Track Of The Cat

by Nevada Barr

  As she hit the open stretch, Karl was less than fifty yards in front of her. Anna dropped down behind a rock and followed him with her ears. When she could no longer hear his grinding steps she peeked out. His wiry orange hair was just disappearing over the hogback and down a gentle slope.

  He would be approaching the boundary fence. The forest began again there, thicker and denser in the moist hollow between the ridges of the two canyons.

  Anna trotted slowly down the trail, aware that if Karl stopped to pee or take a drink or look at the view, she could come upon him more suddenly than she intended. She had a lie ready for such an event but she hoped not to have to use it. If Karl was the killer he probably wouldn't buy it. If he wasn't, she probably wouldn't need it.

  Slowing, she came over the rise. Below her was the barbed wire fence and the rusting revolving gate. Beyond she could see about a mile of trail winding up a steep slope in the Lincoln. To the left North McKittrick Canyon dropped off in a sheer stone cliff. To the right, beyond the gate, the forest crowded up to the trail.

  Karl was gone.

  It crossed Anna's mind that he'd seen her, was waiting behind rock or tree and would reach out one great hairy arm like the ogre he so resembled. She stopped a moment, reassured herself he'd not seen her, and ran on. If he'd gone off trail anywhere before the fence she'd most likely be able to see him still. A hundred or so feet of scrub lay between the trail and the more heavily wooded area.

  At the revolving gate she slowed to a creep, her eyes on the ground. The trail was bone dry and packed hard. A bad surface for tracking. It was also seldom used and Karl was a heavy man. A toe print, the familiar star and waffle horseshoe pattern of NPS boots, was imprinted in the dust. Four feet or so away, a scuffed mark: whitish sand and stone scraped away exposing the darker soil beneath. Anna measured off another yard and a third and looked. In the normal course of events, a foot must have fallen there.

  If there was a sign of Karl's passing, she could not find it. Another four feet were marked off. Nothing. She went back to where she'd found the scuff and studied the side of the trail. A line, very faint, probably an animal track, led off into the trees. Several feet down it a pinecone had been crushed absolutely flat. Not clipped or partially broken as by a hoof, but flattened entirely.

  Anna ran down the faint track. Indians, she'd read time and again, had run through the forest silently. Not the Lincoln, she decided. Careful as she was, her soft-soled sneakers made a distinct rustling in the dry grass and needles. Even the tiniest of snakes would be heard slithering through this high desert woodland.

  Red, a fragment no bigger than a songbird, flickered ahead. Karl was in front of her. She could see his right shoulder and arm through the trees and underbrush. He stopped. A long second later Anna's command to her feet took effect and she, too, was still.

  Karl's arm made no move. He didn't pull off his pack or reach for his water bottle. He hadn't stopped for a rest or a drink.

  Karl was listening.

  Anna was afraid to breathe and afraid to hold her breath. She'd run so far she knew if she tried, her lungs would rebel and she'd gasp aloud. The pounding of her heart, resounding through the woods like a jungle drum, seemed enough to give her away.

  The shoulder moved. Karl was turning. If she could see a scrap of red, what would he see? Blessing her foresight in wearing olive trousers and a khaki shirt, she slowly put her hands behind her, lowered her head till her face was pointing toward the ground, and willed herself utterly still. Her heartbeat slowed, she felt or imagined her energy slowing. Playing a mind-game with herself, Anna rooted, became as a tree.

  Rustling, the crack of a twig: Karl was moving on. If he had seen her, he had chosen to lead her deeper into the woods.

  Anna gambled he had not. Placing each foot with care, she followed. Trailing through the forest was easier than on the trail in the sense that she had ample cover. But walking quietly was proving difficult. Matching him step for step, she hoped the sound of his own passage would mask hers.

  The animal track faded out. Karl walked on like a man sure of his way. Down a dry ravine, the narrow bottom littered with stones, Anna followed. It emptied out into a slightly wider drainage. Downstream it would end in a fall down into Big Canyon. Karl turned upstream.

  Trees had been scoured out by boulders rolled on summer floods. Rocks twenty feet high and that many across were jumbled together forming caves and hallways. From boulder to boulder Anna crept, trusting more to the fact that there wasn't any direction to go but up the creekbed than to sight or sound in keeping on Karl's trail. To have kept him in view would've been impossible without the risk of being seen.

  Sun reflected off rock and the heat in the airless confines of the wash became intense. Having soaked her handkerchief in water, Anna tied it around her head. It was one-fifteen. She had been following Karl for over two hours. Never once had he let up on the pace he had set down on the groomed trail leading across the canyon from the McKittrick Visitors Center. Anna breathed deeply, filling her lungs to aching. There would be time to rest when Karl did. If he did.

  The perfect murder, she thought. He will keep going till I drop dead from exhaustion.

  Karl had been nowhere in sight for nearly twenty minutes when Anna came to the end of the ravine. The drainage was a small box canyon, its head a hallway of stone ending in a rock wall fifty feet high. Karl was not there.

  The ogre theory seemed more and more plausible and images of hidden doors, caves under spells of invisibility, stones that rotated to reveal underground passages flickered through Anna's head. She sat down in the shade of a courageous little pine tree that clung to a crevice and took a pull at her canteen.

  The ravine rose steeply on three sides. No trail, not even places to scramble up, presented themselves. All was sheer stone wall or crumbling rock embedded with catclaw and lechugilla. The dead end of the box was scarcely five feet wide and in deep shadow. Wary of falling stones and tiger traps, Anna made her way into the slot.

  No magic doors. No invisible caves. A prosaic solution in use since the Anasazi had built cliff dwellings: hand and toe holds had been chipped into the rock. From the distance they were apart, Anna guessed Karl had made them to fit his own long reach. She had to stretch precariously to reach from one to another. Twenty feet up she remembered reading that the Anasazi had often planned their stone "ladders" so an enemy, starting out on the wrong foot, would find himself halfway up without a grip, unable to ascend or descend.

  She hoped Karl hadn't read that far.

  The muscles in her arms and legs were quivering by the time she pulled herself over the top. There wasn't any way she could do it safely or discreetly but merely hauled herself over the lip of stone and sprawled gasping on a natural landing fifteen or twenty feet wide.

  Her shoulder throbbed. Cracks took nearly as long to heal as breaks. Climbing fifty feet probably wasn't included under the prescription of "taking it easy." Breath and caution recovered, she sat up.

  The climb had landed her at the mouth of a small hanging valley not more than half a mile deep and about that wide. Met by an unyielding horseshoe-shaped escarpment of hard stone, the rains had carved, instead of the usual steep-sided ravine, a shallow flat-bottomed canyon. Soil, washed down the many tiny runoffs from the high country, had filled the little valley with rich fertile earth.

  Hidden from above by steep tree-covered slopes and from below by the ragged ravine-cut land dropping into Big Canyon, the valley had a mysterious quality. Like all magical lands, it was protected by a cloak of invisibility.

  Anna got to her feet and walked quietly across the stone landing and stepped into the trees. Delicate music reached her and she paused mid-step. Whistling, faint and clear: "Never Never Land." Karl was in the valley. Anna hadn't doubted that; the whistling reassured her that he believed himself alone. Unless she had severely underestimated him and it was part of a well-laid trap.

  A path formed beneath her feet. More than just a narrow
animal track, this trail had been trod by heavy boots many times. She guessed Karl approached his little kingdom from a number of different routes to avoid leaving a trail others might be tempted to follow. Here he felt safe enough to take the easiest way.

  Karl's whistle kept him placed in Anna's ear as she moved quickly up the trail. With the sweet scent of pine, the towering walls, soft dirt instead of unforgiving stone underfoot, it was hard to retain the adrenaline level that had given her strength on the forced march Karl had led.

  A tearing sound in the trees to her left brought her back to nervous reality. Two does tore placidly at the dry grass less than fifteen feet from the trail. Both looked at her with mild interest then went back to their lunch. One of them had an eight-inch scar on the left side of her neck. The other was missing her right rear hoof. The leg ended just below the ankle. Both showed a complete lack of fear.

  Curiouser and curiouser, Anna thought.

  The whistling stopped and she proceeded with more caution. Twenty feet beyond the grazing animals, she came to a small clearing. What looked at first glance to be a child's fort was built against a venerable old ponderosa growing between two boulders.

  The shack was at most eight feet square and not quite that high. Walls and roof were made of sticks and small branches held together with nails, twine, and baling wire. Tar paper served as weather-proofing. A blackened length of stovepipe held up by wire affixed to the pine tree poked up from the roof. A faded horse blanket curtained off the doorway.

  Keeping to the cover of the trees, Anna skirted the clearing till she stood under the pine next to the stick and paper hut. There she listened until she could hear the blood rushing in her ears. Nothing moved within. From up the valley came again the notes of a whistled song.

  She slipped around the cabin and pulled the horse blanket aside. The room was uninhabited. Stepping inside she then steadied the blanket lest its movement give her away.

  After the glare of the afternoon it took her eyes a minute to adjust to the gloom. Light trickled in from gaps around the stovepipe and tears in the tar paper. Karl's red backpack lay on the earthen floor as if he'd thought better of leaning its considerable weight against the walls. A stove, fashioned from half of a fifty-gallon drum, took up most of one wall. Evidently unused in summer, the stove was all but hidden by eight five-gallon plastic cubitainers the park used to haul and store water. Six were full. There were no shelves. Rude benches crafted of stones and branches lined two of the walls. Both were littered with bottles and cans, boxes and tools.

  A short search disclosed several lengths of rope, some chain, two scalpels, surgical tape, syringes, needles, a bottle of chloroform, cotton wool, a ten-pound bag of Purina Dog Chow, and a bottle of ketimine partially empty.

  Sunlight flashed as the blanket covering the door was jerked aside.

  19

  NAILS cried from the wood and the blanket was torn free of the tacks holding it in place. Karl and Anna screamed at the same time. Standing in the sun, the horse blanket trailing from one great fist, a shovel held like a toy in the other, he looked the giant he was. Anna felt like a small furry animal cornered in its den.

  "Anna!" he said, and for an instant she thought he looked pleased to see her. The moment passed. His heavy features settled into stony disapproval. "You can't be telling about this," he said deliberately, seeming to use his words to carve out his thoughts. "You can't be telling." The blanket fell to the ground and Anna saw his left hand tense up on the shovel's handle.

  Feeling oddly melodramatic, she pulled her revolver and leveled it at him. It was the first time she had ever drawn it outside a firing range. The sensation of pointing it at another living creature was disquieting. As was the sudden knowledge that she would not hesitate to use it.

  Karl raised the shovel an inch or two. Though his eyes were locked on hers, Anna found his face as unreadable as she always had.

  "Put the shovel down, Karl," she said gently. "Just let it fall there beside you."

  "You can't be telling," he said stubbornly and his thick fingers rippled on the wooden handle as if he assured himself of his grip.

  Shifting her weight, Anna eased back from the square of sunlight shining in through the doorway. In the shadows her movements, her plans would be less easily read. "Let it go, Karl. It'll be easy. Nobody will be hurt."

  To her surprise, tears, big and bright as crystals, rolled down either side of his bulbous nose. "Everybody depends on me," he said.

  The sense of unreality she had felt since entering the valley deepened. "Who depends on you?"

  He waved the shovel vaguely and every muscle in Anna's body quivered. She was strung tight. Consciously, she relaxed, letting the air pull deeper into her lungs. "Everybody," Karl said again.

  "Karl," Anna said, careful to keep her voice even, non-threatening. "I want you to do something for me. I want you to set down your shovel. You holding it like that is frightening me. You're kind of a scary man with that shovel. After I stop being scared for a while, maybe I can put away this gun and we can talk better. Will you do that for me? Will you put down that shovel?"

  Karl put the shovel down. His big shoulders sagged. It was almost as if he were shrinking before her eyes. She lowered the pistol but kept it ready at her side.

  "Will you show me who everybody is?" A fleeting image out of the horror movies she'd seen as a teenager sickened her: bodies strung up with baling wire and twine presided over by a psychotic killer.

  Without protest, Karl turned and walked toward the trees up the valley from the hut. Keeping a good fifteen feet between them, her side arm still unholstered, Anna followed.

  Things were clarified in Anna's eye to the point of appearing almost surreal. Each movement of Karl's shoulders, every shift of his weight as he plodded heavily along in front of her was noted, judged, rated non-aggressive and dismissed. All in a second, in a footfall. The world surrounding that thick back and shoulders receded from vision. Consequently it took her a moment to refocus when he stopped.

  To his left was a natural overhang in the stone that formed the narrow valley's walls. A grotto fifteen or twenty feet deep and fifty feet long had been formed over the centuries as the tiny seeps in the stone had melted away the soft lime. At its mouth the grotto was half again as tall as Karl. Within this shelter were several cages made from sticks and wire and a pen about ten feet square.

  "Everybody," Karl said. From the warmth and pride in his voice, one might've thought he was introducing his family. Edging closer, Anna peered into the thick shadow under the overhang. The pen held a mule deer-a fawn still in spots. White bandages, wrapped as carefully as if a trained nurse had done the binding, striped its forelegs. When it saw Karl it trotted over to the fence, thrusting its rubbery little nose through the sticks. "I was getting her some lunch," Karl said accusingly. "The little guys get so hungry."

  Anna looked beyond, to the cages. The rust-colored back of a ring-tail cat showed against the chicken wire of one. The cage beyond began to rattle.

  "Looky," Karl said, his eyes glowing. He had apparently forgotten the gun. Anna slipped it back into its holster and, snapping the keeper in place, followed him down the mouth of the grotto. The little fawn kept pace as long as it could then reared up like a dog, putting its tiny hooves against the fence.

  Karl knelt. The rough slow voice was as gentle as a nursemaid's. "Are my girls bored?" he asked. As he reached to lift the door of the cage, a tawny paw met his brown one and he laughed. For the moment Anna had been forgotten. The door slid open and out bounded a fat cougar kitten with enormous paws. It stopped at the sight of Anna, its hind quarters piling up on its front quarters, landing it on its nose.

  "It's okay," Karl said, folding the twenty-five-pound kitten into his arms. Held in his massive grip, it looked no bigger than a house cat.

  "That's my shy baby," Karl said fondly and Anna followed his look back to the cage. A single round ear and dark blue eye peeked around the door.

  "Th
e orphaned kittens. You found them," Anna said. She dropped to her knees and held her hands out palm-up like a supplicant. The baby cougar crept out, smelled her hands, then batted at one experimentally.

  "They're hungry girls," Karl said in the same doting voice. Without having to be told, Anna picked up the second kitten and followed Karl back to the hut. He filled two baby bottles with powdered milk using water from the cubitainers.

  Outside, in the shade of the spreading pine branches, their backs against a boulder, he and Anna bottle-fed the little lions.

  Anna was transfixed. Karl's valley was indeed a magical place. "Was that you I heard whistling the day I rode Gideon up after their mother was shot?" she asked.

  Karl nodded. He kissed the nursing kitten between its ears.

  "Were you whistling Tender Shepherd'?"

  "I knew it was you'd come for the babies. I wanted to tell you they were okay. But you couldn't know." He looked around his valley.

  "No," Anna said. Karl's hospital was most illegally built and operated on Forest Service land. And the official park policy was to let injured animals fend for themselves or, if seen to be suffering, or if dangerous or offensive to visitors, to be dispatched. "Let nature take its course," Anna quoted.

  "I'm nature, too," Karl replied. "This is my course."

  Anna didn't argue. "The ketimine is for the animals?"

  "Sometimes I have to put them out for a while so I can help them."

  "How do you get them up here? This valley is like a fortress."

  "I carry them," Karl said simply.

  Anna was reminded of Father Flannigan's boys: "He ain't heavy, he's my brother."

  "I can carry as much as three hundred pounds sometimes."

  Anna believed him. He'd carried, on his back, everything the animals needed. And he'd carried them. "The deer?" Anna asked. "I saw them as I came in."

  "Chris and Al. They got to stay here always now," he answered sadly. "Chris is lame and the littler one is blind. Outside, the cats and coyotes would get them. Maybe they'll come here and eat them but maybe not."