Cry of the Panther

by Jeff Gulvin

  Keira needed exercising anyway, so Imogen took her down the hillside to the path that ran the length of Loch Duich. It was stony and a little steep in places, but Keira was more than surefooted and Imogen had her trotting through the shallows all the way to the bridge. There she climbed to the main road, meaning to cross and follow the foothills of Sgurr an Airgid on the way back, but she met John MacGregor in his Land-Rover Discovery, coming from the Shiel Bridge. He waved to her, and she waited while he slowed, the chattering of the diesel subsiding to nothing. He rolled down the window and leaned his arm on the sill, his deerstalker hat perched a little too high on his head. He liked to wear a hat because it covered his missing hair. Imogen smiled at him. ‘Good evening, John.’

  ‘Hello, Imogen. Fine evening for a ride.’

  ‘Yes, it’s beautiful, isn’t it.’

  He nodded. ‘On your way out or home?’

  ‘A crossroads, I think you’d call it. I was about to turn back.’

  He looked beyond her, his eyes a little awkward all at once. ‘I’ve a wee bit of business at the McClachan hatchery, but if you fancy a drink later on …’

  Imogen hesitated. In a way she felt sorry for him, but enough rumours abounded without adding to them unnecessarily. ‘I’d love to, John. But I’m already running late. We’d a meeting after school today and I’ve done nothing but exercise Keira.’

  He looked crestfallen, as if it had taken him all his courage to ask her. Guiding the horse forward, Imogen laid a gloved hand on his sleeve. ‘Another time, John. Eh?’

  He tried to smile. ‘Aye. Another time.’

  At home, she stood in the cool of the sitting room and took her book on birds of prey down from the shelf. Carefully, she flicked through it, tucking one loose strand of hair behind her ear, eyes thin in concentration. She ran her finger down the index, then flicked to the pertinent page and began to read. Only as far back as 1991 they had been listed as globally threatened, and they had been extinct in the UK since 1918. A reintroduction programme, with pairs selected from Norway, began on the Hebridean Island of Rum in 1975. She closed the book and smiled. She had painted stags on Rum. That’s where she’d seen one before.

  Two

  CONNLA WAS ON THE phone to his ex-wife, sitting in his cabin in South Dakota. He had been writing notes for a lecture by the dull glow of an oil lamp when her call had broken his concentration. ‘Have you decided when you’re coming to Washington?’ she asked him. He sat back and lifted the sole of one booted foot onto the roughly hewn edge of the desk.

  ‘As soon as I’ve finished up here.’

  ‘When’s that gonna be?’

  He sighed. ‘A couple of days, I guess. Why?’

  ‘I just want to make sure you get to that class, Connla. I know what you’re like when you go native, and I don’t bust my ass trying to get classes for you to teach just so I can look stupid when you don’t show up.’

  ‘When don’t I show up?’

  ‘When something more exciting happens. Like, you know, Siberia or the jungles of Africa.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Holly. I’ll be there.’

  She was quiet for a moment and Connla said, ‘Was there something else?’

  ‘Well, yes. There’s a faculty dinner I have to go to and I don’t have a partner.’

  ‘What happened to Mario?’

  ‘Mario’s out of town. I think he’s pissed at me for talking to you all the time.’

  Connla laughed. ‘Just tell him you feel sorry for me.’

  ‘I do. Believe me.’

  ‘But he still gets pissed, huh?’

  ‘Male ego thing. It must be.’ She was quiet for a moment. ‘It’s ridiculous that I can’t find a partner, but everyone I know is busy.’

  Connla frowned. ‘Holly, you’re not gonna …’

  ‘I don’t want to ask you, Connla. We see too much of each other as it is. But I really don’t want to go on my own. I figured, what with you teaching here, that it wouldn’t look so bad.’

  ‘Aw, Holly. You gotta be joking. I hated faculty dinners when we were married.’

  ‘Yes, Connla, I know. And I hated listening to lecture rehearsals on the consistency of mountain-lion shit, but I was the only one who’d do it. Am I right?’ She paused for a moment. ‘Anyway it’s a fair trade: I get you work when you need it, now I need an escort for a dinner party. Believe me I don’t want to show up with my ex-husband, but I don’t have a lot of choice.’

  Connla sighed. ‘OK. OK. Seeing as you made the invitation so attractive, I’ll come with you. But don’t expect me to behave.’

  ‘When did you ever behave?’

  ‘I’m just saying so we know. When is it?’

  ‘The evening of your lecture class, Connla, the day after tomorrow. The two things’ll dovetail perfectly.’

  ‘OK. I’ll be there.’ He smiled to himself. ‘Can I stay at your apartment?’

  ‘God, no. Surely you can afford a hotel. Get a Howard Johnson. They’re not expensive.’

  ‘Just kidding, Holly. But I’d like to see Mario’s face.’

  She snorted. ‘Goodbye, Connla. Just make sure you’re on time. OK?’

  ‘OK. See you.’ Connla hung up and shook his head. They had been divorced for two years now, but they still saw each other because of the work he did for George Washington University every now and then. Once or twice she had let him stay at their old apartment when money was really tight for him, but not since Mario had come on the scene.

  Something scratched outside the back door, and he called into the shadows, ‘Come on in, if you’re going to.’

  The door was pushed open and a large, feline head peered at him—black nostrils, whitened fur around the muzzle and dulled yellow eyes. Connla stared at the cougar and she flattened her ears and hissed at him.

  ‘Oh, give me a break, Mellencamp. I’ve just had your mom on the phone. Come on. It’s cold with that door open.’ The cougar pricked her ears forward then slunk into the room, leaving the door ajar behind her.

  ‘Your ex-mom’s got a class for me to teach, so I’m outta here for a few days.’ Connla squinted at the weight of her belly as he got up to close the door. ‘She reminded me that she was the only one who’d listen to me talk about your scat. Funny what people remember about a marriage, isn’t it.’ He bent to his haunches and gently scratched her ears. Mellencamp rubbed herself against him like a domestic cat, then she stretched and sat down on the buffalo-skin rug in front of the fire. She remained there for a moment, blinking slowly at the flames, then looked over her shoulder at Connla. He studied her belly, where the fur gathered in whitened, almost woolly tufts.

  ‘You just eaten, girl, or have you been fooling around?’

  She lay flat on her side then, stretching out her paws, the claws suddenly extended, sharp enough to tear an elk’s hide from its back. Connla watched her, head to one side. ‘You gonna have babies, Mellencamp?’ Again, she lifted her head, her tongue curling back over long, canine teeth. She half mewed at him. Connla stood up and, shaking his head, went to the refrigerator for a carton of milk.

  The cabin was open plan on one level—bedroom, kitchen and living room all in one. He had tacked on a separate bathroom when he’d bought it ten years previously, but that was all he had done. Holly had always hated the place, and while they were married she’d only stayed when it was absolutely necessary. Connla poured a bowl of milk and laid it out for Mellencamp. She was already brushing against him, and she bent to drink, back sleek and straight, black-tipped tail flicking from side to side. Connla went back to his desk.

  ‘Ought to be water for you, girl. Not good, all this domesticity.’ He never forgot she was wild and she came and went pretty much as she pleased. The backyard was large, stretching up the hill and fenced all the way round. She could clear ten feet with no problem, however, and sometimes, when he woke up in the morning, he would find her sunning herself on the porch.

  He had rescued her three years before, driving through the rain in his
pickup truck one evening on the road out from Custer. It was March, the Easter tourists weren’t yet flocking to Mount Rushmore and he had been enjoying the solitude. The rain was sheeting off the tarmac in a white spray, the wipers whipping back and forth across the dirty windscreen, obscuring the road ahead.

  Connla was eagle-eyed, though, as observant as he had been as a child, and he spotted the yellow bundle lying by the side of the road. It was a female mountain lion, no more than a year old. He knew mountain lions better than just about anyone, having written a thesis on their habits for his Ph.D. at George Washington University. This one was unconscious but alive, having been hit by a truck. He scooped her up in his jacket and laid her as gently as he could on the bench seat of his Chevy. Back behind the wheel, he spun the truck round and raced all the way to Custer.

  The vet took a long look at her and told Connla her ribs were broken, together with both her left legs. He checked for internal injuries, and the X-rays showed some intestinal damage, but nothing too serious. She had a large gash on her head, which would need stitching, as well as a hefty concussion. Eight weeks and a few hundred dollars later Connla took her home. Six weeks after that she got up from the bed he had made on the deck and hopped the fence. She had been coming back off and on ever since. He had been playing ‘Jack and Diane’ when he’d spotted her, so he called her Mellencamp after John Cougar.

  Back at his desk he studied the bones of his lecture; it was only a week now before he had to deliver it. After that there was his English visit to look forward to. But he was still a long way from completing the lecture, and it needed to really hit the spot, because he was pitching for an environmental grant. Maybe Holly’s dinner wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all: he could pat the pockets of a few well-heeled faculty funders. But he hated Washington just about as much as she hated it here, and, like her, he knew they saw too much of one another. Divorced people with no kids didn’t do that. Their trouble was that the whole thing had been completely amicable; no great rows or fights, no other people involved, just fundamental differences that wouldn’t go away. Looking back, he wondered how they’d ever got married in the first place. Now they were divorced, the new lines drawn between them were far better defined than the old ones. Splitting their possessions hadn’t been difficult. Holly kept the apartment close to the university at Foggy Bottom, and the Keystone shack had always been his home. Situated high in the Black Hills, Paha Sapa, the holy of holies to the Sioux. Red Cloud had fought tooth and nail to try and keep it after the whites discovered gold.

  Mellencamp was watching him from the hearth rug. Connla picked up his notes, scratched the hairs on his forearm and smiled at her. ‘Listen to this,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you think.’

  Mellencamp yawned.

  ‘Jeeze, I haven’t even started yet.’ Connla sat back and cleared his throat. ‘“Territoriality and the nomadic male”. You don’t like nomads, do you, girl? No, of course you don’t. Go after your babies, don’t they.’ He looked back at his notes. ‘“A Lecture by Dr Connla McAdam”.’

  Mellencamp yawned again, got up and walked to the door. It was still open a fraction and, lifting a paw, she prised it the rest of the way, then disappeared into the night. Connla stared after her. ‘That good, huh?’

  He was woken by the telephone early the following morning and slapped the wooden nightstand until he located the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’ he said, sitting up.

  ‘Dr McAdam?’ A soft voice, Native American.

  ‘You got him.’

  ‘This is Joe Hollow Horn over at Manderson, Doc. I think I got a cougar problem.’

  ‘You do?’ Connla was fully awake now, pushing his hair back from his face. ‘What kinda problem?’

  ‘I got one taking my livestock.’

  ‘Sheep?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You seen it?’

  ‘I seen a shadow. I could’ve shot it, but I don’t want to. Cougar’s my animal totem, you understand?’

  ‘Sure I do, Joe. You want me to come dart it for you?’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘’Course I would.’ Connla swung his legs over the edge of the bed. ‘I’ll dart him and ship him some place else.’

  ‘I’d be obliged, Dr McAdam.’

  The drive to Pine Ridge took him via Rapid City. It didn’t need to, but he was out of sedative for his dart gun. Stopping at the veterinary office downtown, he picked up a fresh supply and told the vet—who was sympathetic to his affection for cougars—about the call.

  ‘Lucky he called you up, Connla,’ the vet said. ‘Most people would just shoot it.’

  ‘No kidding. This guy’s Oglala, though, and the cougar’s his life sign. Kinda helps, you know.’

  ‘Well, good luck, I hope you get him.’

  ‘Yeah, so do I.’

  He drove east out of town on Highway 44, through Caputa and the tiny, ridiculously named hamlet Scenic. Somebody must have liked a joke as it was half a dozen buildings falling to pieces on both sides of the street and tumbleweeds rolling across the road. From there it was a right turn off the highway and a two-lane through the Badlands—flat-topped bluffs, grassy on top and chalky white on the flanks. At Sheep Mountain he entered Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, home of the Oglala Lakota: the poorest place per capita in the United States.

  Joe Hollow Horn ran a few head of sheep from a low-lying cabin along the hill from the Manderson Cemetery, the Badlands side of St Agnes Church and Black Elk’s old cabin. That was on private land now, but it was still just the same as when the old long-hair narrated his book to Neihardt in the Thirties. Connla parked the truck and a dog barked inside the house. The screen door swung open and a half-blood of about fifty came out wearing wranglers and a ‘Junior Bonner’ hat.

  ‘Howdy. Thanks for coming out.’

  Connla shook his hand. ‘Glad you called me up.’ He looked at the sky. Grey thunderheads were gathering and he could smell rain in the air. ‘Fixing to let go,’ he muttered. ‘You wanna show me what happened?’

  He followed Joe to the back of the house and a bundle of bloodied wool at the edge of the lowest sheep pen. Connla vaulted the fence and squatted next to the carcass.

  ‘Didn’t get it away, then?’

  Joe shook his head. ‘Me coming out musta scared him. I only saw the shadow, but I’m pretty sure it was cougar.’

  Connla looked at the wound, the claw marks and the torn-open throat. ‘Oh, it was a cougar all right; a big male by the look of it.’ Standing up again, he straightened his hat and rubbed his neck where his hair hung below the collar. He gazed up the hill to the first line of trees, then turned to Joe once more. ‘You mind leaving some sheep up that hill yonder, Joe?’

  Joe squinted at the horizon. ‘What you fixing to do?’

  ‘I’m gonna hole up in that cottonwood right there.’ Again Connla pointed. ‘After what happened last night he’ll be hungry and he knows there’s food down here. He won’t want to come too close to the house and I reckon I can get a dart in him up there.’

  ‘It’ll be dark.’

  ‘It will, but I got a torch mount on my rifle.’

  Connla straddled the boughs of the cottonwood tree, looking into the face of a horned owl who seemed just a little put out by the company. The darkness was all but complete, and the owl sat, wings tucked back, and looked at him with his head swivelled all the way round. ‘Like sharing a tree with the exorcist,’ Connla muttered.

  It rained on him most of the night and he was glad of his weatherproof gear. It lived in his truck box, along with his dart rifle, which lay, assembled now, across his thighs. He could sit all night; he’d done it many times before, only this time it occurred to him that he was due to be on a plane to Washington in the morning. There was no way he would make it now. That first zoology class and Holly’s party would have to go begging. Once darted, he still had to get the cougar loaded into the cage in his truck, then ship it back to Keystone. That was a two-hour drive at best. Then he
had to find a suitable place to release the animal. Not easy. He was probably taking a dominant male from his home turf to new territory that would more than likely be occupied. There were very few free areas anywhere from the Black Hills to the Powder River Basin. Over the past two decades he had logged all the male and female turf and pretty much knew their boundaries. This guy would have to rove for a while. He might get his butt kicked a few times but, judging by the size of the claw marks he’d left in the sheep, he could handle it.

  Just before dawn he felt the cougar’s presence. They were the most elusive of creatures, most prevalent in Idaho, Colorado and California. In all, there were maybe twenty thousand of them scattered across the country, but very few hikers, hunters or would-be photographers ever caught a glimpse of one. Connla figured that after twenty years in the business he was as good a tracker as anyone, and he sensed the arrival of this old male long before he heard him.

  The owl had left the tree, the rain had stopped and the wind was coming in from the north. Connla licked his finger and rechecked its direction, just to make sure his scent wouldn’t be picked up by the cougar, then he eased himself back against the pale trunk of the cottonwood and readied his rifle. The cougar was still in cover, just at the tree line above him. Connla could hear him moving through the scrub and tangles of undergrowth—slow, stealthy footpads, all but undetectable. Then he broke cover, keeping low to the ground.

  A pale moon shortened the shadows and Connla’s night sight was well attuned after the hours he had spent in the tree. The cougar was a dark shape against the thinly covered hillside. The sheep could smell him and they huddled together restlessly. There was no protection for them here; the lights of Joe Hollow Horn’s house were a good 500 yards further down the valley. Connla lifted the dart gun, holding it lightly round the stock. The cougar had paused, one foot up like a pointer, his large flat head almost directly beneath Connla’s position, ears back, flattened against his skull. He was big all right, tail whipping silently from side to side, shoulder muscles punching his hide as he moved forward again. There was no sound now, every movement was instinctive, as soft and silent as the night.