Track Of The Cat

by Nevada Barr

  "Howdy, Craig," she echoed. She wanted to be friendly, easy with him, but she knew too many things she had no right to know. Things that made her look past the smile and the dimple; made her look for the insanity that Roberts assured her lurked behind what they'd all accepted as yet one more form of the desert lunacy that made the Southwest a place of heroes, tall tales and strange truths.

  "Backcountry patrol," he informed her of her mission, then tapped the zipper pocket of his daypack where the rubber antennae of an NPS Motorola protruded. "I heard."

  "Carrying a radio on your day off. I'm impressed." Anna shrugged out of her pack and squatted in the trail, her butt on her heels. She'd learned to balance flat-footed like that for hours. A cheap seat, better than the bleachers, a visitor from Cairo with whom she'd hiked briefly had assured her. "On my days off I hide out," she said, making conversation.

  "No," Craig contradicted her. "I've heard you going with Paul on ambulance runs. Do you like saving people?"

  The question was almost a challenge. The dimple flashed but Anna had been reminded that Craig had an edge. How sharp that edge was she had yet to find out. Because the question interested her, she gave it serious consideration before answering. "I like being good at it," she said carefully. "I don't feel much one way or another about the people. Maybe because it's easier that way."

  "Maybe because you don't care?" Craig asked shrewdly.

  Anna just smiled. "What's this I hear about UFOs on the West Side?" she asked, hoping to lighten the conversation.

  Momentarily, he looked confused, then his face clouded. "Harland?"

  Anna didn't reply.

  "I'm real sick of his bullshit," Craig fumed. "I saw something and everybody makes this big joke. I saw green lights, moving low, and heard these thumping sounds, like footsteps. I was a mile or so away, I couldn't see clear. They'll be back. So will I. With a camera. Harland's a bastard."

  His anger had effectively silenced Anna. For a while she stared down the mountain to the straight-sided stones of Devil's Hallway, trying to think of a graceful way to escape.

  "Paul told me about you and the lion hunt," Craig said abruptly, clearly wanting to change the subject as much as she did. "Corinne's pissed. You're not playing the game, Anna."

  Again he smiled. He gave them out like earned sweets. Despite what Anna had once called her "better judgment," she was charmed.

  "You won't climb the NPS ladder that way." The smile winked out, the choirboy, the elf vanished. In their place was a young man wound a little too tight, eyes glittering too brightly, muscles strung too taut. As he spoke, the slight ducking of the head, the defensive twitch of the shoulder that Anna always thought of when she pictured him returned.

  "Don't climb, Anna," he said. "They're hypocrites: Corinne, that damn Christina, Roberts, Karl with his good-old-boy act. Especially Corinne. She'd pave the whole park if she thought it'd get her the nod from the Regional Office. She's using Guadalupe to get a superintendency somewhere. She'd kill every cougar in Texas for a line on her resume."

  Though it wasn't entirely unexpected, his outburst startled Anna. Rocking back on her heels, she watched the working of his facial muscles. "Institutionalized for paranoid delusions," flashed though her mind.

  Probing, experimenting with the effect of words, of ideas, on Craig's volatile emotions, Anna said: "The Park Service has its share of losers, no doubt about that. It makes the loss of Sheila Drury the more tragic. She was a first-class ranger. The Park Service needs more like her."

  Her eyes fixed on him unwaveringly. For an instant she thought she'd gone fishing in a dead lake. Then the calm masking his features began rippling like the surface of a pond when, deep in the waters, creatures are struggling.

  Finally the underwater beast broke free and it was Rage. "Drury was a whore!" Eastern spat the words out as if each was formed new, hot, bitter for Drury's condemnation. "She'd've carved up Dog Canyon, turned it into a Safeway parking lot just to advertise herself. She didn't care about this place. She never hiked or camped. If she couldn't ride her horse in, forget it. She was on her way up. She was a whore. To her everything was sexual. She used it. She was one of Corinne's 'little girls'-"

  Craig seemed to notice then that Anna, more than merely listening, was studying him as an entomologist might study an exotic insect. Abruptly, he ceased speaking. In a quick, scrabbling motion, he scooped his book into his daypack and stood up.

  Anna stayed in her squat, aware that on the steep-sided trail she was safer with her center of gravity close to the ground.

  Craig squeezed his bulky shoulders into the pack's straps. "They'll sell out the park," he said, his voice subdued, sad. "Like they sold out Big Bend, Big Thicket. It's just a matter of time. There's not many places left to run to. They're selling out the world."

  With that, he shambled past and around the bend out of sight. For long moments Anna remained where she was.

  What stayed with her was the sadness and the elfin smile.

  "The high country," she said aloud. Rising, she shouldered her pack and, celebrating each step that she put between herself and the seemingly all-pervasive psychosis of humanity, began to climb.

  11

  IN the pines, pygmy nuthatches and mule deer for companions, the breezes blew away thought and Anna achieved the peace she'd come to depend on the wilderness for. In place of doubt and suspicion came yellow butterflies feeding incongruously at fox dung. Unselfconscious as a bird, she whistled, lending human notes to the sweet cacophony of the woods.

  Perhaps planted there by Karl Johnson, maybe in her mind since childhood, Anna found tongue and lips forming the music from the score of Peter Pan. Haunted by the nursery melody, again and again she whistled the notes, the words floating through her mind as she walked the trails. "Tender shepherd, tender shepherd, let me help you count your sheep. One in the meadow, two in the garden, three in the nursery fast asleep." The song tickled some memory. Far from being nagged by it, Anna enjoyed a sense of elusive comfort.

  On the third day the comfort was remembered.

  The melody she had heard-or imagined she had-in Big Canyon when she was searching for the orphaned lion cubs, was the first four notes of "Tender Shepherd." If she didn't think but only felt, she could almost believe a kindly cosmic shepherd looked after the lost kittens.

  On the third day, happier than she'd been for a while, she radioed in her itinerary and began the sixteen-mile hike out. She'd chosen the long way: across the Bowl on the Tejas then south on the McKittrick Ridge Trail.

  McKittrick Ridge was a favorite walk of hers. The rugged trail wound for miles above the south fork of McKittrick Canyon. A mile to the north, hidden behind wooded hills, was Middle McKittrick, where Drury had died. And, once she began the long descent, she would catch glimpses of the white escarpment above North McKittrick, the third prong of the three-tined canyon fork.

  Near four o'clock, she came out of the trees and looked down the three thousand feet into the bottom of McKittrick Canyon. The creek sparkled suddenly silver where it surfaced, left a white stone trail when it vanished underground. Big-tooth maple, ponderosa, gray-leaf oak, Texas madrona, and juniper veiled the canyon floor. Above, where North McKittrick forked off, she could see great ribs of the Permian Reef, pocked with sotol and yucca, pushing into this water-fed paradise. White bones at the oasis.

  "I'm starting down the ridge," Anna radioed Cheryl Light, the ranger on duty in the canyon that day. "I should be at the Visitors Center at about six-thirty. I'll need a ride back to the housing area."

  "Somebody will be there," Light returned.

  "Thanks. Three-one-five clear." For a couple of minutes more Anna enjoyed the view. Then, shouldering her pack, she started down again to the battering badgering world of people.

  The trail carved a descent in rocky switchbacks, dropping through biomes with delightful rapidity. The air grew perceptibly warmer. In places the trail was so steep a crew, now twenty years gone-probably pediatricians and ran
ch hands, mechanics and alcoholics by this time-had blasted steps from the living stone.

  Moist and alive with grasses and succulents, the flank of the mountain protected Anna's right shoulder as she walked downhill. To her left a cliff dropped away for three hundred feet. Madrone and juniper, stunted dwarves of their highland selves, clung courageously to the few small ledges. Another thousand feet of scrub and brush then below that was water: the splendor of the desert.

  Trees grew in the creekbed and up ravines that would pour their floodwaters into McKittrick come the monsoons. By the end of October the maples-rare but for this water-blessed enclave-would turn crimson. The ravines would be as red as if they ran with blood. Then, for two brief weeks, the Guadalupe Mountains would be overrun with Texans starved for fall colors.

  Periwinkle blue sky, sparkling white thunderheads beginning to form, heat and insect buzz, formed a dream around Anna as she walked down the rocky incline, boots sure and flat on the stone.

  Then the stone was gone, sky and cliff face reeling. She had stepped from the trail into nothing. Her left boot had struck sky instead of earth and she was pitching sideways. With a sickening sense of the world gone awry, she fell as if in a nightmare. "Damn," she whispered, her mind not yet grasping the hideous reality.

  For ninety feet or so the cliff was not sheer but sloped steeply away in a limestone slide. From there it dropped two hundred feet to another wooded section. Anna twisted in air, tried to regain the safety of the path but the thirty-five pounds on her back threw her over the edge. She flung her arms out but the pack kept her on her back like an overturned beetle. All she could do was flail.

  The slick nylon on the limestone reduced friction to almost nothing and Anna slid down toward the drop. Pressing hands and heels into the stone, she slowed her skid. Rock tore the flesh from her palms. On some level she was aware of the damage but not the pain.

  Below, over the toes of her boots, she could see a gray horizon. The end of the slope. The end of the world.

  With an effort that tore a scream from her lungs, she shoved out with left leg and arm. Fueled by adrenaline, it seemed as if every muscle in her body contracted and the sudden spasm flipped her over onto her belly. Spread-eagled, the pockmarked limestone ripping her clothes, Anna tried to stop her slide. Her shirt was dragged up, her flesh caught and burned. Screaming now, her fingers were stiff as claws scrabbling at the rock.

  Then the claws caught. A bone or joint snapped in her shoulder and sudden pain almost loosed her fingers but she held on. A ledge, scarcely an inch wide where the limestone had cracked and the weather had heaved a part out ever so slightly, provided purchase for her fingers.

  For a moment, Anna hung there, her bleeding chest and belly pressed against the sun-warmed stone, her torn finger-ends driven against the tiny ledge. Below her she heard the sweet simple call of the canyon wren. She was aware of the sun on the back of her legs and the sheer bliss of simply being still, suspended above death. Gradually she became conscious of the drag of the pack on her shoulders, the searing pain in her left arm socket.

  It was dislocated. Soon, bone pressing against the soft tissue of nerves outside the socket, the arm would grow numb, she would lose control of her fingers, and she would fall.

  Die from a dislocated shoulder, Anna thought and wondered how strangely a mind worked under pressure to think such things.

  Carefully, not knowing how much her belabored grip would bear, she began to feel blindly across the rockface with the toe of her boot. Each small swipe of lug sole over the stone threatened to dislodge her precarious grasp. Her fingers began to uncurl, the strength draining out of them, turning to pain and pooling in her shoulder joint.

  Then her foot found something: a root an inch or two high pushing out of a crack. Enough to hold her without breaking.

  "Hang on, hang on, hang on," Anna chanted silently as she began to look for footing for her right boot. This time the search was not long. A narrow crevice ran vertically down through the stone eight or ten inches to her right. With a short stabbing kick she drove the toe of her boot between the jaws of stone. Slowly, pound by pound, she lowered her weight to her feet. Her right foot slipped then stopped, resting on a natural step within the crack.

  Braced on her feet, Anna pressed herself into the rock and uncurled her fingers. They moved stiffly as if the joints had rusted in their clenched attitudes. Freed, her left arm fell and Anna screamed with the pain. Gripping tightly with her good hand, she prayed she wouldn't overbalance or faint.

  Behind her eyelids red dots danced and she felt again as though she were falling. Squeezing against the rockface, she leaned to the left, letting her arm hang. If the dislocation weren't too severe the limb's own weight might pull it back into the socket. She tried to remember how long her Emergency Medicine instructor said it took, but her mind would not fix on the past.

  With her arm lowered, Anna could see where she was. Above was the trail. Sixty feet below, the mountain dropped away. She could see the bright backs of violet-green swallows swooping high above the canyon floor. The crack she'd wedged her foot into ran from the trail to the drop. Near the top it was only an inch wide, widening as it descended until it was several feet across where it broke on the lip of the cliff.

  Anna heard rather than felt her humerus bone go back into the socket, heard through her skeleton and not her ears. The pain subsided. "Thankyoubabyjesus," she murmured, and for once she wasn't being irreverent.

  Awareness of the one pain was replaced by another. Blood was oozing from the scrapes on her belly and breasts. Fervently she hoped it would dry like glue, stick her fast to the rock. What chance, she wondered, was there to pluck herself from this rocky crucifix without losing her grip and falling?

  Still, she was alive. That one fact made all the difference. Her mind started working again.

  Fifty feet of nylon cord and a good long-bladed knife were in her pack. They made up part of the weight that was trying to drag her from her fragile fingernail grip on life. The cord would be just about behind her neck coiled neatly through the handle of her first-aid kit. The knife was in the kit. A half a dozen feet above and to the right a couple of yards a dwarfed gray-leaf oak had shoved roots deep into the crack in the rock. The tree was only three or four feet tall but if the spring winds and the summer rains had not dislodged it, Anna guessed it would hold her weight. With the knife and the cord she might, with luck, rig a safety line.

  But the knife and cord, four inches behind her right ear, might as well have been at home on the top shelf of the closet. If she released the buckles of the pack it would fall away, down two hundred and forty feet and the kit with it. If she tried to manhandle it, both she and the pack would fall. Soon, she knew, she must cut the pack loose. Her own weight would be more than she could support in the not too distant future.

  Mentally, Anna frisked herself, searching for other tools. All she came up with were lip balm, a watch, and her tiny pocketknife. The knife was less than two inches long, weighed nothing: no good for throwing, wedging, or clawing. If she had an envelope that needed opening it would be just the thing, Anna thought acidly. It occurred to her then that, in a way, that was just what she did have. The muscles of her calves were beginning to tremble. She must do something while she was still able.

  Working her hand into her pocket, risking no movement that would shake her precarious foundations, Anna fished the little knife out and opened it with her teeth. The small blade, kept razor sharp, cut through the nylon of the pack just above the shoulder strap fairly easily. When the slash was half a foot long, Anna pocketed the knife and pushed her hand over her shoulder through the material. The kit was there. She worked it out though the hole and clamped its soft handles in her teeth.

  With infinite care, she pulled both shoulder straps free of their buckles and, holding them so the pack would not roll back and drag her with it, she undid the buckle of her hip belt. The instant it snapped free, she released the shoulder straps and dug her finger
s into the ledge.

  The pack fell back, bumped her legs, slid down the stone, and was gone.

  Anna remained. For the first time she dared to think she was really going to make it. This hope of survival made the prospect of any mistake so terrifying that for a moment she couldn't move, not even to open her eyes.

  From above, the sound of gravel grinding underfoot caught her up with sudden wild relief. "Help, help me," she called around the canvas straps between her teeth. The crunching changed tenor. It wasn't the footfall of a timely savior. The stone-on-stone ringing was caused by a rock the size of a cantaloupe rolling down the slope.

  "Fuck!" Anna yelled and pressed her cheek tightly against the limestone. The rock struck her behind the ear; a fist punching her from conciousness, from life. As the blackness took her she felt her fingers slipping from the ledge, her feet from their pathetic supports. In the millisecond before she lost herself, Anna was aware of a great and futile anger.

  Then that, too, was gone.

  12

  SOMEHOW Anna thought death wouldn't hurt this bad. She'd always pictured the Great Beyond as an unfathomable nothing; like trying to see from the tip of one's finger or smell with one's knees.

  This was pain, the old familiar earthly variety.

  Quite a lot of it.

  For what seemed like a long while, less than quick but more than dead, Anna lived around this ache. Slowly it came to her that she could open her eyes. There was light, gray uniform light, but no shapes or colors. Vague images of a cloud-filled heaven taken from childhood Sunday-school books drifted in her mind; images incomplete and faded.

  But heaven would be cool and it wouldn't hurt.

  A shadow marred the cloudscape and Anna turned her face. Stone grated against her mouth. An ant, small and black and six-legged, crawled across the universe. Anna knew then that she lay facedown on the limestone and that she probably had to die all over again.