Cry of the Panther

by Jeff Gulvin

‘Imogen Munro.’

  He checked out of the hotel the following morning, taking his luggage with him. He phoned Cullen and told him he was heading west and would contact him in a few days, then he took the Land-Rover and drove up the A9. He did not drive quickly; after nearly thirty years he wasn’t in any hurry. His mind wandered off by itself, sometimes quiet, sometimes dragging him into myriad thoughts and emotions. Memories, things he had left hidden and wanted to remain that way. On the passenger seat next to him was the greetings card. He knew whose window it was now, only he remembered her as a little girl from Jackson City, Wyoming who had a crush on him.

  He took the A9 beyond Pitlochry and up through Glen Garry; the countryside rolling out on either side till he came to Dalwhinnie. Here he turned off, skirting the northern lip of Loch Ericht, where the road narrowed considerably, climbing past farms before plateauing for a few miles. It was empty, with no other cars to disturb him. The sky seemed low here and the sunshine was only just beginning to work on the early morning mist. At the fork in the road, with Laggan signposted to his right, he turned west for Spean Bridge. It was a two-lane road and it weaved in gentle and not-so-gentle curves, passing through various tiny hamlets, and then the expanse of Loch Laggan opened out on his left.

  The beauty of the place was incredible. The western United States had some of the most spectacular scenery on the planet as far as he was concerned, but each section went on for an eternity. Mountain after mountain, valley after valley, forests drifting like a sea of green waves to edge the very horizon. Here the scenery was tranquil then suddenly savage within the space of just a few miles. The hills rose steeply above Loch Laggan, and halfway along its northern flank he made out the spires of an isolated church jutting between the trees across dark and choppy water. He could feel the history, sense the souls of generations that had shaped the land, fought for it, shed blood and died for it. He could almost hear the clash of steel, the shouts of Celtic voices, the old Gaelic of the Highlands. He paused briefly at Moy Lodge to look at the water pressing against the dam, then drove on with other thoughts in his head.

  Custer County, Idaho, 1969, the sheriff’s office in Challis, a small town with one main street of old West buildings, rising into the foothills north of the Sawtooth. Two deputies with blue shirts, blue pants and massive pistols hanging from gunbelts which made them look like something out of a John Wayne movie. Silence, save for the clicking keys of a typewriter and the gloop and bubble of the water-cooler that stood next to a token rubber plant. His dad sitting opposite him on a grey plastic seat, with his arms folded across his chest and his features matching the colour of the chair. His mother standing, unable to sit, moving back and forth, pacing, feet tapping like a nervous dancer on the chipped linoleum floor. The sobs rising from Mrs Munro’s throat. The haggard exhausted look on her husband’s face. And Imogen, Twaggle Tail, with the dark piercing eyes that stared at him as she sucked the corner of her blanket.

  He pulled off the road where the hills rose grizzled and craggy from the banks of Loch Lochy. He needed to breathe. The sun was high, the mountain air clean and fresh and he needed to clear his head. He stood for a long moment, looking over the water at the black-faced sheep chewing the stepped hillside.

  The sheriff had sat him down, a great pad of foolscap paper on the otherwise empty table. ‘Now, son. You wanna go back to the beginning here and tell me exactly what happened.’

  Connla’s lowered eyes. Even now he could see them, and feel again the weight in his chest, as if somebody very strong were squeezing the breath out of him.

  ‘We got up and went into them woods. Ewan dumped his jacket to go climbing, then he took off, is all. That’s why I come running back.’

  ‘You sure that’s it?’ The sheriff, with his head cocked to one side, stared into his eyes.

  Connla lifted his shoulders. ‘That’s it, sir. I swear there ain’t no more.’

  The sheriff sighed and eased his bulk back in the chair so Connla was aware of the sound of it straining. He shifted his plug of chewing tobacco to the other side of his mouth and looked at Connla out of half-closed eyes. ‘You know, son,’ he said, ‘when I was a little bitty kid there were things I got up to that I wouldn’t tell my folks no how.’

  Connla watched him, holding his gaze with his own bunched eyes.

  ‘You understand what I mean?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Some things are just secret, aren’t they.’

  ‘Yessir. I guess.’

  The sheriff leaned his elbows on the counter and rubbed his hands together. ‘Trouble is, though, son, sometimes what feels like a good secret to a child isn’t that way to the child’s mom or dad. You follow me?’

  Connla shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘There’s certain stuff that moms and dads need to know which we kids just don’t wanna tell them. But you know what, sometimes it’s best if we do.’

  ‘Yessir. I know, sir.’

  The sheriff nodded and smiled. ‘So, Connla. You wanna tell me any more about what you and Ewan got up to?’

  Connla bit his lip, looking at the floor, his palms sweating where they dangled in his lap.

  ‘Son?’

  Connla shook his head. ‘I told you everything there is, sir. There ain’t no more to tell.’

  He got back in the Land-Rover: shadows had fallen across the sun now and he could see storm clouds gathering like residue from explosions. He drove on through the pass, with Loch Lochy on his left, then climbed again, the road thin and twisting, with few cars, even in high summer. There was the odd coach ahead of him, but otherwise the land was still and empty. Then the mountains seemed to lean back and grow smoother. Another loch bending at right angles to the west, smooth-skinned hills rising to a good height, but gentle, with no buttresses of rock to scar their flanks. The banks of the loch were shallow … and then Connla was back home in Jackson City, with the death of Ewan Munro the word on everyone’s lips.

  Smalltown USA, wagging tongues and a memorial service at school, where student after student offered a eulogy to him. The number-one man was dead, and there were weird circumstances: a drowning in Idaho at the weekend. His parents were flying him home to Scotland, where he would be buried among his ancestors. It was as if some great chieftain had gone and a void was left in his place. Connla stood in it alone, flanked on either side by his parents, but as alone as anyone could ever be. Ewan had been the apple of the whole community’s eye, one of those kids that couldn’t put a foot wrong, even though he might be a selfish, spiteful sonofabitch. Best in class, best on the sports field—the Munro family had a million and one reasons to be proud of him. Connla McAdam was just darned lucky that a fellow like Ewan singled him out for a buddy.

  He stood by the car once more, smoking a cigarette; eyes closed, he saw again that white face, drained of life and yet staring up in accusation. He and Imogen, laid flat out on their bellies for fear of toppling over the cliff. One of Ewan’s legs caught in the rotten cottonwood bough, broken at the knee and being thrashed back and forth by the current. The roaring, shrieking, rock-pounding Salmon River, which claimed ten lives at least a year. He glanced once more at the passenger seat and the greetings card with the picture on the front that sparked a thousand memories.

  Jackson City after the Munros had gone: the silence of a small town, the stilted nature of school life, the suspicion, overt in some eyes, less obvious in others. The way his father slipped deeper into the Jim Beam bottle and his mother’s nerves grew more and more brittle, till they cracked and finally snapped, and she muttered and stuttered her way into a sanatorium. And coming home from high school one afternoon, aged fourteen years, three months and sixteen days, to find two welfare officers waiting for him.

  ‘Your daddy’s in the hospital, son. And your mom’s not coming home. We’re here to take you to South Dakota.’

  He had physically trembled. He was young still, but the deterioration of his parents had warned him of something like this. And yet the
warning was not enough. Here were two people he had never seen before, dressed in their neat, official clothes, a man and a smiling woman telling him they were taking him away. And he knew that when he got in that car with them that would be it, his life in Wyoming was over, everything about childhood would be gone. Nothing to hold on to, no-one to comfort him. He would be alone in the world, the aloneness he had first experienced when he arrived back at school from Idaho.

  Connla let go a stiff breath, standing on the hillside with the twisted road behind him and the might of the Western Highlands before him. Words from the past that still rang like a death knell in his head, words that he could have foretold the day Ewan Munro died. And then everything being rushed and having to pack and being strapped in an unfamiliar Buick that smelled of the freshener dangling from the mirror on the windscreen. The drive through Wyoming to Rapid City and his new home at the Boys’ Club, with the woman talking in soothing tones to him about what he might expect and the special new school the government had organized for him. His mouth was so dry he couldn’t reply.

  The new home was a dormitory full of other kids, some tough, some not so tough, everybody looking for a new place in the world. Nobody with anything or anyone to fall back on, so you fell back on yourself, and sometimes you had to fight to do it. He recalled thinking, as he dusted himself down from a fist fight and washed the blood from his lip, that he had two distinct choices: he either got busy and tough with himself or he would slip into the gutter and stay there for the rest of his life. He dabbed at his bloodied features and looked in his eyes as they stared back from the mirror. People sank or swam in here. There had been Boys’ Club people in Jackson City; they were always the best fighters, and always the first people the cops called on when there was trouble in town.

  Boxing. A lot of the boys went boxing, but Connla had no time for that. He was left to his own devices, put in a new high school where every parented kid looked at him like he had some kind of disease. But he had been bright, much brighter than either his parents or his school tutors had given him credit for, back in the days when he had stood in Ewan Munro’s shadow. He remembered it as clearly as the loch he stared at now. Fifteen years old, nine months into his time at the Boys’ Club, his birthday gone by with no present or card, just two distinct choices. Some of the kids were already into petty street crime and he was being dragged along with them. But he was bright and he knew it. Sink or swim, buddy, he told himself. Get on or get out. That’s all there is to it.

  He put himself out on a limb, buried his head in his books and graduated with honours from high school. Then it was college and a part-time job in a photographer’s studio, where he fell in love with the camera. Every weekend he would ride his bicycle into the Black Hills, where Sioux warriors sought Hanblecheyapi, the vision quest for their people. His first pictures were of a mountain lion crouched on a rock in the forest, watching white-tailed deer through the tree trunks.

  He gained a degree in zoology, then a Ph.D., and won his first photographic assignments. Gradually he established a slightly off-beat reputation, with his Gaelic name and Celtic eyes and the wilderness etched in his soul. That was when he had met Holly the senator’s daughter, and he’d craved her social acceptability as much as she’d craved his restlessness of spirit. Their paths had converged like twin branches of an oak tree, only to pull away from each other as the years took their toll.

  Fifteen

  IMOGEN RODE KEIRA BACK to Atholl McKenzie’s land. There were other things she had planned for these summer weeks, other trips, landscapes she had wanted to paint, but the discovery of the pair of white tails had changed all that. There was a purpose in Keira’s stride, trotting along the deer trails, cantering once they got beyond the Seer Stone and the Leum, and Tana Coire dominated the horizon. Imogen had a tent with her and plenty of food. She didn’t know how long she would stay out here, but she was prepared as best she could be. She trusted McKenzie about as far as she could throw him. The poison for the peregrine would have been laid by him or one of his men, or possibly by William Morris the gamekeeper. The bird hadn’t been poisoned elsewhere and just flown on to McKenzie’s land to die. McKenzie was a hard old hill farmer. He was trying to make a thousand poor-quality acres pay, and the price of lamb was rock bottom. No wonder he’d thought of stocking the loch. But there were only two eagles, and the reason they’d become extinct in Britain in the first place was because men like McKenzie poisoned them.

  There was no sign of any work being done as Imogen approached the water, easing Keira from a canter to a trot and finally a walk. The area set aside for picnicking was deserted. The logs from yesterday had been added to; a further four lay crosswise on the original two. But apart from that there was no sign that anyone had been there. Imogen reined Keira in and sat for a long time, holding her head on a tight rein and scanning every inch of the loch side for movement. She saw nothing and climbed down from the saddle.

  The wind was fierce this high, tearing at her clothing and whistling through the trees on her right. She studied the edge of the pinewood, where McKenzie and his men had been working yesterday. Perhaps they were in there hauling more logs. There was no sound, though, and no movement. Keira was cropping the long grass at the loch side, browsing among the stones for the juicier patches. Imogen wandered to the water’s edge and surveyed the coire and the crags through binoculars. She sectioned the area, beginning at the bottom of the cliffs and gradually working her way higher, breaking up the rock piece by piece. She saw nothing and, clicking her tongue at the horse, she started round the loch. Keira followed, walking a few yards behind her, pausing to nose at the grass now and again. Imogen got as far as the edge of the coire and stopped. Once more she studied the land, the way the hills broke gently around the water, then reared suddenly in the savage outcrops above the coire itself. The waters were roughened flakes of flint, sliced into breakers by wind that blew from the north.

  Again she was visited by the strange sensation she had experienced yesterday, as if something was wrong. The land felt barren and empty. That was ridiculous. The land was barren and empty. But she knew it was more than that. Somebody else might rationalize it as emotions running high in view of the precariousness of the recent discovery, but Imogen knew herself better than that. She gazed up at the rocks and searched with the naked eye. Nothing. She scanned the loch and the hills to the east and south. She shaded one hand over her eyes and looked the length and breadth of the chilled and whitened sky. She saw nothing. Looking down again, she saw Keira watching her. ‘What do you think?’ Imogen asked her. Keira tossed her head and snorted.

  Imogen squatted in the shelter of two boulders and thought for a moment. The wind had risen yet further and the whistle had become a howl. It dragged over her shoulders, clawing at strands of her hair, which was tied back from her head and tucked inside the collar of her jacket. She thought she saw movement, thought she heard a cry, and stood up sharply. It was nothing; some trick of her imagination. Shaking her head at herself, she started to climb the narrow path. Halfway up she again thought she heard a cry, but once more she was mistaken. Her heart bumped against her ribs and she knew then that something was wrong. The rock seemed to be alive, and she walked with one palm pressed against it until she got to the point where, diagonally, she should see the eyrie. She stood and stared, the saliva drying in her mouth.

  Nothing. No movement, no sign of dark-brown feathers cresting into the wind, no hint of yellow, not even the mass of mossed twigs that made up the eyrie. She moved much more quickly now, picking her way across the buttresses in a traverse. She got closer and closer and, as she did so, she found bits of stick and leaves and then more twigs and sections of packed moss, and she felt the cry welling up in her throat. The eyrie was completely destroyed. She stood right over it now and she could sense the coldness, the silence that was all that remained. Looking back down the mountain she could pick out more bits and pieces, flotsam and jetsam that had been part of the nest. And then she
saw something else, flat and speckled like a piece of broken china. She moved down to it carefully; the going was very steep here. And as she got closer, she supported herself with one hand and her fingers closed over a coarse brown feather. Imogen stopped, aware of her own breathing. She lifted the feather, brought it close to her face and smelled it—a resinous oily odour. She looked again at the little piece of china, and all at once she knew what it was.

  Atholl McKenzie’s quad was parked outside his house when Imogen rode into the yard, Keira’s hooves announcing her arrival with a clatter of iron shoes. Dogs barked and over by the barn two collies strained at the lengths of rope that held them. Imogen pulled Keira up sharply and she snorted and stamped her feet, sweat foaming her flanks from the gallop down the hillside. The farmhouse door was thrown open and McKenzie stepped outside, face red, sleeves pushed up, vein pulsing like cord at his neck.

  ‘What the hell have you done?’ Imogen shouted at him from where she sat on the horse. He squinted slightly, then cocked his head to one side. She opened her closed fist and showed him the piece of broken shell clutched in her palm. ‘What have you done to them, Atholl?’

  McKenzie folded his arms and leaned in the doorway. He was chewing, jaws working against each other like a cow at the cud. He watched her, saying nothing, eyes tight and pig-like in the pockets of flesh that held them. Imogen looked into his face. ‘You knew about them all the time,’ she said, ‘didn’t you. Yesterday. You already knew. You’d been up there and smashed their nest already. Where are they, Atholl? What did you do with the bodies?’

  McKenzie shook his head at her. ‘You know, if I had a tape recorder I’d be suing you for this,’ he said. ‘You ought to learn to keep a civil tongue in your head. You can’t go around accusing people of things, lassie. It’s against the law.’ He shifted his position, spat between his feet and leered at her. ‘Now, get out of my farmyard before I fetch a shotgun.’ He banged the door after him and Imogen was left alone, impotent, the horse shifting beneath her.