Cliff-Hanger (10 page)

“W
hat did the collar look like?” Olivia was asking. “Was it a tracking collar like they use on the wolves at Yellowstone?”

“No—a dog collar,” Ashley answered.

“The kind you can buy at Kmart. Not real wide, but it had a big buckle.”

The four Landons were back at the round house. Olivia spoke into a two-way radio the Navajo ranger had given her, relaying Ashley's information to the searchers in the field. It was now three in the morning, and the whole park staff was out in force, trying to locate the dangerous cat.

No one was bothering to look for Lucky or her father, not even the local police. Since manpower was at a premium and the two O'Douls were not considered to be a threat, the search for them had been shoved to the back burner. Until tomorrow, maybe, or at least till the cougar had been caught.

Olivia snapped off the radio and let out a big sigh. “Finally, it makes sense,” she said. “You've solved it, Ashley—that collar means the cougar wasn't wild. Someone had raised it as a pet—found it when it was a cute little cub and kept it penned up. Then it grew big and got too hard to handle, so the owner let it loose. Probably brought it here to the park and set it free.”

Jack nodded. “So that's why it wasn't afraid of people. It came straight up to us.”

“Right. It was used to the smell of humans and connected that scent with being fed. When the owner dumped it, the poor animal had trouble fending for itself in the wild.”

“Yeah, it looked kind of skinny,” Ashley broke in.

“Because it had never been taught by its mother to hunt,” Olivia continued. “It probably didn't even know how to find water.”

A signal from the two-way radio made them all turn to stare at it. Switching it on, Olivia said, “Yes?”

“We've got it,” the radio-transmitted voice announced. “The cat with the collar. Thought you'd want to know, Dr. Landon.”

“Good. What are you going to—” The unmistakable crack of rifle fire exploded through the receiver in Olivia's hand. Jack flinched, Steven bit his lip, and Ashley's eyes filled with tears. “It's all over, Dr. Landon,” the voice said. “We found our cougar, thanks to those kids of yours.”

Ashley sobbed, “Oh Mom, I didn't want to—”

Olivia reached to comfort her daughter. “I hate it too, honey,” she said. “But we had no choice. Once animals have been raised by humans, they rarely adapt to life in the wild. And when they start attacking people, like that little boy and that woman—”

“But those people are going to be OK, right?”

“Yes, they're both going to be fine. But the next person might not have been so lucky. This simply had to be done, Ashley.”

“At least the rest of the cougars in the park will be left in peace,” Steven told her.

Ashley cried, “Still, I have this big ache inside.”

Jack did too. A huge ache. And only part of it was because of the cougar. That part would heal over time, but the rest of the hurt would be with him always.

 

Even in June in Jackson Hole, the peaks of the Tetons glistened with snow. In the valley it was shorts and T-shirt weather.

School was out, and Steven had come home for lunch, bringing tacos. The three of them—Olivia was at work at the elk refuge—sat at their picnic table in the backyard munching the crispy taco shells. Jack liked hot sauce on his beef-and-bean hardshell taco; Ashley preferred sour cream and guacamole on hers.

As he ate, Jack read the sports pages. The Utah Jazz were playing in the finals for the NBA champion ship. Ordinarily this would have fired him with excitement, but now he put down the paper with only half the columns read.

“I see the mail truck out front,” Ashley said. “I'll go get the mail.”

“No, I will.” For two weeks Jack had tried to be first at the mailbox every day, hoping in vain for even a postcard from Lucky. Now he came back and handed half a dozen bills and advertisements to his father.

Steven opened one envelope and frowned. “I don't get this,” he said. “This phone bill has calls on it that we didn't make.”

Jack sat up straighter. “Like what?”

“Starting with—one from here at the house at 2 a.m. on the night before we left for Mesa Verde. That has to be a mistake.”

“Where's it to?” Jack asked, remembering that middle-of-the-night phone call when he first heard about the fictitious Maria.

“To Moab, Utah. We don't even know anyone in Moab. And here's one made from Mesa Verde to Cortez, Colorado—it's billed to your mother's phone card.”

That's where Lucky's father had been that evening—Cortez, just down the road from the park. “Lucky calling her dad,” Ashley murmured.

Steven may not have heard her, because he went on, “And the day after that, there was a call from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and then another one from Albuquerque. Both of these calls were charged to the phone card.”

“Heading south,” Jack said.

Steven hadn't been ignoring the obvious. “They were on their way to the Mexican border,” he said. “There's a call from El Paso, Texas, and this last one is an international call, from Ciudad Juárez.” He threw down the bundle of mail. “So they made it to Mexico. I don't know whether I'm glad or sorry. That poor kid, Lucky—what kind of life is she going to have, always on the run, in a different country with no family, no friends—”

She has one friend, Jack thought. No matter where she is.

“Who were the calls made to?” Ashley asked.

“I don't know. I'd have to get in touch with the phone company, I guess, to find out. Maybe I ought to give the information to Ms. Lopez,” Steven decided. “Not that it will do any good now that Lucky and her father are in Mexico. But I suppose I do need to report it. Poor Ms. Lopez had quite a time with Lucky—trying to track her name and checking out that white tiger story, which, of course, turned out to be just another one of Lucky's tales. Who knows, maybe Lucky will turn out to be a writer.” Untangling his long legs from the picnic bench, Steven stood up and went into the house.

Jack had saved one letter from the day's mail because it was addressed to him. The return address said Mesa Verde National Park. Picking up a dinner knife, he sliced open the flap on the envelope.

“Dear Jack Landon,” the letter began, “We wish to express our deep appreciation to you for returning the turquoise frog fetish to the museum association. When you gave it to us, you expressed the opinion that the fetish, although old, didn't have an especially great financial value. It is correct that small stone carvings cannot usually be dated because they are noncarbon-based materials—”

“What does that mean?” Ashley asked, pointing to the line Jack was reading.

He jerked the paper away. “Who said you could read my mail?”

“Oh, come on, Jack. I was as much a part of that night as you were. What to they mean about the dating?”

He sighed. “Carbon dating only works on things that were once living—like the fiber in sandals, or the turkey-feather blankets the People made, or old bones. Not on stone or turquoise or anything that wasn't alive. Now back off while I finish reading this.”

He turned his attention to the letter in his hand.

“…noncarbon-based materials,” he continued. “However, it happens that this turquoise fetish is different. As we examined it, we realized it had once held tiny gemstones for eyes. The gemstones are long gone, but residue remains of the pitch that was used to glue the eyes in place. And pitch, because it comes from pine trees, can be dated. Very preliminary test results lead us to believe that this fetish was made approximately 780 years ago. Since its age can be certified, the piece is priceless. Of course, even if it had little financial value, the fetish would be invaluable to us as an artifact that expands our knowledge of the prehistoric Puebloan culture. For that reason, we extend to you our heartfelt thanks. Sincerely, Linda Martin, Curator.”

In a handwritten note at the bottom of the letter, she'd added, “Just for fun, Jack, if I had to put a price on the fetish, I'd guess about a quarter million dollars.”

Jack closed his eyes and leaned back so far he nearly fell off the bench.

“Can I see it now?” Ashley asked. He handed it to her.

“Wow!” Ashley jumped up, waving the letter. “Wow! Lucky would curl up and die if she knew about this—a quarter million! Wow!”

“She would have given it back anyway, because it belonged in the park,” Jack insisted.

Ashley laughed so hard Jack felt a slow burn crawling up his cheeks. “Oh yeah! Sure she would, Jack! You are some dreamer. She thought it was worth about a hundred bucks, so she gave it back. But a quarter million? No way!”

Steven came out of the house then. “They can't trace Lucky and her dad from the phone calls they made,” he said. “The calls were just to sporting-goods stores and travel offices and places like that. I guess they drove from El Paso across the border into Juárez. Ms. Lopez says she'll call the border checkpoints, but she suspects O'Doul was an alias, too. They probably used lots of different names, and had several different passports.”

“Dad, you might want to see this,” Jack said. He handed his father the letter from Mesa Verde. Without another word, Jack went inside.

H
e'd been waiting for a chance to be alone in the house. That evening, at last, his mother and dad and Ashley had gone to a movie. Jack had begged off, saying he was halfway through a book more exciting than any movie playing in Jackson Hole that week.

Eighteen days had passed since Lucky had run away from him, disappearing into the forest on top of the mesa. In all that time, his film had remained inside his camera, untouched.

He hadn't been trying for pictures when he fired his camera's flash at the cougar. All he'd wanted was to scare the big cat, to make it go away. He hadn't pointed the camera, he hadn't focused, he'd just pressed the shutter button to make the automatic flash go off. Later, when he looked at the number showing how far the film had advanced, he discovered he'd clicked the shutter 14 times. No wonder the flash had stopped recharging.

Fourteen wild, random shots. What were the odds that he'd captured something on film? Anything? As he made his way to the basement to his father's darkroom, he held his hopes in check.

After filling the tanks with water and chemicals, he turned off the lights and loaded the film onto the processing spool. As he worked, he kept checking the glow-in-the-dark numbers on the clock they used to time steps in the developing process. He wanted everything finished before his parents and Ashley came home.

As he took the roll of negatives from the stabilizer solution, he caught his breath. He didn't want to look too closely—not yet—but he thought he might have lucked out on at least two frames. Don't get your hopes up, he told himself.

Negatives dried. Paper in the developing tube. Jack checked the clock again, sending mental signals to his parents to take Ashley for ice cream after the movie. When at last he allowed himself to really look at his prints, his heart thudded.

Twelve of them were useless. They showed slabs of rock, bits of trees, the cougar's left front foot, half of its face—or nothing at all.

But one! One was a magnificent shot of the cougar in full snarl. Each whisker stood out against the dark background. The pink nose and the ridge of fur behind it wrinkled menacingly. And the eyes—the flash had caught them full on, so that they gleamed like beacons. It was an almost perfect picture. Later, Jack would show it to his father, who would probably blow it up to poster size in the studio where he worked.

Then, as if he might be handling the Grail, Jack turned his attention to the picture that mattered most, the one he'd been hoping against all odds would turn out to be good.

Gently, holding the wet print only by the edges, he gazed into Lucky's face. She stared back at him, startled by the camera's flash. It was just before she'd turned to discover the cougar; she didn't yet wear the expression of terror that would twist her features just a few seconds afterward.

For a long time he stared at her, remembering the good things about her—her smile, the time in the tunnel when she'd taken his hand, the way she'd secretly passed the piece of turquoise to him just before she fled. It hurt to think that the good in her might never have a chance to grow.

All he had of her was this picture. And no one else was ever going to see it.

I
n my job as a park ranger at Mesa Verde National Park, I get to drive up onto this amazing mesa every day. One spring morning, just after 7 a.m., I had a terrific wildlife sighting—a cougar! He stood just above the road on a small slope. I looked at him, and he looked at me. Cougars, also called mountain lions, are mostly nocturnal hunters, so perhaps this lion was returning from a hunting trip in search of his favorite food: mule deer.

He stood on the slope in the morning sunshine, tawny brown, probably six feet long, his graceful tail a full one-third of his body length. Beautiful and awe-inspiring, he probably weighed around 170 pounds of sleek, fluid strength. As I watched, his ears perked up, and he seemed to look me right in the eyes. It sent a chill running up my spine. Almost before I realized what I had seen, he was gone.

Except for the paved road, my sighting could have been exactly like the sighting of an Ancestral Puebloan some 700 years ago. The same sun was shining on that person along a dirt trail near the edge of the same canyon. An ancestor of the cougar I saw could have stood in the same place and inspired the same feelings. Across the centuries I felt a kinship with those residents of Mesa Verde, human and mountain lion alike.

Unfortunately, since
A.D
. 1300 (when most people had left Mesa Verde), not everyone has felt that same kinship with the cougar. As European settlers, farmers, and ranchers moved across North America, the cougar has been pushed from its homeland, which ranged from coast to coast, from Canada to Mexico. Fear for their livestock and even for their own families has caused people to kill cougars and other predators, wherever people came into contact with wildlife. Encroaching development across the West—cities, towns, houses, ranches—destroyed habitat for the cougar. People need places to live and work, but cougars have the same needs. Cougars now live mostly in the West, pushed into islands of wilderness like Mesa Verde National Park.

Our natural fear of the cougar is not without cause. Cougars attacking people, as in this book, are events that are rare, but they do happen. You are much more likely to be attacked by another person than by a cougar. Yet when cougar attacks do occur, it's big news in newspapers and magazines, and on the radio and TV.

Mesa Verde kids probably also heard stories about cougars when they lived in places like Cliff Palace, Balcony House, and Spruce Tree House. During the winter, around the warming fire of their clan's kiva, these kids probably listened to cougar stories from their grandparents. The People didn't have a written history, so stories, religion, and a strong understanding of their own family history were all passed on from one generation to the next by word of mouth. As they went to sleep at night, the children were probably afraid of the cougar, but they also would have felt that it was a natural part of their world, an animal to be respected and revered.

Mesa Verde National Park is an important place for all of us, cougars and people alike, to share our common history going back thousands of years. We need public lands to ensure habitat for all wildlife and to ensure that all of the dwellings and artifacts of earlier people are preserved for future generations.

When you have the opportunity to visit a national park, please remember that everything you find there is protected—plants, animals, rocks, artifacts, every thing. You're welcome to take photographs, like Jack, and to take away as much litter as you can carry.

Come explore Mesa Verde National Park. Look back in time to the places where kids lived 700 years ago. Who knows? You just might see a cougar!

Will Morris
Chief of Interpretation and Visitor Services
Mesa Verde National Park, Mesa Verde, Colorado