Track of the Cat (5 page)

"It's been so dry. I'm putting hoof-flex on but all the same you oughtn't be working him till it heals. You can ride him all right, but no packing."

Anna nodded. If the crack broke into the quick, Gideon would be bound for the glue factory, for Piedmont's catfood tin.

"I'll take Pesky," Anna said. Running a hand down Gideon's flat forehead, she shooed flies from his eyes and the corners of his mouth. The black cloud resettled behind her fingers and the horse blinked with what seemed to Anna, in her foul mood, a tired hopelessness. "You're a good old boy, Gideon," she said. "Yes, you are." From the corner of her eye Anna thought she saw Karl smile. An event rare enough to focus her attention on him.

Maybe he's just passing gas, she thought and startled herself by laughing. There was something about Karl that was oddly innocent, baby-like. It was why Anna liked him. And possibly why she didn't understand him at all.

"Pesky needs to get out, air himself off," Karl said.

Pesky and two of the pack mules were milling around the small paddock, fussing at each other and snatching mouthfuls of hay from between the pipe bars on the manger.

Affecting nonchalance, Anna walked toward the gate. The mules, Jack and Jill, caught on immediately and, amid rolling eyes and halfhearted kicks, ran out into the pasture beyond. Pesky was so torn between freedom and food, he stood too long dithering.

"Gotcha!" Anna gloated as she swung the gate shut. It was amazing how soothing it was to exert power over one's fellow creatures.

She haltered Pesky and tied him to the hitching rail. Karl had moved back and was painstakingly combing the tangles from Gideon's tail.

"You look like you heard already," he said as Anna wrestled with the cinch, trying to get it tight enough the saddle wouldn't slip. Pesky was blowing up so he could loosen the strap with one mighty exhalation as soon as she got on. Pesky was the horse's earned name. His given name was Pasquale.

"Probably not," Anna grunted. "I never hear anything."

"About the hunt." The Norwegian's voice was bland, the careful neutrality of a cautious man.

Anna stopped what she was doing. The anger of minutes before was back, rising in her throat like indigestion. "Don't tell me," she said, but it was a question all the same.

"They're putting together a hunt. Paul and the Chief Ranger.

Superintendent's orders."

"How can they know which one to kill?" Anna asked, knowing the answer, knowing the question was intentionally naive.

Karl just looked at her, then back to Gideon's tail.

Already rumors of a man-eater would be buzzing around the local ranches.

Old stories would be flowing as fast as the Coors. Any excuse to drag out the hunting rifles was a good excuse in Texas. Texans were the best hunters in the world. They were born to it, believed in it, almost like a religion. Hunting and football, not opposable thumbs and the ability to laugh, were what separated Man from the apes.

The killing of one cat wouldn't affect the health of the lion population as a whole. Maybe if the National Park Service sacrificed one animal, preferably shot near the area of the incident, it would buy off wholesale slaughter. That's how the argument would go. It would all sound so rational when Paul or Corinne Mathers, the Chief Ranger, explained it at the next squad meeting.

"But it's just a goddamned lynching party," Anna said aloud.

Pesky twitched as if her angry words were flies landing on his neck. Karl said nothing, just combed.

Outraged injustice.

Anna was choking on it. Nobody else would care. Not enough. If a human life were on the line . . . But no one would see the connection, no one would see that this wasn't any different.

No one would see.

Anna leaned her forehead against Pesky's broad warm shoulder and tried desperately to feel normal.

5

THREE-six-one; seven-two-five Alpha."

The radio woke Anna at 9:13. She'd not slept that late in months. Her head felt thick and heavy with the wine she'd drunk the night before.

Lying on the hood of her old American Motors Rambler, she'd watched the stars deepen the endless Texas sky. She'd finished a bottle of California Chardonnay drinking to all lions living, all lions dead, and the lion soon to die.

Near midnight, while she'd still toasted those long-since vanished radio-collared lions, Rogelio had left, bound for Mexico, for a meeting of the Friends of the Pinacate. They were all converging at a little place he kept down there. Anna guessed he owned it. Rogelio had money from somewhere but he shied away from any specifics. She'd never been curious enough to pry.

"Three-six-one; seven-two-five Alpha," the radio bleated again and Anna swung her legs over the side of the Murphy bed to stare across the room bleary-eyed. Piedmont jumped up onto the bed and pressed his head into her ribs. Absently, she scratched the golden ears. "Three-six-one; seven-two-five Alpha."

"Answer your goddamn radio, Harland," she growled.

As if in obedience, Harland Roberts, Roads and Trails foreman, keyed his mike. "This is Harland. Go ahead."

Manny Mankins's voice, loud and clear from the Visitors Center base station, relayed the message that a visitor had seen a fawn caught in the fence a mile inside the park's boundary toward Carlsbad. It appeared to be badly injured. He asked Harland to investigate.

"Dispatch," Anna corrected. It was a part of Roberts's job to destroy problem animals. "Good morning to you, too, Manny." She rubbed her face hard. The skin felt loose and dry. "Remind me not to look in the mirror, Piedmont," she said to the cat. "Not till after I've had a shower at least." She scooped the cat up and dumped him and some Friskies near his bowl in the kitchen.

Tuesdays and Wednesdays were her lieu days, her days off. She'd call her sister, do her laundry, go into Carlsbad, shoot fifty rounds at the range, have a Prissy's Special and a couple of Tecates at Lucy's, take in a movie, do her grocery shopping. Then there'd be Wednesday to get through.

Anna flung the Murphy bed, unmade, up into its niche. While the water heated for coffee, she sat down at her desk. Her naked thighs stuck to the wooden chair. Already the day was heating up.

Opening the bottom drawer, Anna pulled out an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven envelope from under an untidy pile of bills- paid and unpaid.

"Don't do it," she said aloud. "Just don't do it." But she folded back the flap and pulled the pictures out anyway.

A tall, skinny man with fine eyes and clear pale skin looked out at her from a bridge over a little lake in Central Park. Behind him was the top of the Plaza Hotel. Terribly earnest, he stood with his hands folded on the bridge's ornate metal railing, his sensual mouth composed in solemn lines. Except for the glittering purple insect feelers hobbing on his head, he might have been a stockbroker or a young senator.

But Zach was an actor. A classical actor. He was good. He might have made it. Then again, Anna thought wearily, maybe not. During their years in New York they'd watched an awful lot of good actors give up, go home and join the family business. Or worse, stick it out waiting tables and driving cabs, keeping their courage up with alcohol and boasts.

Anna looked at the next photo. Zach's head shot. So intense. A beautiful man in that sensitive, dying-of-tuberculosis, turn-of-the-century mold.

Born too tall to play Hamlet.

"God, I miss you, Zach. It's beautiful here. But you'd've hated West Texas." Anna might have laughed but her throat was too tight. It was going to be one of those days. She put the pictures away and closed the drawer gently, as if they slept.

The water for her coffee had all but boiled away. Refilling the pan, she started the morning over.

On her way into Carlsbad, Anna saw the blue six-pac pickup the Roads and Trails foreman drove parked along the fence just inside the park boundary. He and Manny were standing near the fenceline with binoculars.

There wasn't a dead fawn in the bed of the truck, so she pulled over.

"Hey, Manny, Harland," she greeted them as she climbed out of the Rambler.

Manny just nodded and kept looking out across the mesquite toward the escarpment.

Harland let his glasses fall down around his neck on their strap. They weren't government issue. They were finely crafted, expensive, birding binoculars. Many things about Harland Roberts were a little classier than the run-of-the-mill. In his early fifties, he had Stewart Granger gray streaks at his temples and aquiline good looks.

Anna'd worked for him on a couple of projects. Harland got things done.

In government service that was saying something.

"I didn't recognize you with your hair down," Harland said as he leaned against her car and folded his arms.

Anna pushed the cloud of hair back from her face. Thinking of Zach, feeling sorry for herself, she'd blown it dry and curled it, wearing it as she had when she was younger.

"It looks good," Harland said.

The compliment both pleased and made her feel self-conscious. "What's happening?" She jerked her chin to where Manny still surveyed the countryside.

"This is where the injured fawn was reported," Roberts said. "There's hair and blood on the barbed wire, but it looks like the little guy got himself untangled and crawled off somewhere. We've walked this area for a quarter of a mile in every direction but no luck."

"Maybe he's okay," Anna said.

"Let's hope so."

They stood a moment watching Manny watching the brush.

"I don't see how you can do it, Harland. I wouldn't have your job for all the tea in China," Anna said suddenly.

He looked at her, mild reproach in his eyes. "I don't like destroying an animal. But I'd rather that than have them suffer."

Anna was sorry but she didn't say so. Letting her eyes wander, she hoped to fix on a new topic. In the rack across the six pac's rear window was a seven millimeter Browning hunting rifle. "That your own?" she asked.

"Yes."

"I figured. A bit too fine for government work. Do you hunt big game?"

"I used to," Harland answered and Anna could tell he was uncomfortable with the subject. "I bought that line about it being a 'challenge.' When I found out a bull elk had an intelligence level equivalent to that of an eighteen-month-old toddler, I kind of lost my taste for it."

Anna smiled. Then remembered. "How's the hunt for the lion going?" she asked.

"No luck. We'll go up again today. I called old Jerimiah D. and he said he will lend us his dogs."

"Jerimiah D.?"

"Paulsen," Harland said. "He keeps hunting dogs."

"I bet," Anna said bitterly. "What does he get? The head? The pelt? Or just to be in on the kill?" Paulsen owned twenty-five thousand acres that bordered the park's northern boundary. He'd fought against every environmental issue in New Mexico and North Texas for thirty years.

Usually he won.

"The animal will be salvaged for the display in the new Visitors Center,"

Harland said, overlooking her rudeness. "They can freeze-dry them so they look life-like now. They're going to use it in an educational display.

Corinne was glad to get it, in a way. That VC's her baby. If people are better informed, maybe this won't happen next time."

Anna doubted they could freeze-dry a "specimen" that large but she didn't say so. Instead, wanting suddenly to escape Harland and the conversation, she excused herself: "I better leave you to it."

"Wait." Harland laid a hand on her arm. "You didn't hear the big news."

He was smiling, a boyish smile with a lot of charm. Making amends for her churlishness, it seemed. Letting her know there were no hard feelings.

Anna waited.

"We've got exotics on the West Side."

Resource Management spent countless hours and dollars eradicating exotic plant species that endangered native vegetation. "What?" Anna asked.

"It's awful dry over there for tamarisk."

"Worse than tamarisk," Harland said, a twinkle in his gray eyes.

"Martians. Tell her, Manny."

Manny looked their way a moment, the thin, pockmarked face showing a trace of humor but no inclination to join in the conversation. "You tell her, Harland."

"Craig Eastern was camped over there a couple nights back working on his snake studies and he saw a UFO. A greenish halo that danced over the ground and made noise like cosmic footsteps. A putt-putt. Sort of a celestial Model T. Manny said he was all shook up. Thought they'd come to take him home, I guess."

"Craig is a strange man," Anna said.

Harland moved slightly so he was between her and Manny. When he spoke, his voice was low, pitched for her ears only. "Craig Eastern is crazy,"

he said. "Seriously. He's mentally ill. This is not for public consumption. You're out alone a lot. You take care of yourself."

Before Anna could respond one way or another, he had turned away, was calling to Manny, giving up the hunt for the fawn.

As they climbed into his truck, Roberts looked back over his shoulder. "I like the hair, Anna."

Anna spent the next twenty miles thinking about Harland Roberts.

He had a talent for knocking her a little off balance. Talking with him she felt younger, more vulnerable, less sure of herself. Harland was of an age where men seldom looked at women as peers, co-workers. Always, however well concealed behind training or good manners, was the pervasive concept of women as the Weaker Sex.

The damned thing of it was, Anna thought, it made her behave like a

"flawed vessel." She wasn't sure if it was knee-jerk, a nerve touched from early socialization or-and this was the creepy thought-because she liked it.

"Not bloody likely!" Anna said aloud and moved her thoughts on to other things.

Roberts had said Craig Eastern was crazy. Everybody said Eastern was crazy, but Harland meant it. "He's mentally ill." He'd used those words.

And: "Take care of yourself."

Anna knew Craig was fanatic about keeping the park undeveloped. It was more than just the inescapable animosity one felt when forced to see what the human race was doing to the planet. With Craig it was personal, a betrayal of him as well as Texas and the world.