CLAWS

by Stacey Cochran

  She looked at her left pants leg. Her khakis were ripped, and she lifted up her pants leg and saw that a shiver of wood had opened up the skin on her left shin.

  “Damn that hurts,” she said, grimacing.

  She looked with disgust at the spot where the wood had rotted and broken through. The garden hose sat there on the edge of the wooden base frame, and it seemed to smile at her in the sunlight. She looked back at her leg, judging how badly the wound was going to bleed.

  She glanced back over her shoulder. There was a wooden shed out behind the cabin. Maybe Robert kept a mower in there. It’d be nice to mow this grass, Angie thought.

  She looked back at her leg, and then all of a sudden, there was a gurgling sound from the pump. Several belches of air came up from the spigot, and the pump hawked out some rusty-colored water. A second later, the water color turned over from the rusty color to clear well water. The pump stopped belching up air, and the water just flowed.

  Angie reached her hand forward and felt the water’s coolness. It was icy.

  “Sweet,” she said. She rolled her pants leg up past her knee, and she reached her shin forward and let the water clean the wound.

  Everything was going to be alright. Angie looked at the green garden hose coiled on the side of the wooden base frame, and it didn’t seem to be smiling at her in the sunlight anymore. It was looking at her smugly.

  “What are you looking at?” Angie muttered, and she continued washing her wound until it stopped bleeding.

  She lifted her leg and moved it out of the stream of icy water, and she let it dry for a moment.

  The pump was over at the edge of the yard. There was pine straw on the wooden base frame from the ponderosa pines, and Angie more than once looked down into the forest, letting her eyes focus across the forest floor. She saw two birds fly from one tree to another, and she saw a squirrel scramble up a tree, but she didn’t see anything that looked like a mountain lion.

  She did all of this in a cursory sort of way because she didn’t really want to dwell on the fact that she was becoming somewhat paranoid that a mountain lion may be stalking her at any given moment. It just wasn’t natural, and even though this cougar had exhibited plenty of unnatural behavior in the past couple of months, Angie still held onto a fundamental belief that order existed in nature on a principle level, and that strange things didn’t generally happen.

  Angie was a scientist, and even though she was a deeply intuitive scientist, science operated on a cause-and-reaction principle, and monsters didn’t well up out of nowhere and begin hunting people unless there was a very good reason.

  If this mountain lion were stalking people, it did so because it had been conditioned to do so. Somewhere in its past, it had learned that humans were easy prey, an easy meal, and not a significant threat. It had probably grown up on protected sanctuaries where hunting was illegal, and as such, it had no reason to stay away from a human that it happened upon on a hiking trail.

  “Aversive conditioning” was the phrase she’d used at the Fifth Annual Research Symposium for the Center of Applied Conservation Biology. These animals had to be taught to avoid humans, to stay away, that if it smelled or saw a human that the best thing for a cougar to do was to run away.

  But that wasn’t what was happening anymore. Hunting mountain lions was illegal in several states in the West, and where there weren’t statewide bans on hunting the animal, there were generally hundreds of thousands of acres of protected forest land where it was illegal to hunt cougars. And with human populations on a staggeringly fast rise in the West, more and more people were putting up subdivisions in wilderness areas, and more and more people were walking on trails that would have been remote wilderness trails thirty years earlier.

  All of this, though, was an explanation. Right or wrong, it operated on the principle that if there were an animal behavior problem (a cougar stalking people, for example), there were certain measures that could be taken to prevent such behaviors.

  The paranoia that Angie felt while she stood there washing the wound on her leg, the tension in her shoulders, the shortness of breath that she felt, it was something altogether different. The paranoia was a result of fear, and the fear was a result of recent human attacks and killings, but the degree and intensity with which she felt the paranoia couldn’t be easily explained. It was that gray area of human thought.

  She knew that they were going to kill this cougar. She knew that someone was going to die. She knew it. But explaining how she knew it was beyond her scientific grasp. And yet it was there, floating along in her subconscious, and every time she saw a bird flutter through the trees or saw movement along the forest floor out of the corner of her eye, she turned and looked. She felt her chest seizing up just a little; she felt her breath growing thin and discordant. Would this be it? Was she breathing her last breath before the animal attacked her? Was she thinking her last thought before the cougar pounced on her and snapped her neck?

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Angie muttered, looking at her wounded leg. And she wanted to yell out her frustration, her pain, her fear. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she said.

  She glanced over her shoulder at the spot in the grassy yard where she’d thrown the garden hose.

  “I hope you’re happy!” she said loudly, disregarding the realization that she sounded more than a little crazy shouting at an inanimate garden hose that was lying in the grass. She muttered, “Stupid garden hose.”

  Twenty-Nine

  Angie spread the map out on a table on the porch. Robert and John looked on, and neither said anything about the clouds each of them saw forming to the south. The topographic map was four feet by four feet square, took up the whole tabletop, and it showed elevation gradations, hiking trails, creeks and springs all the way down to Roosevelt Lake.

  Angie said, “I figure this afternoon we ought to map out a couple of grids that we can follow the next two to three days.”

  “We break the tracking work down into detail?” Robert said.

  “Cover a grid per afternoon,” Angie said. “Give us some reasonable ground to cover.”

  John and Robert nodded their heads. John held a contemplative index finger to his lower lip. Suddenly, a loud rumble of thunder rolled up from deep on the horizon, and it startled them all. It was distant but powerful, and all three of them looked up at the clouds rising from the southern horizon thirty miles away. Huge clouds climbed from mountains to the south looking white, dark blue, and almost black from higher to lower altitudes.

  “Cumulonimbus,” Angie said gravely. “You see the anvil-shaped head at the top of the cloud formation?”

  “Thunderheads,” Robert said.

  “What does the anvil shape mean?” John asked stupidly.

  “It means we’re in for a storm,” Angie said.

  “It means they’re monsoon clouds,” Robert said.

  A sudden breeze came up from the woods and pressed hard against the screened-in porch. The map started to flutter off of the table, and Angie leaned forward and pressed both hands flat against it, holding it in place. The wind died down, but there was no denying the moisture on the breeze. In Arizona, Angie had grown accustomed to being able to smell the rain on the air, the winds of change, twelve hours before a storm would strike. Life in the desert high country changed when a monsoonal storm hit.

  “Well, technically, it would be a pre-monsoonal storm,” Angie said. “We’re not in monsoon season just yet.”

  “It may just pass us over,” John said.

  Neither Angie nor Robert responded to this statement. Angie focused on the map. She drew four grids north of the lake. She placed a roman numeral squarely in the center of each grid: I, II, III, and IV.

  “We take grid three this afternoon,” Angie said. “It’s the closest to us. We break the grid into four horizontal sections, and we cover as much ground as we can. If a storm rises up, we can be back up here safely and quickly.”

  John started looking at the roof
over the porch, judging how well the cabin would stand up in a storm. His eyes went back worriedly to the map. He reached forward and pointed at the map legend at the bottom right-hand corner of the map.

  “What is the scale?” he said. “How many miles are we talking?”

  “Each grid is about fifteen miles, north to south,” Angie said. “Ten miles east to west. All we have to do is get a dart into him, and we can come back with the ATV and haul him up to the kennel. But for now, we’re scouting, tracking, looking for signs of cougars. Robert and I know what to look for.”

  “And what’s that?” John said. “What’re the signs?”

  “Cougar mounds,” Angie said. “Tree markings and tracks would be the best, but there are more visible signs than a paw print in mud that’ll help us determine if our cougar’s up here in the mountains with us.”

  “And what if it’s not?” John asked.

  “Then, we all live another week,” she said. “We take the helicopter back down to civilization. We let the Department of Game and Fish know what’s going on. They’ll let the governor know what’s going on. We regroup, and if we have to come back up here, we do that. We establish a base camp here.”

  “You’re convinced that it’s up here,” Robert said.

  Angie nodded her head and looked into Robert’s eyes.

  “Our cat is up here,” she said. She gazed out across the sea of trees.

  John fingered his shotgun.

  “We’ll find him,” Angie said. “Or he’ll find us.”

  “What about the Chopper?” Gonzalez said.

  Angie said, “That lunatic?”

  “Yeah,” Gonzalez said.

  “He’s out there, too,” Angie said. “Somewhere.”

  They looked out across the forest treetops, south all the way to the lake. Another deep rumbling roll of thunder came up from the south; this one shook the windows hard enough to make them rattle in their frames.

  • •

  The rains came when they were two miles out from the cabin on a trail in a forest so thick they couldn’t see more than thirty meters in any direction.

  “Jesus,” John muttered. “I’m cold.”

  The rain felt almost icy it was so cold, yet the air had been warm, so there was this sensation of going from warm dry air to cool, damp air in only a matter of minutes. And the rain fell hard. John looked up ahead of him on the trail.

  Angie’s hair was soaked. Her khakis were damp. She turned and looked at him, and almost had to shout to be heard, “We need to find some shelter! This may turn over to hail!”

  “Right!” John shouted. They both looked at Robert.

  “There used to be a camping shelter on up ahead,” Robert said. “It’s not much, but it may give us some protection.”

  They continued up the trail through the woods, and a few minutes later, they saw something ahead of them. Angie saw it first, and she pointed it out.

  “Yeah,” Robert said. “I see it!”

  The rain hammered the trees, the earthy ground, soaking the trio in icy cold rain. Rivulets formed along the trail, quickly eating away at the earth. Angie saw something that looked like a couple sheets of dark plywood up ahead.

  As they approached the camping shelter, she saw that Robert was right. It really wasn’t much. A wooden platform was built up about two feet off of the ground. It opened like a rectangular clam shell and was about eight feet from right to left. A “half cave” is what outdoor enthusiasts called it. The side facing the trail was completely exposed, but they climbed up inside it, laughing with excitement.

  “It’s not much,” Robert said over the rain.

  “It’ll do,” Angie said.

  The rain beat against the plywood roof and poured down the back of the lean-to. It was not much larger than a closet, but the group was happy to be out of the rain for a moment.

  “Back-country hikers sometimes hold up here,” Robert said.

  Angie looked around. There were names carved into the wood.

  Robert said, “It gets them up off of the ground.”

  “Yeah,” John said. “You could put a sleeping bag in here, and it wouldn’t be all that bad.”

  “Look at all these names,” Angie said.

  John read one that said: “Frannie blew me here 9-9-02.” And then apparently Frannie had corroborated the statement just underneath that: “It was really fun—Frannie.”

  “Oh, man,” John said. “People have screwed in here.”

  He seemed somewhat grossed out by the idea.

  “Why is it,” Robert asked, “that people write the most vulgar shit when they’re carving stuff into wood?”

  “Well, if you’ve only got five words to write in your lifetime, you’re gonna write ‘I wanted to get laid.’”

  Angie said, “Or ‘I got laid.’”

  “Nice,” John said. “Very succinct.”

  “Here’s a nice one,” Robert said. “‘Sunny day—12-3-02.’” And there was a goofy looking sunshine carved into the wood with rays bursting out from it. The sun had a smile and eyes carved into it.

  Suddenly, the forest exploded with the sound of hail hitting tree branches. The hail pounded the wooden roof of the shelter. Angie, Robert, and John tried to squeeze back further into the thing, and they looked out at the forest floor as it was quickly covered in little white pellets of hail.

  “Well, wherever our mountain lion is,” John said, “I hope he’s got him some shelter.”

  The hail continued to pound the forest for the next ten minutes until the ground was white. Robert reached his hand out at one point to pick up a few pieces, and he was struck by the sharpness of the pouring hail.

  “Ow!” he said, and he retracted his hand.

  He looked at his hand as though shocked that Mother Nature had a little sting in her. He wasn’t prepared for the fact that nature didn’t give a damn about him and would sting his hand if he stuck it out at the wrong time.

  “You alright?” Angie said.

  He looked at his hand. “Yeah, I’ll be alright.”

  “That’s some serious stuff,” John said inanely. “What is hail anyway?”

  “It’s the most destructive form of precipitation on Earth,” Angie said. “Hailstones usually measure about a quarter inch to four inches in diameter.”

  The stones that covered the ground around the camping shelter were about the size of marbles, about a half inch in diameter.

  “Some stones measuring up to six inches in diameter have been reported,” Angie said. “That kind’a hail can kill animals.”

  John and Robert looked at her. The hail continued to pound the forest.

  “I read a story a couple years ago about a hailstorm in Colorado that just wiped out an entire herd of cattle,” Angie said. “Like ten thousand head of cattle, lying out in the field fifteen minutes after the hail started, most of them dead or near death. Terrible.”

  “It’ll last like five minute,” John said.

  “Hailstorms rarely last longer than fifteen minutes,” Angie said. “It’ll turn over to rain soon enough.”

  They sat there silently, eyes bright, excited, and alert. Something about all of this was fun, even though they realized they had serious business ahead of them.

  Angie sat there in the lean-to, her legs curled up in front of her, her arms and hands wrapped around the front of her knees. Her wet brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail, but strands of hair hung down on either side. Robert thought she was cute. He noticed that her blue eyes, which normally held such intensity, seemed bright and almost innocent. Angie was in her element, and she was having fun. The curve of her chin was rounded like an apple, and when she smiled, little crescent-shaped dimples rose on both sides of her face. She looked from Robert to John, and she patted at her wet hair.

  “What’s the worst storm you ever got caught in?” John asked.

  “When I was sixteen,” Robert said. “I was driving back from my grandparents’ house in Santa Fe.”

 
“New Mexico?” John asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “We lived down in Albuquerque. It’s about an hour drive, and I was coming home one night, and it was like the sky just opened up, man. It started pounding. Lightning, thunder. But the crazy thing was a bolt of lightning came down and hit the highway in front of my car. Sparks exploded all over the place, man. It was crazy.”