Hunting Season (12 page)

 She took her time driving back to Port Gibson, gathering her wits and cataloguing her injuries. Now that she had the time to listen, her body began to complain of the ill treatment: a scratched forearm, a bruised knee, a sore shoulder muscle. The flight through the woods hadn't been nearly as costly as she feared it might.

Randy readied the ranger station before she did. Lights were blazing. Anna pulled up beside his patrol ear and got out. Her mad dash had sapped her strength. Muscles cooled, she found herself moving like a creaky old woman. Consciously she straightened up and loosened her gait. Feeling old and tired and frail was her privilege. Seeing her do so was not Ranger Thigpen's.

As if to point up her distress, Randy, older than she and fatter than Jabba the Hutt, was looking quite cool and dapper. He sat at his desk, facing the door she entered through, a bottle of Coke in his left hand, a cigarette in his right.

Despite years of federal and then, even in Mississippi, state laws banning smoking in public buildings, till Anna'd become district ranger the Port Gibson Ranger Station had been Thigpen's private smoking lounge. The walls and ceiling were yellow-gray with twenty years' accumulated residue. The only way to cleanse the building of the smell would be to raze it to the ground and build anew.

Her first day on duty the previous April, Anna had enforced the smoking ban. Since then Randy had played at compliance. He acted out the familiar scene again.

"Anna!" A grin, meant to be sheepish but merely sly, ferreted around beneath his mustache. "Caught me red-handed." Scooting his chair to the opposite door, he threw the butt out on the concrete where she'd have to wade through it and its pals. "Hard to remember after so long doing things our own way." Emphasis on the "our," chair rolled back to desk, triumphant look of innocence feigned.

Because she was new to management, because Thigpen had already sued her once, because she wanted to be fair and understanding, Anna'd put up with this scene half a dozen times. After it played itself through she sighed, dragging the tainted air deep and letting it go with the relaxed musculature of the seriously depressed. "Randy," she said wearily. He smiled. Anna smiled back. "If I ever catch you smoking in here again, I will put the goddamn cigarette out on your tongue." Perhaps she'd not shed her totem snake as completely as she thought.

Randy's smile quivered, cracked, ran and hid behind his mustache. Obnoxious retorts skittered through his brain; Anna could see them flittering like moths behind his pale blue eyes.

She waited, half hoping he'd say something stupid. Having been jeered, frightened and chased, she was in the mood to smack the hell out of somebody.

Thigpen wisely didn't give her cause. He rested a moment, then, true to form, went back on the offensive.

"Why didn't you wait for me?" he demanded. "You could of gotten yourself hurt out there playing at Navy Seals. Not that those old boys would have hurt you. They were just having a little fun. Running through the woods at night, you could've broken a leg or gotten yourself snake-bit."

Anna chose not to engage. With a satisfying ripping sound, she pulled her duty belt off its underbelt of Velcro and dropped it on Barth's desk. Thigpen winced and Anna was pleased. Settling into the chair facing his over the appalling clutter her field rangers stubbornly insisted on working in the midst of, she said, "You recognize anybody? Any voices, faces, anything? It's a good bet they were locals. Probably the men that built that stand in the first place."

"No," he said too quickly.

"You told Sheriff Jones you'd gotten to know everybody in Natchez. Who were those guys?"

Randy looked genuinely, sincerely hurt and confused. Proof, if Anna'd needed any, that he was hiding something. At an easy guess, Thigpen had done what he'd done once before, if only in part. He'd slowed his response time to her call for backup to the point she'd either have settled the matter before he arrived or it would have settled her. That was a firing offense and he knew it. He also knew, this time, there was no way she could prove it.

"I honestly don't know," he said. "I got a look sort of at one of 'em, but even if I had of seen him before, I wouldn't of recognized him. They had mud or something smeared on their faces."

Listening to him Anna felt only emptiness and fatigue. She glanced at her watch: quarter to twelve. The time surprised her. She had that gritty hollow feeling that comes just before sunrise. An absurd scene floated up from a distant past, one spent eating apples and reading novels in the crook of an old oak tree that grew in her parents' front yard: Scarlett O'Hara standing ragged and worn, clutching a fistful of Tara's good earth and swearing, "I'll think about it tomorrow. After all, tomorrow is another day."

Tomorrow was fourteen minutes away. Anna didn't want to start it in the presence of Randy Thigpen. Rising, she gathered up her gunbelt. "You're off duty in a minute and I've about had it. We'll talk tomorrow."

As the door was closing behind her, she heard Randy's light pleasant voice calling "goodnight" in an offensively cheerful cadence.

"Fuck you," Anna whispered. "Fuck you all." The "all" was catholic: Anna hadn't the energy to separate the saved from the damned.

6

Another exquisite Mississippi fall day greeted Anna. Air was dry and cool, sky as blue and deep as a poet could wish. The woods, so sentient with entangling evil the night before, sighed with peaceful dreams of the winter's sleep to come and breathed out a perfume delicate with sweet memories of a glorious spring.

Anna inhaled and tried to be appreciative. After the painfully long day before, she'd thought she would have slept like the dead but perhaps the analogy was too apt. She'd tossed and turned till Piedmont abandoned the bed for the Morris chair in the living room. She'd made so many trips to the bathroom that finally even the faithful Taco gave up escorting her down the long dark hallway. Nightmares plagued her, a confusion of images full of violence and failure. On waking, she remembered none of them, but they'd left her with all the symptoms of a hangover. It was nearly enough to drive her to drink. Paying the piper when the son-of-a-bitch never played rankled.

Standing at the foot of the crude stairs leading to the hunting stand, she tried to unclutter a
mind as full of junk as Fibber McGee and Molly's closet.

She'd parked her patrol car on the Trace in the same place she'd parked the previous night and backtracked, following her flight through the trees. After a few false leads, she'd found the place she'd gone to ground. Looking at the stirring and heaping of downed leaves and needles she'd used to camouflage herself brought back the specter of the snake. In her weakened state, her basic humanity precarious, she'd felt an icy touch remembering how close she'd been to taking another life and the keen and joyless pleasure with which she'd looked forward to doing so.

Tracking her hunters had been a piece of cake, even through the usually trackless fecundity of the Mississippi undergrowth. They'd pursued her with the delicate touch of a pack of all-terrain vehicles, smashing over rotting logs and crashing through thin dry branches. Unfortunately no one had been thoughtful enough to lose a unique button or drop an engraved cigarette lighter.

By the time she'd reached the tree where they'd first surprised her, she knew no more about them than she had the night before, beyond the fact that they were a mindless group of mean-spirited bozos. During hunting season that didn't narrow the field of play by much.

Her flashlight was where she'd left it so the search wasn't entirely fruitless. She scoured the area where the hunters had lain in wait. Scuffled duff, a few marks in the bark and the butt of three filter cigarettes was all she got for her trouble. The cigarette butts she retrieved and dropped in a baggie, not as evidence but as litter. An interchange such as she'd experienced didn't warrant the time and expense of high-tech lab work. No DNA would be lifted from the butts. Chances were good her hunters had no criminal records. As Thigpen had said, they were probably just "good old boys having a little fun."

Anna sneered at the thought. She'd cleaned up after that brand of American macho gang "fun" too many times: rape, vandalism, harassment, assault. Men and women in the United States carried a terrific burden of anger against the other gender for reasons Anna could never fathom. Women took theirs out in psychological torture sometimes aimed at men, more often at themselves. Men were more hands-on: and the hands were too often on the smaller, weaker sex.

"Not all men," Anna forced herself to say out loud. "Not even most," the rational voice of her sister in her head forced her to add. Some days it was harder than others to remember that evil was still front page news. Goodness and order were so much the norm they needn't be reported.

A dozen feet or so from the stand itself Anna found a small excavation, a hole maybe a foot across, a couple inches deep and still damp. There being no other reason for its existence, she figured it was where the men had poured out their canteens to mix the mud they'd smeared on their faces.

The timing bothered her. The mud, the three cigarettes at the ambush sight. They'd had time to plan and wait before she came. They must have seen her patrol car the moment she'd stopped. Clearly, they'd had all the time in the world to stroll back to their vehicles and simply slip away undetected. Instead they'd painted their faces and lain in wait.

Spontaneous combustion of assholes was frightening but usually soon over. Premeditated viciousness was apt to recur until its goal, whatever it was, was achieved.

She shook off the musings, shrugged out of the night before, and came back to the sweet-smelling sunlight at the foot of the stairs. Her last chance at evidence lay there. She needed an open mind.

The steps, made of unpainted two-by-fours weathered to gray, were clean. She climbed up, enjoying the childlike feel of climbing into a treehouse in spite of her darkened mood. The stand, a wooden platform with a simple rail around it, was as clean as the steps. No clues. Few leaves. Spotless.

"Damn," Anna muttered as she stared at the weathered hoards. The thing had been swept, not with a branch or anything else that one might imagine would be handy to a group out hunting deer and lady rangers, but swept with a broom. What had once been muddy boot prints was now a veil of dried dust neatly streaked with the fine stiff straw of a household broom. The maid had been in.

She climbed the last step onto the platform. There was no evidence, not even so much as a clue left behind to disturb. She might as well enjoy the view. Leaning her elbows on the railing, she looked out over the small meadow toward the Trace.

The hunting stand was well-placed, several yards back from the meadow's edge in the branches of an old pecan tree. Mixed hardwood, pine and the fast growing weed trees, mimosa, willow and popcorn, had crowded back around the pecan once its protectors were gone. Now it provided a leafy hidden bower.

With a clear shot to the meadow.

Anna had never grasped the lure of hunting. When she went to the trouble to travel to quiet, beautiful, isolated places, usually the last thing on her mind was killing anything.

She walked the length of the stand. The wood was weathered and splintery and the stand was in uneven repair. The steps were rickety and one side of the platform rotted through, but a piece of the railing had been recently repaired. Time had come to tear the stand down. Surely nobody would be using it now.

Surely.

For a moment she remained, thinking. Decision made, she backed down the rudimentary stairs. The stand would stay. The hunters had put so much time and effort into building it. They'd successfully terrorized and chased away the lady ranger. Maybe they'd be back. It was worth a try. Each ache of bruised muscle and sting of torn flesh earned the night before reminded her how thoroughly she wanted to catch the bastards.

At ten-thirty Anna met Sheriff Jones at the Mt. Locust Ranger Station. When she'd first come to the Trace, the office was housed in two grungy rooms in the maintenance building. Since then some of the seasonals positions were cut, housing reappropriated, and the ranger station moved to a house much like the one she lived in. The "new" office was located between the maintenance yard to the north and Mt. Locust to the south. From the luxury of a screened-in porch, the visitors center and the old stand were visible.

"You look beat," Clintus said kindly. "Bad night?"

Anna ran her fingers through her cropped hair then realized, far from smoothing it, she'd probably stood it all on end. As much white as brown had begun to show in recent years. She'd discovered that white hairs, like old women, did just as they pleased.

"Hard night," she agreed and told him of her nocturnal adventures with the local sportsmen.

Clintus listened with flattering attention and reacted with satisfying ire. He could identify with Anna's horror of "good old boys having a little fun." Validation and support were all Anna got, all she expected. He could no more guess the identity or track down her night-hunters than she could.

"I'll check old reports," he promised. "See if we've got anything on poachers over the past few years. Don't get your hopes up. Around here it's a kind of slap-the-wrist and wink crime. Left over from the days everybody hunted to lay in meat for the winter. Or maybe just not liking to be messed with by the government."

"I won't hold my breath," she said and they moved on to other matters. Anna hadn't given poor old Doyce a thought since she'd first spotted the hunters' light from the stand. It was a relief to return to a crime that engaged only her mind and left the rest of her in peace.