Bittersweet

by Susan Wittig Albert

  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 s
everal 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.

  Startled, the caracara gave a hollow, rattling call, lifted its wide black and white wings—at least a four-foot span—and flapped into the air. Mack shifted her scope to the deer camp on the side of the creek nearest the road and saw that two pup tents were pitched there. A small fire burned in a cleared spot on the creek bank, a low metal grill propped on rocks over the flames, a cast-iron pot on the grill. A thickset man was adding a couple of sticks to the fire. In contrast to the previous camp, this one was primitive.

  She started the truck again and drove thirty yards up the road, to the head of the faint trail that led down to Six-Mile Creek and the camp. Parked at the trailhead was a rusty red GMC pickup with Texas plates and an empty rifle rack in the back window of the cab. Mack called in her 10-20 to Dispatch (a precaution she always took when she was leaving her vehicle in an isolated area), locked Molly in the truck, and hiked a hundred yards down the steep hillside to the creek at the bottom. She felt the hair on the back of her neck prickle with apprehension as she approached the camp. These encounters were a test of alertness, experience, and judgment, for you never knew what you were going to walk into. All you could be sure of was that every man on the site would be fully armed, might be drunk as a skunk (like the man who had killed her father), and was ready to shoot at anything that moved. She loosened her Glock in its holster.

  “Hello the camp,” she called as she stepped out of the woods and into the clearing along the creek. “Game warden.” Some wardens didn’t announce themselves. She did. She’d hate to get shot because of mistaken identity.

  The man at the fire straightened up and turned around. Short and hefty, he was wearing a Harley cap and a baggy camo vest. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. A second man—tall, rail thin, and bearded—crawled out of one of the tents, a heavy throwing knife in one hand.

  “Morning, guys,” she said pleasantly. “I’m Warden Chambers. I need to see your hunting licenses, please.”

  “Got mine on me,” Short-and-Hefty said, and produced it out of a pocket. Tall-and-Thin crawled back into the tent and came out with his wallet and license—and without the knife. They even had a much folded and creased copy of their signed hunting lease agreement, something that many hunters failed to carry.

  Mack handed back the papers back. “Had any luck yet?”

  “We just got here last night,” Tall-and-Thin said, scratching his chin. “We was out still-hunting early this morning but didn’t get anything.”

  “You know how that goes, I reckon.” Short-and-Hefty chuckled wryly. “Still-hunting ain’t the quickest way to get your venison.”

  “There are easier ways to punch a tag,” Mack agreed. Her father had been a still hunter, tracking Indian-style through the woods, rather than crouching in a blind waiting for the deer to come to a feeding station. She had begun still-hunting with him the winter before he was killed, on another warden’s ranch in Lampasas County, miles from anywhere.

  “Fair and square hunting,” he had called it. “You’re on the deer’s home turf, and he knows the landscape infinitely better than you do. He can see and hear and smell better than you can, too. He has all the advantages, so you have to be smarter. You have to be a real hunter.” She didn’t have time to hunt these days and she didn’t need the meat. But if she did, that’s how she’d do it.

  “We was out lookin’ for the eight-pointer we saw last time we was here,” Tall-and-Thin offered with a grin that showed stained, crooked teeth.

  “Worth lookin’ for,” Short-and-Hefty put in. “But if we don’t get him tonight or tomorrow morning, it’s okay. We got a spike buck last week for the freezer, and we’ll be back.”

  Mack nodded. She respected hunters who hunted for their tables. In fact, she felt that, for those who could, hunting was better than buying factory-farmed beef and pork in cellophane packages at the supermarket. She thought people who ate meat should be aware of the fact that an animal had died to feed them. Vegetarians and vegans she understood and respected as well—principle was important, after all—but she could only shake her head at the hypocrisy of those who insisted that killing a deer for food was wrong and then went around the corner and chowed down on a double bacon burger.

  “After all,” Short-and-Hefty added with a knowing look at Mack, “it’s our deer. Ever durn one of them deer out there belongs to the people of Texas, don’t it?” He aimed a squirt of tobacco juice off to one side. “If one of them Frankenbucks goes rogue and hops over his fence onto our lease, we can take him. Ain’t that right?” Frankenbuck was the term some people used to describe the genetically modified deer with massive antlers that were bred on the game ranches.

  “The deer are a natural resource, yes.” Mack chose her words carefully. “They belong to the people of Texas.”

  She was avoiding the man’s specific question about the escaped buck, which was at the heart of a huge argument brewing in the state legislature. By Texas law, all wild animals belonged to the people of Texas. This did not make the deer breeders happy, since they had a massive capital investment in fences, buildings, and animals—especially in the animals. As far as they were concerned, the deer they bred and raised inside their high fences didn’t belong to the state. They were private property, like cows or sheep. The breeders were pushing a slate of bills in the legislature that would essentially change the status of the animals on their game ranches from wildlife to privately owned livestock and move jurisdiction over deer ranching from Parks and Wildlife to the Texas Animal Health Commission. Mack hated this idea with a fierce passion, but she had the bad feeling that the breeders were going to prevail.

  Her generic answer seemed to satisfy Short-and-Hefty. “Thought so,” he said with satisfaction. “Anyway, we’ll be here through the weekend, stalking that buck, if you want to drop in again.” He gestured toward the fire. “Or maybe you’d pull up a rock and join us now. We got us a good pot of chili goin’—last year’s venison, taken right over there across the creek.”

  “Thanks for the offer,” Mack said, “but I’ve got a sandwich in the truck—if my dog hasn’t helped herself to it.” She touched two fingers to the bill of her tan cap. “Y’all have a good one, guys. Hope you get what you came for.”

  On her way back to her truck, she noted the GMC’s license place and jotted it and a couple of other details about the encounter in her log. She checked in with Dispatch again, then got her lunch pack and hot chocolate out of the rear cab and ate the baloney and cheese sandwich, listening idly to the radio traffic and sharing the crusts with Molly but keeping the granola bar for herself. She poured a cup of chocolate from the thermos, then splashed some water into the plastic bowl she kept under the seat for Molly. When they were both finished, she let the dog out to do her business, watching her and calling her back quickly when she was finished. Molly was obedient, but a heeler who spotted a squirrel was a gone heeler, and she didn’t want the dog disturbing the hunters in the camp below. Still hunters, in her view, deserved all the breaks they could get.

  The rest of the day was uneventful, the stops at the camps routine. When she crossed Highway 83 and headed west toward Reagan Wells, she checked for messages on her cell phone and found one from Derek. Returning his call, she heard him say that the Panhandle weather looked bad for the weekend—an ice storm was predicted. He and his daughters had decided not to drive to Abilene to visit the girls’ grandmother for Thanksgiving, as they had planned.

  “We’re having Thanksgiving at home instead,” he said, in that husky, intimate voice—a bedroom voice—that gave Mack a momentary shiver.

  They’d made love twice, the first time the night of the gourmet dinner at Derek’s place, the second time a week later, at her place. Neither time had been all that great, for her at least. It hadn’t been Derek’s fault, certainly. He was e
xperienced and skillful and had all the right moves, from start to finish. But she’d been ambushed by her lack of . . . well, passion. She’d wound up putting on an act, which made her feel uncomfortable, even dishonest, especially since she’d never had to do that before. It definitely hadn’t been that way with Lanny—she’d felt plenty of passionate desire, right up to the last time they’d made love, a couple of days before she found out about the other woman in her husband’s life.

  So what was the problem? She wasn’t still carrying a torch for Lanny, was she? She didn’t think so, but she supposed it might be possible, somewhere deep down in her subconscious. But it had been a long while since she’d made love. Maybe she was just out of practice, although you’d think it would go the other way. The longer the abstinence, the greater the desire.

  “It would be great if you’d join us for dinner,” he went on. “I’m sure the girls would love it. Please say you will, Mackenzie.” Mackenzie. She liked it that he used her full name. He seemed to say it with a special, soft intonation.

  Mack hesitated. “I’d like to,” she said, “but I’ve already promised to have dinner with Sam and Leatha Richards. We’re eating at four.” Derek knew the Richardses through the local ranchers’ association, to which nearly everybody belonged. “Leatha’s daughter will be there, too, from Pecan Springs,” she added. She and China stayed in touch by email, but she hadn’t seen her for months. She was looking forward to spending some time with her.

  And just as importantly, she was pretty sure that Derek’s daughters, Elise and Margaret, wouldn’t be enthusiastic about her butting into their family Thanksgiving. The previous time they’d all been together, she’d gotten the idea that they viewed her as an interloper. She had been a girl herself once, and although that seemed like a distant country, she remembered her girlfriends expressing disdain and dislike through eye rolling, smirking, and shoulder shrugs. She’d seen Elise and Margaret sending several of those signals to each other—when they weren’t engrossed in their smartphones, that is.