CLAWS

by Stacey Cochran

  They raced past the Biosphere out on Highway 77 and saw the green signs for Oracle. Homes glittered up the mountain to the right of the highway, and Angie downshifted and quickly brought her speed down under one hundred.

  “This is it up here,” John said, pointing to a single flashing yellow light.

  There was a sign that read:

  Oracle →

  Angie hit her turn signal and slowed for the turn. They saw singlewide trailers on the right and a Circle K convenience store on the left, a video store, and a Mexican restaurant. The mountainside town looked sleepy, but a sheriff’s deputy pulled onto the two-lane street a block uphill from them, turned on its blue lights, and took off, racing further up the mountain.

  “Keep up with him,” John said. “He’s probably heading up to Peppersauce.”

  • •

  There were more than twenty spinning blue lights of sheriff’s deputies, spinning red lights of ambulances and fire trucks; Angie steered her car down the last stretch of dirt road into Peppersauce Canyon. She parked over to the right, giving plenty of room so that other cars could get past her, and she and John got out.

  The campground was shining with car lights, police, ambulance, and fire truck lights, with shining search beam lights. There was a steady crackle of CB radios, and there were upwards of one hundred people on the scene.

  Angie saw the woman sitting near the back of an ambulance. She wore a bathrobe, and a doctor inspected her son. Angie recognized one of the sheriff’s deputies, and then she saw Robert Gonzalez coming up from a creek in the middle of the campground.

  Gonzalez wore an orange ball cap and spectacles. Angie thought he was a nice looking guy. His legs were muscular, and his arms were strong . . . a very fit specimen. She liked his self-assured attitude and the way he walked. And working with him, she knew he was a good listener, too. Attentive and humble. He saw Angie and John and waved.

  “How’re you doing?” he said.

  Angie said, “Who’s in charge here?”

  “We’ve got a problem with jurisdiction,” Gonzalez said. “This is National Forest Land, but the sheriff’s deputies were the first on the scene. It’ll take rangers three hours to get down here from Lemmon. Ever gone up the north route?”

  “A couple times,” Angie said. “That’s the closest ranger we got?”

  “We’ve got two state park rangers from Oracle.” Gonzalez pointed them out for Angie. “But they’ve got no jurisdiction here, and they just want to help the sheriff’s deputies.”

  “This is National Forest Land,” Angie said. “It comes under Game and Fish jurisdiction. We need a ranger.”

  A large man spoke up from near one of the ambulances. “You must be the Cat Woman,” he said.

  Angie’s blue eyes met his. The man’s first impression of Angie was that there was something almost wolf-like in her gaze. He wore a grizzly beard and had clear brown eyes. His expression was sober, and he had a kind of weary affability about him. He had been talking to a younger sheriff’s deputy who held a clipboard and was taking notes.

  “Sheriff Graham Tucker?” Angie said.

  She approached him and held out her hand.

  He said, “How was the drive up the mountain, Doctor Rippard?”

  Angie said, “You realize this is National Forest Land.”

  They shook hands. Angie looked into Sheriff Tucker’s eyes, and she saw one tough son of a bitch, but she saw, too, someone for whom loyalty was prerequisite. This was a man who had been elected sheriff of a county by people who didn’t give a damn about money, fads, and trendy liberal thinking, which at first glance made him look like an enemy of Angie Rippard. But Rippard and Tucker were of the same blood; they were people who could see many sides to an issue and would reserve judgment until a well-formed opinion could be made.

  “You’ll probably want to speak with the victim,” Tucker said.

  “Yes,” Rippard said. “You realize we need a National Forest ranger. Has anybody contacted Barbara Tonapaw up on Lemmon?”

  Tucker glanced at Gonzalez and John Crandall. “You’re that nature writer,” he said, “the one who writes all those exposés about encroaching on animal habitats.”

  John said, “I wouldn’t call them exposés exactly.”

  Tucker didn’t seem impressed. He said to Angie, “We’ve got two state park rangers here, Doctor Rippard. It’ll be several hours before National Forest rangers can get down the north side of the mountain. They’ll probably have to go all the way around to the south. Until they get here, this is my investigation.”

  “They may not be up here until morning,” Rippard said.

  “Calm down, Doctor Rippard,” Tucker said. “We ain’t gonna be putting a hunting party together just yet.”

  He led Angie Rippard toward the back of the ambulance.

  “Miss Eiser,” he said. “This here is our resident mountain lion expert, Doctor Angie Rippard. If you feel up for it, she’s probably got a few questions for you.”

  “Okay,” Maggie Eiser said.

  “Thank you, Sheriff,” Angie said.

  Sheriff Tucker looked into Angie’s eyes long enough to let her know that he was in charge, but that he appreciated her presence. He managed a smile.

  “How you feeling?” Angie said.

  “I think I’m gonna be alright.”

  Maggie Eiser sat at the back of the ambulance. An EMT was dressing the wound on her leg, but he was intensely focused on his work.

  “How’s your son?” Angie said.

  Maggie glanced at Chip. A doctor listened to his breathing with a stethoscope.

  “He’s a little shook up,” she said. “But we should be alright.”

  “Did the mountain lion seem strange to you?” Angie asked. “Did you notice any erratic behavior, foaming at the mouth, a staggering gait.”

  “No,” Maggie said. “It wasn’t rabid from what I could see. It looked undernourished.”

  “How big was it?”

  “Probably about six feet from its head to the tip of its tail.”

  “Six feet?” Angie asked. She pulled out a pocket notebook.

  “Five or six feet,” Maggie said.

  “If you had to estimate a weight,” Angie said.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that; that’d be kind’a hard to do.”

  “Would you say less than a hundred pounds, less than two hundred?”

  Maggie said, “Definitely less than two hundred. Maybe a hundred pounds, not much more.”

  Angie made a note and underlined it twice. “How did it approach you?”

  “I was in the shower,” Maggie said. “The screen door up there”—she nodded in the direction of the bathhouse—“it doesn’t close all the way. I figure it nosed its way in.”

  Angie wrote this down. She’d only once heard of a mountain lion attacking someone like this, but she didn’t say anything to indicate that to Maggie Eiser. Mountain lions were solitary, and they generally hunted their prey by stalking and ambush, in open spaces but where camouflage was readily available, not by boldly walking into a confined bathhouse. It was the fourth largest cat in the world, but it was probably the most wary of all the big cats. Angie had once watched a one hundred and sixty-pound male stalk a herd of elk in Summit County, Utah for four hours before it made a decisive move. It would creep a few feet at a time and was extremely patient.

  “You’re sure it wasn’t rabid?” Angie said.

  “It didn’t look rabid,” Maggie said. “Now, tests may prove otherwise”—she glanced at her leg—“but I’m a registered nurse, and I’ve seen two rabid animals before. This cat didn’t look like any of those. If anything, it just looked undernourished and very hungry.”

  “And it approached you while you were in the shower?”

  Maggie nodded her head.

  “How did you scare it away?” Angie asked.

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t know how I scared it away. It attacked through the shower curtain, and it knocked out my le
g. I fell to the shower floor. The shower curtain came out from its rings. I think the curtain kind’a netted the cat, and it scared it. And then the cat went crazy and demolished the locker in there. I was just lucky, I guess.”

  Angie asked Sheriff Tucker to show them the bathhouse, and so Tucker led her, Crandall, and Robert Gonzalez up to the bathhouse where the attack had occurred.

  “Mind your footing,” Tucker said. “The floor’s slippery.”

  Angie stepped into the bathroom. She saw the demolished locker to the left and the water and blood on the floor.

  Gonzalez said, “She says the cougar just nosed its way inside?”

  Angie pointed to the screen door. “It wouldn’t be difficult.”

  John asked, “Have you ever heard of a cougar doing something like this?”

  “Once,” Angie said.

  “What were the circumstances there?” Sheriff Tucker asked.

  “Not unlike this one,” Angie said. She knelt down and looked closely at the screen door. “It was a campground inside Banff National Park. In that case, a cougar actually went into a person’s camper, killed two children, badly wounded the kids’ father, and dragged one of the kids out of the camper.”

  Gonzalez stepped over toward the demolished locker. “This cat must have gone wild,” he said.

  Angie stood up and brushed her hands off. She looked Tucker in the eyes.

  “Last summer,” she said, “we had the worst forest fire to hit the Coronado in a century years. More than two hundred and fifty thousand acres of land burnt to the ground.”

  “Would that account for this attack?” Tucker said.

  “There’s no way to prove it,” she said. “But it’s likely a contributing factor. A hungry cat, driven out of its home, its normal food sources depleted—it may attack someone in a remote location like this.”

  “You thought it was rabies?” John said.

  Angie said, “A rabid cougar’s liable to do anything, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.”

  “What would you recommend, Doctor Rippard?” Sheriff Tucker asked.

  Angie looked around the bathhouse at each of them.

  She said, “At first light, we need to get a helicopter up in the air. With tranquilizer darts, we can relocate our cougar across the San Pedro Valley. That’s sheer wilderness area over there. Our cougar will avoid human contact from this point forward.”

  Sheriff Tucker looked interested but skeptical.

  “You think a cougar will be able to survive,” he said, “if we just up and move him seventy miles away?”

  “What would you recommend?” Angie said.

  “Well, I can tell you one thing,” he said. “The cattle farmers in this county ain’t gonna lose any sleep over one less cougar.”

  “That’s unacceptable, Sheriff,” Angie said. “This is National Forest Land. It’s a protected wilderness area.”

  “And we got a cougar that almost killed a woman and her six-year-old son, Doctor Rippard.”

  “If you put it to the voters in this county,” Angie said, “what would they say? Relocate or exterminate?”

  “I don’t know what the voters in this county would say,” he said. “But this ain’t an election. We got a cougar up there that tried to kill a woman.”

  “And so you just want to exterminate it?”

  “All options are on the table at this point, Doctor Rippard,” Tucker said. “I’m a sheriff, and I’m trying to deal with the situation that’s in front of me.”

  “We need to wait until the National Forest rangers get down here,” she said. “This is National Forest Land.”

  “Fair enough,” Tucker said. “But tell me one thing, though. How far can a cougar move, if given five hours?”

  Angie knew the answer to this because one study she’d done tracked dozens of mountain lions with radio collars. Sometimes they stayed put for days. But sometimes an animal could move as much as fifty miles in a single night.

  “Chances are,” she said, “our cougar will stay in the area. I can have a man with a helicopter up here by sunrise. I’ve got the equipment to relocate any animal we find in the morning.”

  “How many animals survive relocation, Doctor Rippard?” Sheriff Tucker said. “From what I’ve read, the percentage ain’t that high, and a death by relocation is a tortuous death. Starvation, thirsting to death. Which would be more brutal?”

  “You’re misinformed, Sheriff,” Rippard said. “It’s the only way this cougar will have a chance to survive.”

  Eleven

  Ernesto Torres wore headphones while riding the single-seat John Deere Tri-Plex Greens Mower. He’d gotten the new Sean Paul CD from his twelve-year-old daughter for Christmas, one of those curious gifts that a kid buys her parent when it’s obviously what the kid wants. And sure enough, he’d heard Christina listening to it in her bedroom in their two-bedroom Meridian East apartment three days after Christmas. The CD remained there for six weeks, until one day in mid February, when Ernesto came home and found it lying upside down on the coffee table in the living room.

  Someone had used it as a drink coaster, and Ernesto picked the CD up, carried it over to the kitchen sink, and washed it with warm soap and water. He dried it off with a paper towel and then carried it across the dirty living room and put it in the Wal-Mart Sanyo they had underneath their TV. He pressed play, turned the volume up to seven, and immediately fell in love with Sean Paul and Beyoncé.

  Since then, Ernesto had been listening to the CD almost every morning while he mowed the fairways and greens at the Ventana Canyon Country Club.

  “What the hell,” he said.

  He’d been hauling up the fourteenth fairway about nine miles per hour, and he came up over one final hill and saw a blanket and clothes at the back of the putting green. An hour before sunrise, the sky was the color of gunmetal, and Ernesto steered the John Deere around to the back of the green. The grass was still wet with dew. Ernesto killed the John Deere’s engine, removed his headphones, and leapt down to have a better look.

  There was a large thick blanket, a pair of jeans, a pair of men’s briefs, women’s panties, bra, tennis shoes. Ernesto stepped up onto the right side of the putting green. He saw a second pair of jeans right in the middle of the green. He turned back toward the fairway and saw something shiny just beyond the fringe.

  He picked up the jeans.

  “Hello?” he called out.

  There was no reply.

  He carried the jeans toward the front of the green and realized that the shiny object he’d seen was a cell phone. He picked it up, pressed a button to turn it on, and saw that the battery was still half charged.

  He wheeled around and called out, “Anybody here?”

  Strange, he thought.

  And he started back toward the blanket and the rest of the clothes near the pond. He was going to pile it altogether at the base of the tree and go on with his job, but he suddenly had an idea. He held the cell out in front of him. Christina carried one like this, and so he tried to navigate the commands.

  Sure enough, he found it; “Recently Called Numbers” flashed on the L.C.D. He pressed “send,” and another list came up. It read “Last Ten Numbers,” and there at the very top was the last number punched into this cell phone: 9-1-1.

  Suddenly, Ernesto realized something bad had happened here, and he was hit with the impulse to just drop everything and move away from the green. He’d seen enough crime scenes down at Meridian East to know that he’d already traipsed over far too much of the green to remove the signs of his presence.

  He tossed the jeans back toward the pin flag, close to where he’d picked them up, and he carefully placed the cell phone on the grass at his feet. He made a straight line for his Tri-Plex Greens Mower.

  Ernesto grabbed the two-way radio clipped to the side of the bright yellow John Deere seat, switched to channel fourteen, and said, “Roger, this is Ernesto—come back.”

  Roger Saunders was the sixty-three-year-old
course ranger who worked the morning shift Monday through Friday. The course ranger job paid no money, but Ventana Canyon gave their four rangers free greens fees. And, as the golf course’s green fee was two hundred and twenty-five dollars during peak season, the job had its advantages. All four rangers were retirees who did the job as much to stay in contact with other people their age (kind of like volunteer librarians in a small public library) as to be able to play golf for free on their days off.