Bittersweet

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “I’m friggin’ not believing this,” Derek muttered darkly.

  “I’ll be glad to give you a hand,” Mack offered. “I brought a can of gasoline and a propane torch. If we get started right away, we’ll have the job done by dark. I’ll radio the county dispatcher and let her know what we’re doing and why, in case somebody sees the smoke and calls it in. There’s no burn ban right now, but dry as it is, folks will be keeping a pretty good eye out for wildfires.”

  Doc Masters grunted. “You’re gettin’ some special treatment,” he said to Derek. “There’s no law that says the warden has to help.”

  But Derek didn’t answer. He turned on his heel and headed for the ATV. Mack stared after him, wondering whether he intended to do the burning or not. If he didn’t—

  “Well, I guess everybody’s got to learn somehow, someway,” the vet said philosophically. “Why don’t you take me back to my vehicle and then you can thump on him about that burning.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Mack sighed, wishing that Derek had made things a little easier. “Let’s go.”

  As they reached Mack’s truck, the vet said, in a casual tone, “I heard that you and that biologist woman nabbed yourselves a nice male lion this morning. What’d y’all do with it?”

  “News travels fast,” Mack said, not quite sure what she should say. She opened the door and got in. Better tell him the truth. “We collared the animal and took it up to Karen Wilson’s study area the other side of Boiling Mountain.”

  The vet slung his bag in the back and climbed into the truck. “Some folks’ll be pissed when they hear, but I gotta say I’m glad you didn’t shoot that cat. There’s not near enough of the wild left in this world, and the big predators have their own part in the general scheme of things. Shoot the cats, and the deer go like gangbusters. Too many deer means that they eat off all the vegetation along the streams, and what you get is erosion. Silt in the water kills the fish and other aquatic life, which—” He slammed the truck door. “When the big cats and the wolves and the grizzlies are all gone, we’ll be the only predator left. And we’re pretty sorry predators. We kill for the wrong reasons. Nature culls the weak ones. We kill the best of the best.”

  “You said a true thing there,” Mack agreed, putting the key in the ignition. She added, “At least we’ll learn something from that cat, as long as that collar functions.” She started the truck and swung out to follow Derek’s ATV down the two-track to the ranch house.

  Doc Masters stretched out his legs in the foot well and leaned back. After a moment, he said, “I’ve got something chewing at me.” He pulled his cap brim down over his nose. “I’ve been pondering what to do about it. Wondering if maybe you’d have a thought or two on the subject.”

  Mack wondered if this was another of Doc Masters’ tests, or an indication that she had already passed muster. “What’s up?”

  He chewed on his lower lip. “Well, I’m not just a hundred percent sure. I know it’s bothering me, is all.” He turned toward Mack, studying her under the brim of his cap. “You seem pretty well trained and reasonably observant, for a warden. You been out to Three Gates yet?”

  Trained and observant. Pleased, Mack thought this was probably the best compliment she was going to get out of the old vet.

  “The assistant foreman gave me the grand tour a month or so ago,” she said. “Quite an impressive setup. I’m not an admirer of deer farming operations, but it looks like the owners have pumped a ton of money into the place—and they’ve had some advice from the pros.” She backed the truck around and began to follow Derek’s ATV back to the ranch house. “The barn is definitely state-of-the-art. I understand that Dr. Boise designed it.”

  The Three Gates deer-handling barn was surrounded on three sides by a system of high-fenced containment pens, where the deer were kept from birth until their release onto the ranch. The two-story barn contained several handling rooms; a cradle designed like a cattle chute to immobilize the deer for various procedures; and a laboratory with all the latest technology for semen collection and storage, artificial insemination, and disease diagnosis and treatment. It even had an observation room on the second floor, where potential buyers could watch the breeder bucks and does in their pens. After she got back to her computer, Mack had done a Google search for Dr. Arthur Boise, who turned out to have outstanding credentials as a deer biologist. He was a member of the team that created Dewey, the first white-tailed deer clone, some twelve years before. Dewey had produced an incredible thirty-eight-point rack—in Mack’s opinion, an incredibly grotesque rack, like nothing ever produced in nature.

  Grunting sourly, the vet fumbled in his pockets until he found a package of chewing gum. “The Gates family friends of yours, are they?” He offered her a stick but she shook her head.

  “Not friends, no. But I felt I ought to see the facility—a duty call, you might say. I don’t like designer deer, and I don’t have any respect for canned hunts.” She was probably saying more than she should, but she couldn’t stop herself. “My father taught me to get out in the woods and look for deer on my own two feet, not sit in a comfy blind and point my rifle at the game manager’s pet buck wearing antlers the size of the UT goalposts.”

  Her visit hadn’t been an official inspection—that was handled by the people who managed the breeder permits. But she felt she had an obligation to know what was going on in the area she patrolled, and the owners of Three Gates were obviously intent on establishing a reputation for their ranch in the deer breeding and hunting business. They were likely to do that, at least if you went by the numbers. She’d been told that there were ninety-three fawns born that year, forty buck and forty-three doe fawns, all with “superior genetics,” which meant the genes for superior headgear. And the animals didn’t even get to enjoy having natural sex. Those ninety-three fawns had been conceived entirely by artificial insemination. Not a naturally bred animal in the batch.

  “UT goalposts,” Doc Masters repeated, darkly amused. “A freak of nature—but they’re really not a freak of nature, since they’re man-made. Not to mention that the fawns are bottle-fed and thoroughly habituated to humans.” He doubled up the chewing gum stick and put it in his mouth, heaving a hefty sigh. “I know I’m old-fashioned, but by damn, I hate those genetically engineered animals. Did you see the bucks in the containment pens? God didn’t make deer like that. Man doesn’t have any business making ’em, either.” He took off his baseball cap and rubbed his scalp. “Not to mention that line breeding is in no way healthy for the animals. Breeding for antlers is a quick way to weaken the gene pool.”

  Mack nodded, not sure where this was going and waiting to see.

  After a moment, Doc Masters sat up straighter and squared his shoulders, as if he had made up his mind that Mack—even though she was a woman and a game warden—was somebody he could talk to. “When you went to Three Gates, you probably noticed the deer ear tags and tattoos.”

  “I did, yes.” Mack chuckled. “Learned about that at warden school, too.”

  When a captive fawn was born, the breeder inserted a plastic tag in its right ear, identifying the sex and the year of birth. A few months later (the delay was supposed to take infant mortality into consideration), Texas Parks and Wildlife issued a number. The breeder tattooed it in the fawn’s left ear. The three-digit prefix was the facility’s identification number, the following digits a unique number issued to each fawn. At the end of the first quarter of every year, the breeder had to turn in a report on all the fawns born in the preceding twelve months in his facility. At the same time, he turned in a mortality report and a report on any deer he had sold as breeding animals. It was a birth-to-death monitoring program. The identification numbers, carrying on the old tradition of cattle brands, were key to making it work.

  The breeders complained about all the records they had to maintain, but the system was designed to keep tabs on the increasing numbers of facilit
y-bred deer, which quite obviously did not have the same genetic makeup as the native wild deer population. If an animal escaped into the wild population, the ear tag and the tattoo identified it as a genetically engineered deer.

  Keeping track of individual animals and their pedigree was important as far as the bottom line was concerned, too, for some of the bucks were extremely valuable. Mack had learned that Buckaroo, one of the bucks at Three Gates, wore an $800,000 price tag, and his semen went for $10,000 a straw. That was one of the reasons for the expensive fencing that surrounded such ranches. You didn’t want a high-dollar buck like Buckaroo out roaming the neighborhood unsupervised, giving it all away when he should be filling those $10,000 semen straws back home in the barn, or being shot for nothing instead of fetching top dollar during hunting season

  “Okay, then,” the vet said. “So what we’ve got are fawns with ear tags and fawns with ear tags and tattoos.” He put his baseball cap back on and tugged down hard on the bill, pulling it almost down to his nose. “I went out to Three Gates last spring to treat a horse with a hoof infection. I happened to be there when they were tattooing fawns, and I noticed the prefix. Four-thirty-two. Four-three-two. A number that might stick in your mind, right?”

  Mack slowed, as a doe bounded gracefully out of the woods and across the narrow gravel track in front of them. She popped into neutral, idling, and as she expected, two yearling deer—last year’s fawns—dashed after the doe a moment later. No ear tags, no tattoos, they were beautiful and wild, a natural part of the wilderness, like horseflies, like the mountain lion. Like anthrax. It was all bound up together.

  She brought her attention back to Masters. “Four-three-two,” she said, shifting back into first and picking up speed again. “The prefix designates the breeding facility.” In Texas, there were over a thousand facilities, with more applying for permits every year. And not just Texas. Nationwide, there were eight thousand deer farms, and the number was growing. Deer farming was the next big bubble.

  “Exactly,” Masters said. He fell silent again, as if he’d lost the thread of his story.

  “And?” Mack prompted.

  He took a deep breath, let it out again. “Well, a week or so ago, I made a trip to another ranch, over near Sycamore Mountain. I did what I was there to do—help a young cow birth twin calves. Lost one of them, unfortunately. Happens sometimes, with a first birth. Midway through, I took a break to answer a call of nature, and off behind the barn, I happened to see a fair-size pen, high-fenced, with canvas stretched around the fence so you couldn’t see what was inside. But one of the corners was flapping loose, and I noticed that there were a half-dozen fawns in the pen. They weren’t wearing ear tags, but they were tattooed, which got my attention right off. You understand why?”

  “Because the ranch wasn’t a permitted breeding facility,” Mack replied. Derek was pushing the ATV fast, and she’d lost sight of him around a bend.

  “You got it. It’s a cattle ranch, not a deer farm. Been a cattle ranch for decades. A good one, once upon a time; maybe not so good now, though. Times are tough.” There was a glint in the vet’s eye. “So, being a curious sort of fellow, I waited my chance. When the owner was off doing something else, I went back for a better look. The prefix on the tattoos was four-eight-two. Four-eight-two. And the eight looked fresher than the four or the two—at least, that’s the way it seemed to me. Not that I got a really close look,” he added. “I could be wrong.”

  “But if you’re right,” Mack said thoughtfully, “you’re wondering whether the eight might have been a three, originally. And if the eight was a three, you’re thinking that the fawns in that pen may have started life at Three Gates.”

  “It’s been in my mind,” he conceded. “But that’s if the eight was a three. It could’ve been something else. A zero, maybe. Smells like the old brand-changing trick.”

  “But whatever the number, you’re thinking that the fawns were illegally moved, since the ranch where you saw them wasn’t a licensed facility. And maybe stolen, to boot. And you’re telling all this to a game warden.” She gave the old man a sidelong look. “So are you going to tell me where this ranch is and who it belongs to?”

  There was another long silence while Masters chewed on his gum. “I dunno,” he said, finally. “Dunno whether I am or not.” He sighed. “I guess maybe I’ve been talking a little too much. I didn’t think this thing through all the way to the end. It’s kind of a tricky business, since one of the owners—” He stopped, frowning.

  “Is a friend of yours,” Mack guessed. She swung around a corner. Derek’s ranch house was just ahead, the ATV parked out in front. Derek was nowhere in sight. “Or a regular client. Even a pillar of the community, maybe.” Could be somebody—a professional person, a doctor, a lawyer—who couldn’t afford to be exposed. And maybe the fawns Doc Masters had seen weren’t the only animals involved. The penalties on something like this could add up fast in fines and jail time, especially if there were any Lacey Act violations and the feds got involved.

  “Sorry.” Masters pulled on his lower lip. “It’s complicated, and there’s a lot more hanging on it than there seems to be, just right off the bat, especially for one of the—” He stopped. “Reckon I need to think about it a little longer.”

  “But you’re not going to think about it too long, I hope,” Mack said, pulling to a stop beside the ATV and turning off the ignition. Derek was coming out of the garage, a gasoline can in one hand and a rake in the other. He had changed from shorts and sandals to jeans and boots.

  The vet chuckled dryly, seizing the opportunity to change the subject. “Well, look at that. Guess he’s decided a fella’s gotta do what he’s gotta do.”

  “We’ve all gotta do what we’ve gotta do,” Mack said firmly, not letting him off the hook. “But you don’t have to be involved, Doc. Deer are my job. Give me a name and a location and I’ll take it from here. Nobody needs to know where the information came from.”

  “I wish it were that easy.” Shoulders slumped, the vet gazed out the window. “I’m not saying it’s a matter of life and death, but it’s serious enough. I’m wishing I hadn’t . . .” His voice trailed off.

  Somehow, Mack thought, the tables had turned. She was now the one who had to tell the old man what had to be done, and when. “I’m sure you understand the importance of this, Doc. After that big criminal case over in Cherokee County, everybody in the deer-breeding business is aware of the penalties involved with breaking the law.”

  The case had made national news. A deer breeder in East Texas—one of the two or three biggest in the state—had pleaded guilty to smuggling illegal white-tails from states up north where CWD was rampant. He had paid a million-dollar fine to the feds for violations of the Lacey Act and another half million in restitution to the state of Texas, as well as forfeiting his entire breeding stock, worth more millions.

  “That’s true,” Masters said, and fell silent again.

  Mack persisted. “Look. A few illegally transported fawns aren’t any big deal. But I need to get out there and take a look. Right away.” In fact, if the owner had happened to notice the vet’s interest in the fawns, it was likely that he had already moved them. “How about if I call you first thing in the morning and you give me the location so I can do my job?”

  The old man tipped up the brim of his cap with a thumb. “In case you haven’t heard,” he said wryly, “tomorrow’s Thanksgiving. If it’s all the same to you, I’d just as soon eat turkey and watch some football. How about you call me on Friday morning?”

  Not giving her a chance to reply, he opened the truck door and got out, raising his voice so that Derek could hear. “Well, I’ll leave you to settle the business of the carcasses, warden. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear back from the lab, but my money is on anthrax.”

  “Yeah,” Mack said. “Mine, too.”

  He ducked down and spoke to her through the
open window. “Nice working with you, Mack. I hope there’ll be a next time.”

  She heard the respect in his voice and understood that he was saying something important. “I’m sure there will,” she said.

  She watched as the old man walked to his car, got in, and drove away. She urgently hoped he wasn’t planning on warning someone, but she understood his reluctance to tell her what he knew. He had lived in Utopia his entire life. He knew everybody, and everybody knew him. If word got around that he had blown the whistle on a friend or an upstanding citizen, people might decide he couldn’t be trusted. Small-town people could be petty that way.

  Derek had gone behind the garage and now came out, pulling a small two-wheeled trailer. He dropped the tongue hitch onto the tow ball at the rear of the ATV and shoved the locking lever down hard. When he straightened up, Mack rolled down her window and called. “Hey, Derek, why don’t you put that stuff in the back of the truck and ride with me to the site?”

  Derek stopped five feet from the truck. “I can handle this myself, Mack.” He looked at her, eyes flinty, jaw thrust out, mouth tight. “Unless you just want to watch and make sure I’m doing the job right. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to break any of your game warden rules.”

  Oh, damn, Mack thought, refraining from rolling her eyes. But she only shrugged. “Sure, whatever you want.” She smiled and added brightly, “So what time did we say for brunch tomorrow? Ten thirty? Oh, and Cheyenne needs some exercise—I thought I’d bring her out with me and take the girls for a ride. You think they’d like that?”

  Derek gave her a hard look. “I think I need to give you a rain check. After I finish barbecuing those dead deer this evening, I doubt I’ll be in the mood to cook a holiday meal for company.”

  Mack stared at him for a moment. “I get it,” she said. “Sorry.”