CLAWS

by Stacey Cochran

  “You’ve got a cabin up there don’t you, Robert?” Angie said.

  “No, that’s up near Castle Peak in the Sierra Anchas.”

  “How far north?”

  “The cabin’s forty miles northeast of Lost Dutchman.”

  “That’s where our cat will go,” Angie said.

  “Why do you say that?” Robert said. “The mountain lion was last seen in Apache Junction.”

  “The reservoirs that service water to Phoenix are to the northeast: Roosevelt, Canyon, and Bartlett. It’s a huge wilderness area, the largest in the state. If we don’t find our cat within twenty-four hours that’s the place it’ll go. He’s cut off to the west by Phoenix. He’ll go to the northeast.”

  “My cabin is in the woods north of Roosevelt. Castle Peak is northeast of that. That’s mountain country, Angie. Ponderosa pine country.”

  “We need to get on the ground around Apache Junction and Prospector Park, but if we don’t find the cat there, your cabin may be the perfect place for a base of operations.”

  “How long before you could make it up to Apache Junction?”

  “One hour,” Angie said.

  “I’ll see you there,” Robert said.

  Angie hung up the phone and looked at her wristwatch. It was a quarter past six.

  Outside John’s modest cottage, Angie’s black Porsche glistened in the early morning light.

  Twenty-Five

  The reporters were lined up outside of Prospector Park as though ready for a parade. Angie and her team were inside the park studying the tracks from the previous night’s attack. Everyone else’s eyes were on the governor, who stood over near the bleachers adjacent to the infield. It looked like Horace G. was getting an idea of what the parents had seen.

  “He’s coming this way,” Robert said.

  Angie looked up from the tracks they’d been meticulously studying just beyond the outfield fence.

  “These tracks match the tracks from Ventana Canyon,” she said.

  “Let’s hope there are no two mountain lions with paw marks that large.”

  Angie was knelt down comparing the tracks on the ground to the tracks in her palm pilot. She had a tape measurer and caliper ruler. She shook her head in disbelief.

  “It’s the same cat,” she said.

  “Doctor Rippard,” the governor called. He stood at the opening in the outfield fence through which the cat had walked. Angie was in the dry wash twenty-five meters downhill. She rose up, smiled, and approached the governor and his entourage.

  All of his men wore suits, ties, and sunglasses, and the governor extended a hand for Angie to shake.

  She enthusiastically gripped his hand, smiled, and said, “It’s an honor to meet you, Governor.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” the governor said. “That was some good work you did in Tucson. I wish we could have spoken sooner. I would have congratulated you.”

  “Four people died.”

  “And you handled yourself admirably in the press.” Horace glanced over his shoulder at the police line that held the circus of news reporters, news vans, and television cameras outside of the main entrance to the park. There must have been thirty news vans and nearly four times that many reporters, cameramen, and pushy onlookers trying to get a better look into the park. “They can be vicious sometimes.”

  Angie looked into the governor’s eyes and said, “You’ll probably want to see what we’ve found.”

  “Yes.”

  Angie held up her palm pilot for the governor to see, and she led his entourage down the grassy hill toward the wash.

  “The tracks we’ve found here in the wash lead to the northeast,” Angie said. “As you’re probably aware everything slopes from northeast to southwest into town, so this wash here flows through the park. During rainy seasons it’ll fill with water. The tracks that we’ve found match the tracks that I found at the Ventana Canyon site.”

  “They match?” the governor said.

  Angie showed him the palm pilot. Horace looked from the computer, to Angie’s eyes, to the area her team had roped off like an archaeological site in and around the wash. There was an elaborate grid system with strings and wooden stakes, and a few of the paw marks were being filled with plaster cast. Angie had a team of a half dozen grad students working the site.

  “This is my top grad student,” Angie introduced, “Robert Gonzalez.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Governor.”

  The governor shook Robert’s hand and smiled solemnly.

  “Robert’s team was the first on the site this morning,” Angie said. “We initially put six grad students on this grid here to map the tracks up the wash.”

  “And what do they tell you?” Horace asked.

  “I’d say there’s a ninety-nine percent certainty that the mountain lion that attacked Zach Reynolds is the same mountain lion that killed Nick Jacobs and Jenny Granger at the Ventana Canyon Resort. I’ll need to enter the numbers into my computer, of course.”

  “What are the trackers telling you, Angie?” Horace asked.

  “So far, there’s no sign of our mountain lion.”

  “Well, can’t we just follow the tracks?”

  “They put dogs on it,” Angie said. “Local authorities here in Apache Junction have been tracking since last night.”

  “And this mountain lion just disappeared?” Horace asked. “Does that happen?”

  “It happened at Ventana Canyon.”

  “How do you explain it?”

  Angie shrugged. “They’re highly specialized predators,” she said. “And typically the way they behave after an attack follows what this animal has done.”

  “How exactly?”

  “Well, they don’t hang around after an attack. It’s a survival mechanism. A cat will make an attack—successful or no—and then move well away from the site. Sometimes they never come back; most times they’ll return to a successful kill within forty-eight hours. But this wasn’t a successful kill, and the cat probably moved on. It’s one reason why Felis concolor is so elusive; they make an attack, and they move on. They stay alive by constantly moving, and a cat like this has a big range.”

  “Like ninety miles.”

  Angie said, “As much as two hundred miles sometimes.”

  “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how bad for business this will be. I want to be sensitive to this animal’s habitat, but, well . . . What do you recommend, Doctor Rippard?”

  “I’m for relocation above all else.” Angie realized her own words rang hollow. It was like a political speech or broken record that had played over and over, but even she was beginning to have her doubts about relocating this particular animal.

  “You don’t sound too sure of yourself, Doctor Rippard,” Horace said.

  “No, I’m, uh,” she stammered. “Yes, relocation. We can’t just exterminate an animal. They have rights.”

  Her mind filled with an image from her childhood; it was when her brother was attacked, and it made her shiver. Something was happening inside of Angie. She was having a change of heart. Could it be possible that she was wrong about preserving this particular cat?

  Horace glanced around at his men. No one said anything, but they all seemed to realize that Dr. Rippard’s professional interest in this animal may be clouding her judgment. It was an awkward moment.

  Horace was sensitive to her feelings but asked, “Would you ever support exterminating a cougar, Dr. Rippard?”

  “I, I, I don’t think so,” Angie said. “I don’t know. They’re just harmless animals; they need our protection.”

  There was a commotion up by the gate into the park. People screamed and leapt out of the way, and a giant Hummer limousine crashed through the plastic barricades and yellow police tape.

  “Now what?” Horace said.

  They walked up to the top of the hill near the outfield fence. Angie stood down in the wash staring at the ground.

  The white Hummer limousine raced
through the parking lot. Police chased after it on foot, shouting and yelling. It was headed toward the baseball field. The governor’s men started to grow tense and surrounded him for protection. Several of his men actually removed firearms from inside their suit jackets.

  The Hummer limousine raced toward the right-field fence. It plowed over the curb and started down the hill. It was going to plow through the fence on the right-field line.

  “Look out!” someone shouted.

  The governor’s men tightened around him.

  The limousine plowed through the fence and raced out onto the ball field. It tore up grass and dirt and started heading towards the outfield opening where everyone stood. They leapt out of the way, and the limousine raced through the opening, down the hill toward Angie Rippard.

  The biologist and her grad students jumped out of the way just as the Hummer limousine plowed through their grid system at the bottom of the wash. Dust filled the air, and the limousine came to a stop.

  “What lunatic is driving that obscene automobile?” Horace said.

  The back left door popped open, and a giant bear of a man stepped out from the darkness inside the limousine. He wore a black cowboy hat, black leather pants, black cowboy boots, a rhinestone-studded shirt that glinted in the sunlight, and on his right hip and left hip there dangled matching silver hatchets like a six shooters.

  “Yahoo!” the man bellowed.

  Angie muttered, “The Chopper.”

  “Just who do you think you are?” Horace shouted. His men were trying to hold him back, but he broke free and started angrily toward the man.

  “Governor,” the man said. “I’m the only person who can solve this problem.”

  The man thrust a hand forward for Horace to shake, but Horace declined.

  “My name is Charlie Rutledge,” he said.

  “You mean ‘The Chopper’,” Angie said. “Do you realize you just ran over our site?”

  “I’m terribly sorry about that,” Charlie said. “It didn’t look like the folks up there at the gate were going to let me through. And I don’t have time for your bureaucracy. You must be the biologist that let two people die on my golf course.”

  “Excuse me,” Angie said. She looked into his eyes and realized he wasn’t wholly sane.

  “Let me tell you something, Doctor Tree Hugger,” Charlie declared. “You’ve let enough people die on your watch. It’s what happens when women get into positions of power. You don’t have the requisite—ah, heart—to follow through with the kill when it becomes necessary. And because of that, people die.”

  Angie said, “I don’t know what Cro-Magnon universe you and your limousine just fell out of.”

  The man bowed up his chest. “I don’t have time for you, Doctor Rippard, if you have the gall to actually call yourself ‘Doctor.’ I’m here because you’ve failed, not once, not twice, but three times, now, and because your failure is costing me a lot of money. People are canceling trips to my resort because of you, Doctor Tree Hugger.”

  Horace said, “Let’s be reasonable.”

  “Reasonable has gotten four people killed, Governor,” Charlie said. “I’m not letting you fail again. I’m going up in those hills”—he pointed toward the mountains to the east—“and I’m going to skin me a mountain lion. Now, if you get in my way, I’ll skin you, too.”

  Angie’s face turned red with anger. “Why you son of a—”

  “Angie,” Horace said. “I’m sure we can work this out. I’m sure Charlie here didn’t mean it quite like that.”

  “I’ll tell you how I meant it,” Charlie said. Like lightning, he unlatched the hatchets from his hips. He pivoted around and hurled them like a pro twenty feet through the air. First one, then the other, stuck solidly into a dead log in the middle of the wash.

  “Johnny Black,” he called to the open door of the limousine. “Let’s see the video.”

  A man with long black hair stepped out of the back of the limousine. He carried a video unit, and he stepped up to the group. Charlie retrieved his hatchets and used one like a pointer.

  He proclaimed, “This here video was captured by a parent in the bleachers last night!”

  “How did you get this?” the governor said.

  Johnny Black pressed “play,” and everyone watched the video screen as a mountain lion emerged from the open fence and charged across the outfield toward a little boy in right field.

  “From what I understand, young Zack Reynolds may actually live. He was lucky.”

  “Jesus,” Angie gasped.

  “You’re not supposed to have a copy of this tape,” Horace said.

  On the video, the largest mountain lion Angie Rippard had ever seen leapt onto Zach Reynolds’s back. Parents screamed. Everyone fled the field, except one man, then another who charged right for the mountain lion.

  “Look at the size of him.”

  “I see him,” Angie said.

  “Have you ever seen a mountain lion that big?”

  Angie shook her head.

  On the video, the mountain lion had the boy in its mouth and was trotting toward the opening in the fence.

  With his hatchet, Charlie Rutledge closed down the video unit and motioned Johnny Black back towards the limousine.

  “Now, maybe you think that monster is worth preserving,” Charlie said. “I say it’s a killer. It’s killed four people, and it would have killed a boy last night were it not for two heroic men. I’m going up in those hills. And if you come up there and try to protect this animal, you better bring some mighty good ammunition because I’ll become one with the woods, and I’ll hunt every last one of you. My name’s Charlie Rutledge. Yahoo!”

  Charlie turned and strode toward the open back door of the limousine. He climbed inside, pulled the door shut, and the limousine roared on up the wash in the direction of the mountains. Everyone just stood there speechless.

  Twenty-Six

  The helicopter swung out over the crystal blue water and started racing northeast twenty meters above the water’s surface. On either side of the reservoir, desert mountains towered straight up from the clear blue water.

  “It’s seven miles up to Roosevelt Dam,” Dave Baker said. “Are you familiar with it?”

  Robert said, “I am. The cabin’s just beyond the lake on the high side of the dam.”

  Angie said, “We’ll be able to see Castle Peak once we get out above the—”

  “Damn,” John Crandall said. His mouth dropped open.

  “Big ain’t it?” Baker said. He glanced at each of them. “That’s the world’s largest cyclopedean-masonry dam.”

  “What is that?” Angie said.

  “It’s a style of building that uses huge irregular-shaped blocks,” Baker said. “It’s why it’s curved.”

  The enormous convex dam was built between opposing canyon walls. It had a structural height of three hundred and fifty-six feet, as tall as a thirty-five-story building, and it was over twice that wide across the top, seven hundred and twenty-three feet.

  “It’s a hundred and eighty feet thick at the base,” Baker said.

  Everyone stared at it as the helicopter came closer and started to climb.

  “Yeah,” Baker said. “That’s Arizona right there; that dam controls seventy percent of the water for Phoenix.”

  The helicopter came over the top, and everyone saw the huge arch back beyond the dam and then the stunningly vast Roosevelt Lake on the high side of the dam.

  “What’s the arch?” John asked.

  “Highway 188.”

  And they all saw a single car hauling across the bridge, the arch high over it. The little white sedan looked like a toy car passing across the bridge.

  “Depending on rainfall totals,” Baker said. “Roosevelt Lake may be as wide as thirty miles from northwest to southeast.”

  It was huge from left to right, and on the far side of the lake, the enormous Sierra Ancha Mountains rose like a slumbering giant.

  The helicopter race
d onward across the lake and then began to climb up into the mountains. Giant peaks rose in the distance some eight thousand feet above sea level. The desert saguaro cacti gave way to shrub trees, and then to giant ponderosa pines. The forest was huge and on a scale for which John was not prepared. In either direction north and east, there was nothing but mountains and pine forests for hundreds of miles.