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CLAWS

Page 13

by Stacey Cochran


  And then they all saw it. Castle Peak rose from the horizon, and it suddenly hit them how remote the location was. The nearest telephone would be more than a hundred miles away. Cars and roads would be non-existent. Angie swallowed down her fear and said, “Well, if I were a mountain lion, this is where I’d be.”

  Baker tucked the nose of the helicopter down, and raced onward over the sea of ponderosa pines, climbing higher and higher up into the mountains.

  “I sure hope you’re right, Angie,” Robert said.

  And they all fell into silence, listening to the rhythmic thump of the helicopter blades.

  • •

  The helicopter dropped them off in a clearing a half mile from the cabin. Each of the three carried expedition-style backpacks loaded with enough clothing and food to last them seven days; pilot David Baker was instructed to return to the clearing at eight A.M. in exactly that many days, and the last thing unloaded from the helicopter was an unassembled steel kennel that Robert was already snapping into place.

  John and Angie stood there in the clearing and watched the helicopter climb up into the sky overhead. John grimly waved goodbye to Baker, and the helicopter swung around and took off over the tree line vanishing from sight to the south.

  Robert assembled the kennel. It was about fifteen feet long by ten feet wide, and its grated steel roof was five feet tall. John looked doubtfully at it standing there at the side of the clearing. Robert opened and shut the door on one side.

  John said, “How’re you going to get the mountain lion inside is what I want to know.”

  Angie carried a Winchester .22 with two dozen Telazol tranquilizer darts strapped to the side of her pack. She also had twenty .22 shells in a pocket on her pack, but she didn’t tell John or Robert about that.

  “I’ve got two dozen Telazol darts,” she said.

  John frowned as Angie approached the assembled cage and shook it with her right hand. It seemed fairly sturdy.

  “It’ll hold together,” Robert said.

  Angie nodded her agreement.

  “Are you kidding me?” John said. “That mountain lion will rip out’a that thing like it’s Glad wrap!”

  For his part, John carried a telephoto lens, a Nikon camera, and a Remington twelve-gauge, double-barrel shotgun. The shotgun was strapped to his pack. Robert looked at the cage and said heartily, “It’ll hold.”

  He carried a hatchet, binoculars, and an old .357 in a leather holster on his right hip.

  “Come on,” he said. “That’s the trail over there.”

  He pointed to a little rectangle sign that stood atop a three-foot-tall wooden post.

  CABIN ↑

  The word was etched into the dark wood, and a worn path led uphill into the forest.

  “It’s about a ten-minute hike up the mountain,” Robert said.

  “I hope you know,” Angie said, “if we make it through this, I’m making sure you get your Ph.D.”

  Robert smiled and said, “Good, because I might not ever finish up otherwise.”

  The group shouldered their packs and started up into the forest. It was a beautiful sunlit morning, and light danced through the shadows and on the red earthy ground inside the forest. There was a deep silence all around them, punctuated only by the sound of an occasional bird in the treetops, the wind rustling the tree branches, or a squirrel skittering over dead leaves and pine straw.

  “It’s peaceful,” John Crandall said. “I just hope to get a good story out of this. Maybe I’ll even turn it into a novel.”

  Angie smirked good naturedly at his eagerness.

  John said, “If I could write a bestseller maybe Angie will stop flirting with you.”

  The comment caught Angie off guard because it had no grounding in reality, but she thought that maybe he was just trying to say something funny and that it came out the wrong way. She started to ask him what he meant.

  Robert said coolly, “I think you’ll really like the views from the cabin, John.”

  Angie ignored John’s comment and said, “How so, Robert?”

  “Well, it sits up on a clearing on the side of a hill,” Robert said. “You can see down the mountain all the way to the lake; it’s probably about thirty miles.”

  “How often do you come up here?” John asked.

  “Three to four times a year,” Robert said. “Ordinarily, I put in on the east side of the lake near Grapevine.”

  “Grapevine?” Angie said.

  “It’s a little campground area,” Gonzalez said. “I keep two ATVs up here. One is in a shed down near Grapevine; one is up at the cabin.”

  “How long would it take us to get down to Grapevine?” John asked.

  “By foot,” Robert said, “it’s a two-day hike. On an ATV you can do it in a few hours.”

  They reached a little stone stairwell up the side of the hill. The forest was thick with ponderosa pines, and they were each winded from the climb.

  “I put in this stairwell a few years back,” Robert said.

  When they reached the top of the steps, they could see the cabin through an opening in the forest. The trail continued on ahead of them another forty meters, but there was a clearing up ahead, and they could see the cabin on the side of a grassy hill.

  It was a two-story cabin with twin windows upstairs on the front. A wide running porch ran along the front and two sides of the cabin. The porch was screened in, and a wooden swinging chair creaked in a breeze on the front porch. Sunlight shone down on the cabin, and Angie could tell that from its perch, there was quite a view out over the trees.

  “It’s beautiful, Robert,” Angie said.

  Robert whispered, “Look!”

  Everyone looked up and saw the herd of elk on the far side of the cabin. The elk were grazing on the grass at the edge of the clearing.

  “They’re huge,” John said. He looked at Angie and smiled excitedly.

  Robert said, “I’m afraid that’s all we’ll have in the way of neighbors for the next few days.”

  There were two adult females, one juvenile, and a month-old calf. The bull elk had an enormous rack of antlers.

  “They’re in the rut,” Angie whispered.

  “What do you mean?” John asked.

  “Most of the year,” Angie said, “elk stay in a loose female social order, and the males travel alone. You only see them like this when they’re mating.”

  The humans stood there on the edge of the clearing, the cabin between them, and on the far side of the clearing the elk casually walked on up the mountain and into the forest.

  “How much does the male weigh?” John asked.

  “The bull’s about seven hundred pounds,” Angie said. “The two cows probably weigh about five hundred. The juvenile’s about half that, and the calf weighs a hundred or so.”

  The group stepped out into the sunlight. A worn gray path led through the knee-high grass. A dozen wooden steps led up from the ground to the screen door on the front porch; their feet clomped heavily up the steps.

  Robert unlatched the screen door, and they all stepped up onto the porch. John and Angie turned around and were stunned by the view.

  “Oh, my God,” John said.

  The mountain sloped downhill thirty miles to the southeast. It looked like a vast green sea, and far down at the bottom of the mountain was Roosevelt Lake, which spread from eastern horizon to western horizon.

  “The place always needs a little cleaning at first,” Robert said.

  He removed a key from his pocket and unlocked the hard wooden door.

  Angie said, “This is perfect.”

  Robert looked over his shoulder and saw the expression on her face. She stood there on the porch gazing out at the wilderness that surrounded them. She looked utterly calm and at peace. She nodded her head lightly.

  “What is it?” John said.

  “This is it,” Angie said. “We’re going to find our cat. I can feel it; it’s like a knot in my chest.”

  John and Robert
exchanged glances. They were both aware of Angie’s uncanny intuition, but rarely was she so specific, and they both kind of smiled curiously and then looked at her. She stood on the porch, the sunlight bright all around the screened-in area, out over the yard, the trees, all the way down to the lake. Crickets chirruped in the grass. A steady breeze stirred the treetops, and the screen bulged in and out as though the cabin itself was breathing.

  What Angie didn’t say was that she was certain, too, that one of them was going to die.

  Twenty-Seven

  The big cat stood perfectly still staring uphill through the trees. Its shoulders were tense, and it seemed ready to take a step forward. But it was staring at something up the hillside, something through the trees, something that seemed utterly unaware that a huge predator was stalking it. A breeze rustled through the treetops, but the cougar resisted the urge to smell the wind. Its head remained level and perfectly motionless.

  The deer stood in a patch of sunlight that came through the forest canopy. It raised its head up and glanced nervously down the hill. Its ears stood like twin radars on its head, twitching and honing in on every sound along the forest floor. The deer’s coal black nose was moist, and it detected a fluctuation in the scent of the forest.

  Something had startled a squirrel two hundred meters down the forested hillside, and the squirrel scrambled up into a tree. Two birds were on a low branch of the tree, and the squirrel’s jittery movement caused them to take flight through the forest up toward the deer.

  Now the deer stood there in the dappled sunlight, cocking its head one way then the other, its ears poised and listening for any sound from down the hill.

  The deer stood there like that for a good thirty seconds, making no sound at all, its head pivoting back and forth listening, listening . . .

  The attack came from up the hill, which completely caught the deer off guard. It was so tensely poised listening for a sound from down the hillside that in the half-second between when it heard the mountain lion and was hit by the mountain lion, it actually bolted up the hill.

  The cougar hit it at full speed and knocked the deer over in a blinding frenzy of fur, claws, and wildcat growling. The deer landed hard on its side, knocking the wind from its lungs. It made a short-burst groan and tried to stagger onto its feet.

  The cougar hit the deer so hard that it was dazed itself, and it had overshot its mark. The cougar sprung around a hundred and eighty degrees without even looking and pounced down on top of the deer, which had almost reached its feet in the split second after the initial hit. The cougar’s front two sets of claws dug into the deer’s back, and its back left leg kicked wildly and swept the deer’s back legs out from under it.

  The deer groaned again, now pinned to the forest floor, and the cougar lunged forward and bit into the back of the deer’s neck. The bite was just above the deer’s shoulders, and it was powerful, but it didn’t snap its neck instantly. The deer struggled and twisted and kicked its legs, and the cougar just dug in balancing itself over the smaller animal.

  The deer thrashed and kicked like a fish on a pier, but the cougar held it down and refused to let go. The cougar’s jaws pressed down harder, and it centered its balance so that the deer could not get a brace on anything.

  The cougar wasn’t centered well enough to break the deer’s neck, but it was centered well enough to hold it firmly in place. The bite wasn’t around the deer’s throat either, so the action seemed momentarily stalemated. The cougar seemed to realize this, but it realized too that the deer wasn’t going anywhere.

  Gradually the deer tired enough that the cougar could break its neck. The cougar brought its front right paw forward and pinned it against the deer’s head. It used its left paw to goad the deer into struggling, and with its jaws clamped tightly around the deer’s neck, it wrenched the deer’s head against its struggling body until the deer’s neck snapped.

  Once the deer was paralyzed, the big cat began to feed.

  Twenty-Eight

  “You hungry?” Robert asked.

  John looked up at Robert from across the inside of the cabin. Robert was at the counter in the kitchen. Sunlight shined in through the open windows, and there was a gentle breeze pulled in by one of two circulating fans in the living room.

  “What do you got?” John asked. He was on the sofa, reading a magazine.

  “Got a ton of these.” Robert held up a Power Bar.

  John motioned like he wanted one, and Robert tossed it across the cabin for John to catch.

  “Where did Angie go?”

  “She wanted to check the pump,” Robert said.

  John opened the wrapper on the Power Bar.

  “Where is that?”

  Robert said, “It’s over at the side of the yard, at the edge of the woods, over on this”—he pointed to the right—“side of the cabin.”

  “You think it’s safe for her out there alone?”

  “She’ll be fine,” Robert said. “Chances are we’ll be up here a week and won’t find so much as a track.”

  “Yeah?”

  “They’re really elusive animals, John. Some professional trackers spend months searching for a single track. The chance that we’ll find one specific cougar—our cougar—is really minimal.”

  “Do you think she’s good?”

  “Angie?”

  “Yeah, man.”

  Robert Gonzalez poured a glass of water from a pitcher. “I’ve always thought she’s the best field researcher I’ve ever known. She thinks like an animal. She has a good imagination, and she knows her business better than anybody else. If we’re going to find our cougar, there’s nobody that I’d bet on more to find it than Angie.”

  John stood up and walked over to the window on the right side of the cabin. He took a bite of the Power Bar and tried to spot Angie out in the yard, but he didn’t see her.

  “What is it with you and her?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know,” John said. “You probably understand her better than I do. You spend more time with her than I do; that’s for sure. What is so attractive about these animals to her?”

  “I don’t know, man. Maybe it’s the unknown. We fear the unknown. And I don’t know of another predator in North America that we know less about than the cougar.”

  “And yet you’ve got a system by which you can get a handle on it, studying it?”

  “Yeah, I mean, we get paid,” he said. “There’s academic respect, maybe even a little bit of fame in Angie’s case. But I don’t know; I think it’s something altogether deeper for her. I mean her brother was attacked when she was a kid. She was there. It was like her brush with death. Maybe she revisits it the way guys coming home from Vietnam thirty-five years ago, sometimes would go back to Saigon a year or two later. It’s like you just can’t get away from it in your mind.”

  “That’s a psychological truism isn’t it?”

  “To go back to the thing that almost killed you?”

  “Yeah,” John said.

  “Maybe so; it’s like you got a handle on it because you survived it once. It gives you a buzz to go back so close to death. I mean Angie lived. She made it through the attack. So that’s what she expects will happen every time she encounters a cat. Maybe she feels like she knows the animals in a way that no one else ever really can. Hell, I don’t know. I just know that she’s one hell of a tracker. She knows this animal better than the animal knows itself.”

  • •

  Angie held a green garden hose coiled in her hand. The pump was an old hand-lever style, and she couldn’t see any way that she could attach the hose to it. The pump had a wood-encased base, and the grass and weeds were grown up tall around the wooden base frame. Her fear of snakes rustling through the high grass in the yard was real, but Angie tried to brush that out of her mind in order to focus on getting the hose hooked up.

  She placed the coiled hose on the wooden base, and she tried to lift the lever on the pump. It w
as harder than she had thought it would be, and so she stepped up onto the wooden base and tried to use both hands. She lifted the lever up, expecting water to come gushing out of the thing, when all of sudden the board underneath her cracked and she fell through.

  “Son of a bitch!” she muttered.

  Her left leg was down inside the wooden base, which stood a foot up from the ground; so she was in it up to her shin. It felt like she’d cut her leg, and she saw that the wood was rotted around the base. The nails that held the wood in place were rusty and exposed, and so Angie carefully removed her leg from the wooden base and stepped back two steps from the pump.

 

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