Trapline

by Mark Stevens

  They sat at a breakfast booth with oak benches and matching shoulder-height backs and a table worn and stained with character. There was room for six, three to a side, but Allison and Colin sat close, thigh to thigh. Over Trudy’s shoulder, a greenhouse jutted out and away from the house, bursting with herbs and plants.

  A small TV on the kitchen counter was tuned to CNN and Allison could see the images from Glenwood Springs and what appeared to be a well-seasoned, well-travelled male reporter recapping the news. The sound was low but from the occasional word she picked up there didn’t appear to be any fresh developments.

  “Candidate’s Condition Stable” said the banner at the bottom of the screen.

  In Trudy’s organic food, plant, herb, and cat emporium, the television stood out like an electronic pimple, but Allison knew Trudy liked to stay up on all the news. She was a reliable source of information on pending issues from Denver to Washington. Trudy’s updates about the world gave Allison a fleeting sense that she didn’t live completely in a black hole.

  “Kerry London,” said Trudy.

  “What?” said Allison.

  “You’re staring at him,” said Trudy.

  There was something oddly familiar about the reporter.

  “Strange to see Glenwood Springs on national news.”

  “And Kerry London too,” said Trudy. “He goes everywhere and now he’s right here. He’s sort of the master of disaster—earthquakes, hurricanes, and, you know, chaos. He always seems calm. Worried, but calm.”

  “And familiar,” said Allison. “But back to you. I can’t imagine you do anything but operate by the book.”

  “If you’re in trouble,” said Colin, “every business in Garfield and Rio Blanco counties needs to be checked. There are Mexicans everywhere, and most of them do the work Americans don’t want to touch.”

  “Maybe,” said Trudy. “But he scared me, made me feel bad.”

  “Hell, he’s the one who is probably scared,” said Colin. “The cops I’ve known don’t mind blaming others.”

  Colin had taken out his atlatl, a foot-long beauty he had been refining all summer. He was making a grip with leather shoelaces, wrapping the leather tightly. The shaft of the weapon glowed with a golden sheen from the steady polishing and sanding. The notch was perfect. Colin could whip an arrow at such speed that she couldn’t follow its flight. He had fashioned three perfect oak arrows with duck feathers for stability. The points were honed to an exquisite sharpness, like X-Acto blades. She liked watching Colin bear down on a problem, refuse to give up, and make the step-by-step improvements until everything was just-so. In other words, perfect.

  “I’ve got to re-check the whole staff,” said Trudy. “Maybe it’s a good thing. For my own reassurance.”

  “You’re going to let someone go?” said Colin. “Just because their paperwork isn’t all together? If you do, they’ll find work somewhere else is all, somewhere right down the street, most likely.”

  “I keep having images of a raid of some sort, like that nasty raid at that meat packing plant a few years back, the one that was in the news for weeks,” said Trudy. “They had all the buses waiting, went in and snatched workers right off the line, shipped ’em off.”

  “That was in Greeley,” said Allison. “Kind of an ironic location. I guess the Utopian vision isn’t working out.”

  “It’s not like it’s okay to be here if you’re not legit,” said Colin.

  Colin put his atlatl aside, mopped up a bit of egg yolk with a last bite of scone. Trudy looked lost in thought. CNN switched to a volcano erupting in Chile, hundreds dead in the resulting mudslide that buried a rural village.

  Allison itched to get going. She had lost a day of scouting and prep work. There were tents to clean, camp gear to sort out, authorities to escort to half-corpses.

  Some thought chewed in her guts, but it remained safe and secure in that part of the so-called brain where good ideas turned to mush. Whatever the notion, it may as well have been written in the most impenetrable code ever devised by the CIA and buried in an ironclad vault with no doors a thousand feet down on the dark side of the moon. Allison had tried concentrating on it. She had tried ignoring it. Why they hadn’t yet invented some sort of implant to record every thought—some device you could rewind in case you missed something—was another indication of a world gone lazy. Whatever the idea, it had to do with confirming her point of view about the half-corpse: no mountain lion was involved in his demise.

  Allison’s cell phone chirped. She didn’t recognize the number.

  “Allison Coil?”

  The voice was male, young and chipper.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Brad Marker, Garfield County Sheriff.”

  She glanced at the wall clock over Trudy’s sink. One minute before 7:00 a.m. Five stars for promptness.

  They discussed meet-up times, horses, pack mules. Marker’s team would be six all together, including the county coroner and a wildlife officer from Colorado Parks and Wildlife, who would also bring a houndsman and his three best Treeing Walkers. Allison would charge the standard daily fee for the horses and, with a thumbs-up from Trudy, provide lunch for the whole crew. They’d put that on the bill. Marker had some experience riding. He was just leaving New Castle, where he lived. They had two hours to get ready.

  Allison checked her watch. By the time they got back to the half-corpse, it would have been exposed to the elements for an additional twenty-four hours.

  “Now what?” said Trudy. “What happened?”

  Allison gave Trudy the highlights. Trudy was rapt, uttering only an “oh my” at a couple of appropriate moments.

  “So where are the rest of the legs?” she asked.

  “Probably a pile of shit in the woods by now,” said Colin, always cutting to the chase.

  “If it was a cat,” said Allison.

  “It’s still a possibility,” said Colin. “If he was slight and not too tall, a mountain lion—a hungry mountain lion—might have taken the chance.”

  “Not exactly the kind of reassuring story you want to see out there right before all your hunters start arriving, is it?” said Trudy.

  “It won’t take them long to clear the mountain lion scenario,” said Allison. “And they’ll figure out the name and if he was alone in the woods.”

  “He must have been alone,” said Colin. “Nobody has reported anything.”

  “Haven’t heard anything,” said Trudy. “Maybe it’s not news until it’s been a couple days. Unless it’s a child that’s wandered off. “

  “Think for sure it was not a child,” said Allison.

  “Thanks for that,” said Trudy.

  “And I still don’t get what makes you so sure about what it’s not,” said Colin.

  The look from Colin suggested she dial up a dose of humility. Colin, no doubt drawing on the experience of his extended family of outdoorsmen, had more experience in the woods. Maybe she didn’t want to think about a mountain lion around her camps—a lion with a taste for human would complicate matters considerably. By day’s end, they’d have a better idea. Maybe she should back down.

  “Just going on everything I feel,” she said. On the other hand, maybe she should stick with her guns. “And what I saw.”

  “You’re guessing,” said Colin. “Not like you.”

  “No squabbling,” said Trudy. “I won’t have it.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a guess,” said Allison.

  “Well, you’re jumping ahead.”

  “You’ll see,” said Allison. “Wait. Observe. Discover.”

  Of course it was absurd that the former city girl was attempting to school Daniel Boone Jr. His faint, fake smile said he knew it.

  “You can show the cops all the ways you’re right, but it sounds like I’m staying here today,” said Colin. “I see that worr
ied look in your eye.”

  “All the prep for the hunters coming in,” said Allison. “You know.”

  “We went over the list three times yesterday,” said Colin. “Think I got it. Clean, fold, straighten, organize, clean, count, sort, and clean some more. And feed the horses.”

  “And don’t forget to clean,” said Allison. “Sharpest outfit in the West, that’s what we want.”

  Trudy stood. “I suppose I’ve gotta get down to Glenwood and go through my records. Make sure the paperwork for my crew is copacetic.”

  If everyone was as respectful of the law as Trudy, there would be little need for policemen, prosecutors, judges, or tax auditors. Trudy was a speed-limit queen. She did well with boundaries.

  At the rate Trudy’s business had bloomed, the center of gravity in the culture might be shifting. You didn’t just buy Trudy’s products, you bought into a culture of eating well, of doing things the right way. A bottle of anything from Down to Earth in your grocery cart was a signal to yourself and the world that you understood that eating well was an active choice and that it went hand in hand with the idea of community togetherness. Like Birkenstock sandals or Tom’s of Maine toothpaste, the product shined a light on the user as a thoughtful citizen of the planet.

  “I know you’ll square things up right with your business, even if there is a problem,” said Allison. “And I doubt there is one.”

  “What if I have to let somebody go—just because their paperwork isn’t right?”

  “Cross that bridge when you come to it,” said Allison. “And you’ll do it in the most humane way possible.”

  Trudy looked quiet. She’d gone deep inside herself, still reeling. “I want to go back a day,” she said. “And start over.”

  seven:

  monday, mid-day

  Allison squatted in sandy rocks and bunchgrass at the top of the ridge near the half-corpse. The summer sun warmed her cheeks. Behind her up the slope and under the cover of the woods, three Garfield County Sheriff officers and the county coroner busied themselves with measurements, photographs and a careful examination of the body.

  She slowed her breathing, played statue. She watched the tops of a fireweed flutter under the spell of a gentle breeze. She quieted her mind. At least, she tried. She wanted the cops to be done, wanted the body picked up and packed up—she wanted their conclusions oh, about an hour ago.

  She stopped naming the individual plants and flowers. She let them be as the living things that they were before human beings came around and tried to order and organize the world. King Philip crossed over France going south. Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Her father had taught her the first mnemonic. She preferred the ones her high school girlfriends giggled about, King Philip came over for good sex.

  No order to anything. See. Feel. Sense. Absorb.

  She moved five slow steps north, squatted again. Her working theory was rickety but as good as any other. If it was an animal attack, the only two truly eligible critters were bear or mountain lion. If it was one or the other, her theory went, the closest stand of woods were their likely cover. Allison planned to follow an arc that should have intersected where the animal would have raced out of the woods and where the attack would have happened. She hoped to come across some feline or ursine track or, better yet, some indication that she needed another line of thinking.

  She faced the open valley. Lumberjack Camp plopped in the middle of the otherwise treeless bowl like a pin cushion at the bottom of the town water tank.

  Allison scanned the ground again, overlapping each view in the grid. Marmot tracks? She’d seen plenty. These were about seven inches apart, a right and a left. A V-shaped print with four elongated toes. The fifth vestigial lined up like a forgotten finger.

  Allison moved again, squatted. What she wanted to see was a paw print or scat from something feline. Uncovered scat would be the real prize, suggesting the cat was comfortable, moving and working on its own turf.

  Five more steps, another squat, another moment, another chance to ice-down the percolating brain and live in the moment, to expand her thoughts and senses so she could pick up what was happening for hundreds of yards—or a mile or ten—around. A deer could do it, why couldn’t she? An elk could do it, why couldn’t she? Coyote radar had a hundred times her sensitivity, why couldn’t she channel that power, if only for a minute?

  A daisy. A sunflower. More fireweed. A scattering of lupine.

  The lack of evidence matched the lack of a credible scenario. If it was a mountain lion, which the stick and brush-covering business suggested, then the attack, if confirmed, would send a shudder deep down in the bones of every hiker, camper, or outdoorsman in Colorado. In fact, she should be quaking in her Ropers, the new black pair she’d been breaking in for the season and which, in fact, looked as good as they felt. The same ones that would now leave a nifty track for some other mammal or insect tracker to decipher. But she wasn’t afraid. No quaking. The only mammals in the Flat Tops that gave her pause were the ones that came up this way with rifles, alcohol, and a mad desire to channel their inner Teddy Roosevelt.

  Five more steps. Here, some vole scat but no vole tracks, the soil too firm to collect an impression. Or maybe you’d need to be another vole to notice.

  Three more squats, three more mini-vistas of wildflowers, scrub, and rock in their wonderfully random arrangements. If the attacking beast hadn’t come from the woods, he or she had to have come running across a half-mile or more of open expanse, as unlikely as a Colorado aspen grove suddenly becoming the home for a troop of howler monkeys. This wasn’t the Serengeti, where predator and prey interacted in big bloody widescreen Technicolor smack in front of every Range Rover full of safari-esque tourists, this was the goddamn Flat Tops where beast-on-beast takedowns, when they happened, took place off-screen like a movie script carefully crafted to earn no more than a PG-13 rating. Humans were common here and many carried rifles or bows. Thus the term heavy hunter pressure. All the big mammals in the Flat Tops faced the consequences of hunting season and all the big mammals, as a result, were champions of avoiding human contact except during the rut, of course, when sexual urges overrode every other instinct and a 700-pound elk could be manipulated like a horny virgin.

  Allison climbed back up to the top of the ridge. The trio of deputies lifted the half-corpse onto a sheet of plastic. It was wrapped with care, placed in a body bag and then into an oversized saddle bag on Eli, her old reliable mule.

  The threesome pulled their masks over their heads in unison. They packed up trowels, knives, scissors, forceps, evidence bags, glass vials, measuring tape.

  “You have an inquisitive look on your face.”

  The speaker was the most talkative of the bunch, lead deputy Brad Marker. Allison had fallen into easy conversation with him on the ride up. Marker had been a deputy for eleven years but had transferred from New Mexico two years ago.

  “I’m that obvious?” said Allison.

  “Don’t think we have anything conclusive,” said Marker. “Tom?”

  Garfield County deputy coroner Tom Potts couldn’t have been a day over thirty. He wore mirrored Aviator sunglasses and a plain baseball cap. Besides being truly circumspect and inscrutable all morning, he had complained about his back on the ride up and issued leave-me-alone vibes from the first moment. Not much about him said sports or outdoors. Allison stood a couple of strides uphill so they were eye to eye.

  “Going to be a simple case of undetermined causes until we send the parts out,” said Potts. “There’s a wildlife forensics lab up in Wyoming that handles all these cases.”

  “Mountain lion?” said Allison.

  “Can’t rule it out,” said Potts. “We’ve got all the sticks and stuff that was moved around to cover him up—might be animal hair that shows up in there somewhere, or on the body itself. And maybe the DNA analysis. We have a long way
to go.”

  “Was there anything on the body—an ID? Did he have a wallet—anything?” said Allison.

  “What was left of his pockets were empty,” said Potts. “He wasn’t carrying much or wearing much.”

  “What did you find?” said Marker, almost as if he was trying to spare Potts.

  “Lots of wildflowers and some marmot tracks,” said Allison. “So, mountain lion?”

  “I’d like to see the legs,” said Marker.

  “Doubt that’s going to happen,” said Allison. “See any bite marks?”

  “He’s going to need cleaning up,” said Marker. “I can’t tell the difference between the original attacker and post-mortem eaters. No major puncture wounds on the back of his neck, though, and that’s where mountain lions like to attack, no?”

  Marker’s stiff-jawed inconclusiveness didn’t help. Allison wanted closure and certainty or new theories to stir into the mix.

  “But can you picture a mountain lion?” said Allison.

  “More than a bear,” said Marker. “We’ll have to see if the dogs pick up on anything.”

  With the half-corpse moved, the houndsman made his way up the slope with his two best dogs, who strained at their leashes. The houndsman had a reputation as one of the best mountain lion trackers on the Western Slope. His name was Sal Hickman. His black Stetson was well-worn. His tired face and the ungainly white whiskers on his neck suggested he was at least sixty. He walked with an awkward gait, as if one knee wouldn’t bend right. His brass belt buckle featured a relief of a mountain lion leaping, teeth bared.