CLAWS

by Stacey Cochran

  “See how the heel pad is lobed here?” Angie said. She removed a pen from her shirt pocket and pointed to an impression in the mud. “A dog’s heel pad curves upward here. A cougar’s”—she looked into Kennedy’s eyes—“are flat along the back with this lobe, here and here.”

  “So, these are cougar tracks?” Kennedy said.

  Robert Gonzalez said, “Large cougar tracks.”

  Everyone stood up. Angie traced it out in her mind, searching the mud for front and back paws. She pointed to a spot on the ground.

  “Here’s the front right paw,” she said.

  Robert said, “Here’s the back left.”

  He looked up at Angie, and they both realized what they were seeing.

  “Jesus,” Angie said.

  Gonzalez asked, “Have you ever seen this broad a gait?”

  Angie shook her head.

  “What does that mean?” Kennedy said. “Broad a gait?”

  Angie said, “Let’s see the bodies.”

  She glanced at the sand near the bushes and noticed drag marks. All the police standing near the bushes looked up at Chief Kennedy, Angie, and Robert.

  “We found the bodies—” Jane started to say.

  But Angie saw Nick Jacobs and what was left of Jenny Granger—two of her brightest, most delightful young students—and nothing in all her years of biology training and wildlife experience could have prepared her for that.

  “Oh, my God,” she said.

  The bodies were partially buried in a shallow grave. Angie had seen enough attack scenes that the gruesomeness of the bodies didn’t bother her. But she had been completely unprepared for the fact that she was going to recognize the victims, and it was all she could do to steel her will.

  Her hand came up to her mouth. “Has anybody notified the families?” she said.

  “We’re working on it,” Chief Kennedy said.

  Angie’s eyes were somewhat wide and wouldn’t meet Jane’s. It was as if she didn’t want the police to see that she—a professional biologist—was appalled. Methodically, Angie began to explain what had happened to the best of her ability. Method kept her from being floored by emotions.

  “The cougar began feeding mid thorax on the female victim,” she said. “It ate the liver, the spleen, and then began on the victim’s lungs. Death was likely instantaneous, delivered by a crushing bite to her face and head.”

  Robert stepped back away from the bushes and tried to keep from being sick. Angie coughed twice to keep her stomach down and circled the shallow grave. Chief Kennedy and the forensics detectives watched her.

  “The male victim,” she said, “was likely killed by strangulation. Notice the puncture wounds here, and here. The cougar simply locked onto his throat and choked him to death.”

  Eighteen

  Angie recognized several of the reporters from earlier in the day. She stood over to the left of an improvised stage where they’d set up a podium and more than two dozen microphones. It was the front landing of the clubhouse, and the reporters stood at the base of the steps, excited to hear the official report from the authorities. Chief Kennedy had held back the press conference as long as was feasible, and late afternoon shadows were creeping across the parking lot behind the reporters.

  “I guess I’ll start things off,” she said.

  Camera shutters clicked. Flashbulbs flashed. There were about two dozen reporters, and another dozen or so people stood at the base of the steps looking up at her.

  “Two people were attacked last night,” Kennedy said. “Our initial indications are that it was an animal attack. Apparently the two victims were on the golf course after hours when they were attacked. Tucson Metro was first notified by officials here at the golf course this morning. Two officers were sent out. One discovered the bodies.”

  “Can you tell us the victims’ names?” one reporter asked.

  “At this time, we cannot,” Kennedy said. “We are still in the process of contacting the victims’ families.”

  “Is this attack related to the attack near Oracle?” another reporter asked.

  Chief Kennedy glanced over at Angie. She said, “That’s under investigation. We have experts in the field who have seen both attack sites, as well as all of the victims. Certainly, it’s unusual for this many separate attacks to occur in this time frame.”

  “Was it a mountain lion attack?” one reporter said.

  Kennedy nodded. “Initial indications point to that,” she said.

  “What kind of ‘indications’?” the reporter said.

  “Evidence found at the scene,” Kennedy said, “indicates that it might have been a mountain lion.”

  Kennedy pointed to one raised hand.

  “Could you speculate as to the victims’ ages?” the reporter asked.

  “Not at this time,” she said. “I can’t answer any specific questions about the victims at this time. We’re still in the process of contacting their families.”

  “What state were the bodies in?”

  Kennedy took a deep breath, exhaled. She said, “They were partially denuded.”

  One reporter launched, “In recent months, there have been a number of cougar sightings in the Ventana Canyon area. Some biologists have pointed to human encroachment into preserved lands as the reason for these more and more frequent sightings. Could you speculate as to why these mountain lions are behaving this way? Is it because of human encroachment? Is it because of last year’s wildfire?”

  “That’s not a question I can answer,” Chief Kennedy said.

  She pointed to another reporter whose hand was raised.

  “What do you intend to do at this point?” the reporter asked.

  Kennedy said, “We are working with wildlife authorities, National Forest Rangers and with the sheriff’s department involved in the Oracle attacks. One cougar was already killed today. We’ll draw up some kind of plan this evening. I don’t know whether it involves relocating the animal or exterminating the animal. We need to talk with Arizona Game and Fish, and we need to talk to the governor.”

  “But you say that one animal was already killed?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Well, how many animals are up there?”

  “In the Coronado National Forest?” Chief Kennedy said. She glanced at Angie. “I really couldn’t speculate how many cougars are up there.”

  “Do you have the authority to hunt these animals?”

  “It’s really up to the National Forest Rangers,” Jane said, “because we believe that the animal has moved up into National Forest Land.”

  “And how far is that?” one national reporter asked. “How far is the National Forest Land from the site of this attack?”

  Chief Kennedy said, “About fifty meters.”

  A ruffle of murmurs went through the crowd. A good number of non-local reporters thought they had misheard her.

  “I thought the attack occurred on the golf course?” the national reporter said.

  “It did,” Kennedy said.

  “But you just said it was fifty meters from the National Forest Land,” the reporter said.

  “That’s correct,” Jane said. “Parts of golf course are very close to the National Forest Land. The two share an invisible fence, you might say.”

  Nineteen

  Angie got the helicopter up an hour before sunset. Chief Kennedy rode with her, and they searched the mountains due north of Ventana Canyon. But they were unable to locate an animal. Kennedy pushed her to keep the helicopter up until darkness had fallen on the mountains, but eventually pilot David Baker insisted that they put in for the night and resume the search first thing the next morning.

  Angie treated everyone to dinner that night at a Chinese restaurant on the corner of Sunrise and Swan. She explained to Chief Kennedy that relocation was not always the best alternative for these animals. She presented the case to her and explained that she understood that sometimes it was necessary to put an animal down. Angie explained that i
n all but the most extreme cases, though, she advocated relocation over extermination. She explained that the real issue was much more complex.

  “If it gets to the point of relocate or exterminate,” she said, “then there was a breakdown somewhere further back.”

  Jane said, “It may well be encroachment.”

  “Too many people are living in locations that were once wilderness areas,” Angie agreed. “You should realize, too, that mountain lion populations are at their highest in a hundred and fifty years; some researchers estimate their numbers total thirty thousand in the U.S. and Canada.”

  “Really?” Jane said.

  “But even with numbers like that it’s a delicate balance, one that requires vigilance and awareness. That the five fastest growing states in the U.S.—Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho—are all home to thriving cougar populations is cause for concern. Every year more and more people move to the American West, and every year cougar populations increase in areas where humans weren’t living twenty years ago.”

  The next morning they put the helicopter up in the skies north of Ventana Canyon again, but they were unable to locate a single cougar. The official decision to relocate the animal came from the governor of Arizona, but the decision was made via the Arizona Game and Fish Department’s five-member commission. No one considered the possibility that the cougar might elude them, until night set in on the second day.

  They’d brought in professional trackers late that afternoon, but even the trackers with their hunting dogs were unable to follow the mountain lion’s tracks more than a couple miles up into the Coronado National Forest. Angie spoke several times to members of the news media, and her image was broadcast a number of times on national news outlets. She advocated relocation of the animal before extermination, but she voiced her concerns that they might be unable to locate the mountain lion that killed Jenny Granger and Nick Jacobs.

  That night, she received phone calls from people who had seen her name and face on TV and looked up her phone number. The furthest call came from Miami, Florida, and it was clear that she was going to have to change her number. A few people were hostile with her, and she finally unplugged her phone line at three in the morning.

  The next day, she went to campus and found her email inbox flooded with email from concerned citizens all over the country who had seen her on the news and wanted to voice their opinions. Most of these were supportive, but a few were downright scary.

  By the fourth day, the story lost its front-page status at cnn.com as well as at other national news outlets. Angie suspected that the cougar that killed two of her best students had begun to move north. Each night she had nightmares that involved Jenny and Nick, and each day she woke less refreshed and more afraid. There were rumblings that she wasn’t doing her job, that she was sabotaging the investigation, that her love for these animals biased her against making the right decisions to find them.

  “She wants these animals to go on killing,” one pundit said, “because it affords her a spotlight in which to speak her liberal politics.”

  Another said, “She’s quite possibly the only person who gains something when these animals kill innocent people.”

  The guilt began to gnaw at Angie, and she woke from a terrible dream the fourth night wherein a mountain lion was eating her alive. Finally, her boyfriend John Crandall asked her to put aside her work for the weekend and spend forty-eight hours as far away from anything resembling mountain lions as she could. She promised to do that, but she silently considered every tracking map she’d ever made of a cougar.

  She reasoned through the possibility that the mountain lion may have moved north. And she began to worry that the next attack would come from a more populated town closer to Phoenix. She kept all of this inside her because she knew that John was a sensitive man, and she didn’t want to burden him with her guilt and fear. She held it in. She breathed. And she made it through the weekend without once mentioning a word of her inner turmoil to John or to anyone else.

  Twenty

  Dr. Angie Rippard exited her office in the Easton-Howell Science Complex and strode confidently down the hallway. It was hot outside, but the AC was on inside the building and it felt cool and good. Angie could see through the glass double doorway at the end of the hall, and students were busy walking up and down the sidewalk just beyond the door.

  “Doctor Rippard?” the voice came from behind her.

  Angie had a tall stack of papers in her arm, and she turned around and saw police Chief Jane Kennedy coming up the hallway. Angie hadn’t seen Kennedy since April 8th.

  “Chief Kennedy,” Angie said. She produced a hand from under the stack of papers, and she and Jane Kennedy shook hands.

  “How’ve you been?” Kennedy asked.

  “Busy,” Angie said. “This is finals week.”

  They started walking up the hallway toward the double doors.

  “Would you let me buy you lunch?” Jane said.

  Angie glanced at her wristwatch. “Sure,” she said. “What’s up?”

  • •

  They ate at a little deli across from campus. There were tables inside and tables outside, and they took a table outside under the shade of a patio umbrella. There was a steady breeze, and Angie had to place her plate on top of her paper napkin to keep it from flying away.

  “There were two different mountain lions,” Kennedy said.

  “Nick and Jenny were killed by a different mountain than the one that attacked Maggie Eiser.”

  “Right.”

  Angie nodded from behind her sandwich. “Yes,” she said. “We weren’t misleading anybody. Every spot I had on TV, I said that it was two different animals. It’s just an unfortunate coincidence, but the cougar that attacked Maggie Eiser—that killed those two deputies—it was not the same cougar that killed Nick and Jenny.”

  Jane Kennedy stared into Angie Rippard’s blue eyes. She noticed the lines around Angie’s eyes. She noticed the lack of sleep that those lines suggested. She felt an intense emotional tug, and she wanted to make it better for this woman. There was something about Angie that made Kennedy want to help her, though it was only in the color of her blue eyes, the exhaustion on her face.

  Angie said, “But the general public, well, they seemed satisfied that a cougar was killed. Any cougar.”

  “But it means that we still have a cougar up there,” Jane Kennedy said, “that killed two people.”

  “Two people that we know of,” Angie said.

  “Well, yeah.”

  “There are a lot of cougars up there,” Angie said. “Animals pass across the San Pedro Valley a lot, so that means we have a few cats up in the Galiuro Mountains. From there, the animals have a much better range. There’s a lot of untouched land east of the San Pedro, and the big male cats—the adults—have large seasonal ranges.”

  “So, what’re you saying?” Kennedy asked.

  “Well, the cat that killed Jenny Granger and Nick Jacobs was not the cat that attacked Maggie Eiser in that bathhouse. I’d bet my life on it. The bite wounds, the paw prints, the cougar mounds; all indications are that there were two different animals. Sheriff Tucker killed one of those animals. The other one—quite possibly the largest mountain lion I’ve ever heard of—is still up there. But a cat like that has a huge seasonal range. We may find that cat a year from now as far north as Payson. And, too, we may never hear from it again.”

  “Payson is over two hundred miles from here,” Kennedy said.

  “There’s a lot of unspoiled land north of the San Pedro,” Angie said. “There’s a perennial water source in the Gila River. There’s a plentiful deer population. A cougar could live in sheer isolation north of Winkelman and Hayden and never be seen by a human.”

  “And that’s what you think has happened?”

  Rippard started to reach for her drink. The outside of the glass was wet with condensation in the warm sunlight. “It’s what I hope has happened,” she said. She picked up her drink,
and the little square napkin stuck to its bottom. “Most of the time, cougars don’t get much larger than a hundred and forty pounds. For those animals, it’s rare that they’ll attack humans, particularly adult humans. But a cat that gets larger than one-sixty is capable of taking down a six-hundred-pound elk. To that kind of cat, a human is very real prey. And the cat that killed Nick Jacobs and Jenny Granger was probably much larger than that, trophy size, as sport hunters like to say. So, yeah, it’s my hope that the cougar moved north. There are literally millions of acres in the Tonto National Forest that are inaccessible to humans.”