Wild Sorrow

by AULT, SANDI

  I ran my finger along the edge of the photograph, as if I might be able to connect through my fingertip with a time when I was nestled against my mother’s bosom, held tightly in her arms, her radiance and beauty surrounding me. In the picture, I was only a tiny, blanketed shape, a stretch of pale, smooth forehead, one eye, and a button nose peeking out from the swaddle.

  I put the photo back in the box and rifled through the poems. I picked up a short one jotted on a torn piece of paper.

  Pale morning moon

  Over prairie farmhouse.

  Meadowlark sings

  In the afternoon.

  Why am I here?

  Because I belong.

  Not to a place, but

  To this moment.

  I belong to me,

  Not just to a prairie.

  I belong to this moment.

  Like the bird’s song belongs

  To the meadowlark,

  I belong to me.

  I knew instantly I wanted to give a copy of this to Diane. I thought perhaps I could burn it into a piece of deerskin to use as a bookmark, but my leather burner needed electrical power, so it would have to wait. I set the shoe box on the nightstand beside my bed, to keep it handy for when the electricity came back on.

  A sudden knock at the door surprised me, and Mountain jumped up from a deep sleep and went on full alert. It was late, almost midnight, and I was in my pajamas. I drew my handgun for the second time that night and went to the door to answer the summons. I looked through the peephole and recognized a neighbor from down the road. I opened the door a crack, keeping it wedged against my foot so Mountain couldn’t get through.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m your neighbor, next place over.” His voice was hard and had a bitter edge.

  “I know.”

  “I lost a steer, and I’ll tell you straight out: I suspect your wolf for the kill.”

  As he said this, Mountain stuck his nose in between my knee and the door and gave a loud snort. He wheedled and pushed, trying to wedge the door open, but I kept my foot in place behind it, the door wobbling back and forth with our struggle. The neighbor looked down at the wolf and curled his lip in a snarl.

  “If I ever see that wolf on my property, I’ll shoot him. You got that?”

  I blinked, stunned. “Listen, he wouldn’t take down a steer by himself. In fact, he wouldn’t take down a steer at all. Wolves hunt in packs, and he’s not hungry, so he wouldn’t go through the work. I just had a hungry pack of coyotes raid my cooler out back where I’d put my food to keep it from spoiling. It had to be them, and even then, the steer had to have gotten stuck or been sick or hurt for coyotes to—”

  “Miss,” he interrupted, holding up a hand with the index finger pointed at me, “we’ve all been pretty tolerant up to now with you having that danged wolf as a pup. But now that he’s grown, he’s a menace. And I meant what I said.” He jabbed the finger toward Mountain, who was watching through the opening of the door with his ears down. “I’ll shoot him, sure as I’m standing here.” He turned to go, then turned back. “You know, it’s as dark as a tomb at your place. Why don’t you turn on some lights?”

  13

  The Lures

  Shortly after dawn, I met Charlie Dorn at the Coldfire Ranch to help with the setting of the traps. Dorn had arranged for a state Department of Transportation crew to bring a road-killed deer for the lure. We worked to get the traps into place, wearing thick rubber boots and rubber gloves that had been prewashed and were relatively free of human scent. Charlie used a reciprocating saw to cut the deer into three parts so we could put meat in each of the traps. “I doubt we’ll get those cubs unless the den is somewhere close,” he said. “If they’re as young as you said, they don’t go out hunting with Mama yet.”

  “What will we do then? The cubs will die without their mother.”

  “Let’s just see what we get, and then we’ll go from there. With the mama cat wounded, the cubs probably aren’t getting much to eat anyway.”

  My heart ached for this desperate family of mountain lions. Cougars formerly ranged far and wide on this continent, but had been extirpated in all but fifteen states—and in those, they were still shot, poisoned, trapped, and sport-hunted to the brink of near-extinction. These elusive and mystical cats were one of the last vestiges of wildlife, and their offspring had a survival rate only near fifty percent in the best of circumstances.

  When Charlie and I had placed the meat lures, I went to my Jeep and brought out the pelt of a quail, which the Tanoah often called the “walking bird” because of its tendency to run and apparent reluctance to fly. When I found feathers like these, I generally gave them to Momma Anna for use in her dreamcatchers, but I remembered Sevenguns’s advice about cats being attracted to live prey that moves, and so I hung some feathers in each trap to flutter in the breeze and hopefully attract the attention of the cougars.

  When we had finished, I headed back toward Taos. Once in range, I pulled over and used the Screech Owl to put in another call to the power company. But I was forced to leave a voice-mail message again. I made a terse recording, saying I had been without power now for several days, had left previous messages and not gotten any response, and wanted a call back immediately to let me know when the technician would be at my place. I left the cell phone number and hastened to add the directions to my place as well. A few minutes after I’d hung up, the Screech Owl went off with a shriek.

  “Are you the one from the BLM?” a man’s voice said.

  “Yes. Are you from the power company?”

  “Something has happened to an elk on the BLM land north of Tanoah Pueblo. Forest Road 109, back in two miles on that road. There’s a meadow there with woods all around. The elk is down in that meadow.”

  “What’s happened to the elk?”

  There was no answer.

  “Is it a cow or a bull?”

  Silence.

  “Who is this?”

  I heard a click, then nothing.

  I called Dorn. “Charlie, I just got a strange call. Some guy said that something had happened to an elk two miles back in on Forest Road 109.”

  “Probably an elk-versus-car report.”

  “I don’t know. This guy sounded strange. Not like he was reporting hitting an elk. Besides, I know that forest road. It’s too primitive to drive more than a few miles per hour on it. There’s no way you could hit an elk on that road unless the animal decided to lie down and watch you as you slowly ran over it.”

  “Well, I’m on the way to the shop to drop off these boots and gloves and this saw. Let me unload them and I’ll come right out.”

  I went to investigate the report, bumping slowly down the old forest road, which was little more than two tracks in some grass and brush. The trail led up into some foothills near thick forest. I kept one eye on the rearview mirror and another on the rutted dirt track ahead of me, thinking this could be a bad place to get lured into and trapped—an irony after I had just helped to create those same conditions for the cougars. At the top of a little rise, I could see down into the bowl of a meadow surrounded by gentle slopes leading up to dense woods on all sides. There, in some short grass near a small pond, was an elk cow. She was down.

  I looked in every direction. No vehicles, no sign of people. A haze of cold hung in the pines that surrounded the meadow, and a patch of clouds had drifted in front of the sun, leaving the ground in shadow. I grabbed my rifle, checked to make sure I had some ammo, took another look around in all directions, and began to hike down into the field. As I walked, I turned my head, sweeping my eyes to the left along the ridge where the road came in, across thick stands of timber, and then to the right where the woods deepened and the road continued on. I turned and looked behind me, walking backward as I did, scoping the land behind me, taking a sure bearing on my Jeep in case I had to run for cover or make a getaway. But it was at least a hundred yards to the elk, and after a certain point, I knew I was committed to that destinati
on.

  When I approached the cow from the back, I slowed. I could see a dark, red-black pool on the grass below her. She tried to raise her head when she heard me approach, but she was too weak. She had lost a lot of blood. I came carefully around her head, staying a few feet away so as not to frighten her. The sight before me was so appalling that I cried out—and at the same time my stomach started to heave. I felt rage rising with the bile that fought to come up. I wanted to kill whoever had done this.

  The elk’s front legs were roped together above the hooves; one back foot was tied to a stake driven into the ground. Her loose back leg trembled uncontrollably. Her belly had been slit open. Before her on the ground lay her unborn calf, coated in a gelatinous skin that must have been the cow’s placenta—the baby had been pulled from her body. As I looked closer, I realized that the calf, too, had been brutally eviscerated. The cow breathed wet, heavy breaths and stared at me with an eye that telegraphed terror. Something that walked like me had done this, something that smelled like me, that looked like me, something the same as me. And now, what was I going to do to her?

  I choked back a sob as I raised the rifle. But it was anger—at whoever had done this—that helped me to steady the stock against my shoulder, to tip my head to the side as I aimed at the elk’s brain pan. I swallowed, then took a deep breath and let it out. After I pulled the trigger, I screamed, “Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!” My voice echoed along with the gunshot in the empty meadow and against the stands of forest around me.

  I went to touch her to make sure she was gone. A dark circle right above and behind her eye glistened black. Her thick neck was still warm. She didn’t move. I inspected her baby. The calf, too, was warm to the touch. This had happened right before I arrived, in spite of the phone call earlier. Someone had downed the cow somehow and then timed it so I would get there . . .

  A crack of gunshot interrupted my thoughts and I dove to the ground, then crawled behind the elk cow’s back to take cover. I couldn’t be sure exactly where the shot had come from, but as I watched the woods, three men emerged and began running toward me, carrying rifles. Behind me, I could hear a vehicle coming down the road. I glanced back and saw Charlie Dorn’s green truck as it lumbered over a rise and then disappeared back down into a dip in the road. He would be here in minutes.

  The three men were making good time as they ran directly for me. I would have to make a move before Charlie arrived. I decided to take the offensive. I pointed my rifle barrel and took dead aim, zinging a shot right past the man in the middle, slightly above his head. “BLM Resource Protection. Drop your weapons and put your hands up!” I yelled. Please, Charlie, get here quick! I thought.

  I watched as the three men did as they were told.

  “Step back from your arms!” I yelled again. “Take three big steps back, no more.”

  They did.

  “Put your hands on the back of your head and keep them there. Do not speak, do not turn around, just stand there and keep your hands on your head!”

  I took another glance back down the road, but didn’t see Charlie yet. I had to see this through by myself for now. I got up, my rifle pointed at the three men. I walked around the elk and farther down into the field toward them.

  I didn’t speak again until I had kicked their weapons to the side. I jerked my head back toward the elk. “Did you do that?” I screamed, my voice giving away my fury.

  The men shook their heads no, but they did not speak. Their eyes were wide, either with fear of what I might do or with surprise at having been caught.

  “Why did you shoot at me, then?” I heard Charlie’s truck and I glanced quickly sideways and saw him pulling up beside my Jeep.

  “We didn’t shoot at you, miss,” the man in the middle said. “We were running because we heard one shot from one way and then another from another way, and we didn’t know who it was or where it came from.”

  I snorted. “You have weapons here, gentlemen. You expect me to believe that?”

  By this time, Dorn was sprinting toward us, and he held his rifle at the ready.

  The man in the middle spoke again. “We been shooting targets all morning. We’re out of ammo. We’re parked over the next hill”—he pointed farther down the forest road—“and we were headed that way when we heard a shot and then a woman screaming. We didn’t know who it was, but we were coming to see if we could help. It sounded like somebody was in trouble. Then we heard a second shot. So we decided to get out of there, and we started running out. We were just trying to get to the road as fast as we could when you shot at us.”

  Dorn looked at me, his brow puckered.

  “I fired a warning shot over their heads. They were coming straight at me, right after a shot had been fired at me.”

  He pressed his lips together and gave a nod. “All right, fellas, let’s see what you got in your backpacks,” he said.

  The men claimed to know nothing about the mutilated elk. They were carrying bags of spent shells and paper targets in their backpacks. We scrutinized their identification and gun licenses, and then I hopped in Dorn’s truck with him, and we followed the three men, idling slowly along behind them as they walked up to their truck, a quarter mile farther down the forest road and around a bend. We checked their truck, got their license plate number, and let them go home. They seemed to be telling the truth.

  While Charlie was looking over the elk cow and her calf, I went back to my Jeep with my rifle. There was a package on the driver’s seat, wrapped in white butcher paper. Without picking it up, I pulled the paper away at the top. I drew in a sharp breath, and I thought for a moment I wouldn’t be able to breathe again—my chest had knotted up and stalled. Nestled inside the waxy white paper was the bloody heart of the elk calf, with a note which had been printed on a flap of the wrapper with a red crayon. It read: Este pobre muchachito lo dejaron abandonado. I translated the words one at a time: This poor child was left abandoned.

  14

  Chill

  I drove back to the tiny village of Cascada Azul, just outside the gates of Tanoah Pueblo, to gain cell phone service so I could call Roy. I used the Screech Owl and reported the incident through shivering lips and chattering teeth, trying hard not to let Roy know it. I had a sudden case of the chills, and I couldn’t stop shaking.

  “What in the hell?” he barked into the phone.

  I shook my head and gritted my teeth, but didn’t answer. I yanked up the zipper of my coat, pulled on my gloves, but I didn’t think it would matter.

  “What kind of jackass would do something like that?”

  “It would have to be someone really cruel. Someone who enjoyed hurting . . . life. Charlie found a foot-noose trap. They must have caught the elk in a foot-noose and then snared her front legs. They timed it so I would get there while the cow was still alive.”

  “Damn. It sounds like the work of some psycho. Can you think of anyone who might have it in for you for some reason? Have you busted anybody for illegal hunting this season? Anybody hunting in the wrong place, or maybe someone who got a pregnant elk?”

  “No. I’m not a game warden. I hardly ever bust a hunter.”

  “I know. I’m just trying to find a handle on this. Why a pregnant elk?”

  “I don’t know, Boss. It was . . . it was just so cruel.” I whispered that last.

  “I’m coming right out. I want you to get on out of there, have Dorn wait for me. I don’t like this, Jamaica. You need to mix up your routine, take the rest of the day off, maybe stay with a friend or in a motel for a few nights.”

  “I’m going to call Diane Langstrom and report this to her, too.”

  “Yeah, good idea. We call the FBI on cattle mutilation, so this is no different. Only it seems like it’s more about you than the elk.”

  “It could be nothing, but the note was written in r-red c-crayon,” I chattered.

  “What? Are you all right?”

  “I’m just cold. I think it was also r-red crayon that was used to write the
words on that sign that was hung around the neck of Cassie Morgan.”

  “Oh.” He was quiet a moment. “Okay, be sure to tell Langstrom that, too. Maybe you should stay with Dorn, then, until I get there. I don’t want you out there by yourself.”

  “Boss?”

  “What?”

  “Did you give this c-cell phone number to anyone else?”

  “Just your FBI friend, Langstrom.”

  “No one else?”

  “Not a soul.”

  I jotted the caller’s number down from the Screech Owl’s call log and gave it to Diane when I phoned to report the incident to her. Then I sat in my Jeep in the lot of the little gas station in Cascada Azul with the heater blasting, trying to chase the chills away. Roy got there first, and I got out to talk with him. A few minutes later, Diane pulled up. As she got out of her car she said, “Guess where the call came from.”

  “The power company?” I said.

  Diane shook her head no. She pointed at the pay phone booth listing against the side of the building.

  “What?” I asked, disbelieving what I’d seen.

  “That’s it. That pay phone right there. That’s your number on your caller I.D.”

  While Roy went to join Charlie to examine the elk, Diane stayed with me and took a report. We sat in the front of her car. After she’d heard my story and asked a few questions, she said, “Listen, Jamaica, it sounds like somebody set you up to take you out.”