country west of Pecan Springs. But Lanny had learned pretty quickly that while his was a nine-to-five job, his wife was on call around the clock, with nighttime patrols routine from September through February and frequent during the summer. For a while, they had loved each other enough to keep trying to make it work, especially when they'd been hopeful enough to imagine fitting a baby into Mack's complicated schedule.

But then a potentially dangerous encounter with a badass hunter had demonstrated to Lanny that his wife's service weapon was not there for
show. “I'm sorry, but I just can't live with the fear that you'll leave on patrol one night and won't come home,” he'd said disconsolately. Not long after that, he told her he had met somebody else.

Mack didn't fight for the marriage. She wasn't sure there was anything left worth fighting for, and when Lanny made it clear that her career was the price of their reconciliation, she knew what she had to do. She thought about it for all of thirty seconds, offered Lanny his freedom, and put in for a transfer. It didn't much matter where in Texas she went, so long as it was close to what passed for wilderness these days. When the transfer to Uvalde County was offered, she had said an immediate yes.

And that's how she had ended up in Utopia. Now, driving down the shadowy street, appreciating its early-morning peace and quiet, she reached down to the truck's cup holder and picked up the mug of hot coffee. Utopia was one of those blink-and-you-miss-it towns, on a road that didn't go much of anywhere. But from time to time it became a “destination town,” and the streets weren't always as quiet as they were this morning. The golf course south of town pulled golfers in for tournaments, and there was the Open Pro Rodeo at the park, the annual Utopia Arts and Crafts Fair, and various barbecue and chili and Dutch oven cook-offs, all of it with plenty of dancing and country music. During dove and deer seasons, weekend hunters wearing camo crowded into the café or picked up supplies at the General Store. There had even been a movie,
Seven Days in Utopia
. Mack hadn't been in Utopia when the film was shot, but she'd heard that it stirred up a potful of excitement—which it would, of course, since it had brought Robert Duvall and Melissa Leo to town. Dozens of Utopians had been employed as extras, and there were snapshots of the stars and the cast and crew plastered all over one of the café's walls.

But the biggest excitement in the past couple of months had been the mountain lion that had added the town to its territory, snatching a puppy out of a resident's backyard and killing a goat tethered to a clothesline. The lion—a young adult male weighing around a hundred pounds—had even been seen prowling along Cypress Street, on the fringes of the town park. People were spooked and rightly so, Mack knew. An adult lion needed eight to ten pounds of meat every day to survive. And a hungry lion might not be particular about who or what was on the menu, as an article in the
Uvalde Leader-News
had recently warned, pointing out that a four-year-old child had been attacked and killed by a mountain lion in the Rio Grande Valley just six months before.

But prowling lions aside, when the movie shoot was over and all the golfers and rodeo riders and tourists and cook-off champs and hunters had left, Utopia was once again transformed into a quiet, modest, back-in-time village—sort of like the mythical Brigadoon that Mack had seen in a movie. It vaulted into the twenty-first century on weekends and slipped back into the nineteenth century during the week.

Like Brigadoon, Utopia had waxed and waned, fading in and out of the gauzy mists that drifted through the Sabinal River Canyon on cool autumn mornings. In the 1790s, the Spanish found silver and dug a mine shaft in Sugarloaf Mountain but hurried back south when the Indians—Comanches, Tonkawas, Kickapoo, and Lipan Apaches—gave them a hard time. The first Anglo settler arrived in 1852. In spite of sporadic Indian raids, more settlers followed, and by 1880, the village boasted 150 citizens and a weekly stage, a post office, a cotton gin, two gristmills, a blacksmith shop, a general merchandise store, three churches, and a half-dozen saloons. The telephone came to town in 1914, and electricity arrived after the Second World War, although paved roads took a while
longer. The population dropped to sixty when the decade-long dry spell of the 1950s droughted out many of the old ranches, but the state's rising prosperity in the following decades delivered a recreation boom to the area. Tourism—and Utopia—began to flourish. And so did hunting and fishing, now a fifteen-billion-dollar industry in Texas. Around Utopia these days, a rancher could make more money hawking hunting leases than he could selling beef, wool, or mohair, which had once been the county's cash crops.

But the biggest money of all wasn't in leases. It was in the big-buck breeding and captive hunting ranches, like the 4,200-acre Three Gates Game Ranch where Jack Krause worked. The place was high fenced to ensure that the managed game (which included a dozen exotic species) stayed inside, where they'd get plenty of high-protein supplemental feed. Critics said that these weren't game ranches but deer farms, and that paying upwards of fifteen thousand dollars to sit in an air-conditioned and heated tower blind and shoot a trophy buck that came to feed wasn't hunting at all, but something else. Target practice, maybe.

But like it or not, Texas A&M University had recently reported that white-tailed deer breeding was the fastest-growing rural industry in the United States. In Texas, it was adding some $650 million annually to the economy. And in Uvalde County, the money it brought in wasn't available in any other legal way. It meant jobs. Real jobs that enabled people to feed their families and pay the rent. High-fenced game ranches were a fact of life in a world that turned wild animals into pricey commodities. But that didn't mean she had to like them.

Mack drained her coffee and dropped the empty mug back into the cup holder. Seeing the motion, Molly raised her head alertly, then sat up on her haunches and looked out the window as Mack made a right turn
off Main Street onto Farm-to-Market Road 1050 and crossed the Sabinal River. To her right, a hundred yards off the road, was the spot where she and her best friend Karen Wilson—a wildlife biologist from San Antonio with whom she'd roomed during their junior year at college—had set up a lion trap a couple of days ago, baited with a roadkill deer. Karen was conducting a study of mountain lions, and Mack had volunteered to help whenever she could. With luck, they would catch the lion, put on a radio collar, and relocate it to Karen's remote study area.

Mack detoured for a quick check of the trap, which was empty and unsprung, and called Karen to report. Her husband Boyce, sounding half-asleep, answered the phone, and she apologized and asked for Karen.

“No luck this morning,” she said, when her friend answered. “I think we're going to need to get some fresh bait. This deer must be three or four days old.” She wrinkled her nose at the smell. “It's getting pretty ripe.”

“You called me before the sun is up to tell me that, Mackenzie?” Karen demanded sternly.

“Oops, sorry,” Mack said, contrite. “I guess I didn't check the time.”

“You guess you didn't check the time,” Karen repeated in a mocking tone. “You're married to your job, Mack. You are totally, completely uncivilized. No wonder your marriage failed.”

“Hey.” Mack sighed. “I said I'm sorry.” She paused and took another sniff of the deer. “I'll see if I can get a pig or something. For the trap.”

“You do that,” Karen said dryly. “You get the pig. I'm going back to bed, where Boyce is waiting. Phone me when we've got our lion.”

Feeling a little sheepish, Mack rejoined Molly in the truck. “I guess Karen's right, Mol,” she muttered. “I'm uncivilized. No wonder Lanny divorced me.” Only of course he hadn't. They had divorced each other. But it was true that she was married to her job.

She swung back onto the two-lane heading west in the direction of Garner State Park. This part of the county lay along the southern rim of the heavily eroded Edwards Plateau, with elevations ranging from 200 to 700 feet above sea level. The rolling hills and deep canyons were blanketed with live oak, shinnery oak, red oak, and Ashe juniper, while the clearings were carpeted with buffalo and mesquite grass. To the south, down toward the county seat of Uvalde, the land flattened out into the coastal plains and became more arid, and the brush-covered plains featured thorny vegetation and plenty of guajillo with scattered clusters of post oak and live oak. There was a lot of talk these days about climate change, and Mack knew that if the drought went on for a few more years, it would have a major impact on the wildlife. But there was no use letting the anxiety about tomorrow darken her pleasure in the day. All she could do was concentrate on doing her job—the job she loved—in the best way she knew how.

It was Tuesday, so she was expecting an easy day, although in this business, you never knew. Following a detailed map on which Clyde Brimley, her predecessor, had located the deer camps in her patrol area, she took a right off 1050 at Six-Mile Road and drove up into the hills and canyons along a rocky caliche two-track that skirted the bare ridge above Six-Mile Creek. A few miles in, she pulled off onto a flat shoulder that overlooked a broad reach of rolling tree-covered hills and narrow valleys, the property of Six-Mile Ranch. The owner, Jed Barnes, sold hunting leases and maintained a half-dozen primitive deer camps. Picking up her dad's old Leupold spotting scope, she began to study the terrain below, where one of the camps was half-hidden under a clump of oaks.

Her father, a game warden, was one of the reasons Mack was a warden now. They'd lived in Burnet County, in the central Hill Country.
Spring and summer, he was out on Lake Buchanan or the Lower Colorado River most days, issuing citations for boating while intoxicated and checking fishing licenses, safety equipment, trotlines, and live buckets. During deer season, he was out most days and nights, inspecting hunting licenses and permits and tags, monitoring bag limits, and citing trespassers and jacklighters—people who used illegal spotlights to freeze deer along the road for an easy kill. One dark night, he was shot and killed by a drunken poacher.

Mack pushed the memory as far away as she could—it was an anguished ghost that she could never banish completely—and opened her patrol log. The last time she had checked the camp, it had been occupied by four men with valid licenses. Tarps were spread over the tops and sides of aluminum folding frames for a temporary bunkhouse, cots and sleeping bags arranged beneath. The camp featured all the comforts of home. Off to one side was a portable propane gas grill; four ice chests; four folding chairs around a card table (she had interrupted a poker game); and a laptop. There were several feeders and stands within a couple of hundred yards. One of the hunters had already taken a deer. When she checked, she saw that the tag and harvest log were in order and that his ice chest contained the field-dressed backstraps and quarters. Pointing to a loaded beer cooler, she had given her routine caution against drinking before they went off for their evening hunt and had taken some mild kidding from the guys for being a “girl game warden.” She got that occasionally. She didn't like it, but she didn't make an issue of it.

The camp was empty today, and Mack moved on, pulling off the road again at the next camp, about five miles farther on and a couple of hundred feet higher up the canyon. Scoping the stream far below, she spotted a natty black and white crested caracara perched on a dead limb over the
creek. The bird was a tropical falcon, a carrion feeder like the vulture that filled the same ecological niche farther north. It cocked its head, peering down, watching a slow, deliberate movement on a half-submerged log. There were two robust splashes in quick succession: a pair of turtles taking to the water, likely red-eared sliders.

Mack peered through the scope at the widening rings left in the silent pool by the disappearing turtles, imagining them foraging among the water weeds on the graveled bottom. She loved the wilderness, loved nature in its wildest, most undisturbed form. The week before, ten miles farther south, she had happened on a docile, slow-moving Texas tortoise feeding on shriveled tuna,
the ruby-colored fruit of the prickly pear cactus. Listed as a threatened species in the state, the tortoise was the first live one she had ever seen, although her father had once brought her a saucer-size yellowish orange tortoise shell. She had scrubbed it and brushed on several coats of clear polyurethane and put it on the shelf over her bed with her other prized turtle shells, some she had found along the creek near their house, some her father had brought her. Lanny had objected to her collection (“What do you want with those ugly old things?”), so her friend China Bayles had kept it for her. But when she moved to Utopia, she brought the shells with her and arranged them with several interesting rocks and lichens on a shelf under the kitchen window where she could see them every day, lovely icons of wilderness in her home.