CLAWS

by Stacey Cochran

  A whispering buzz went through the auditorium. Rippard turned back to the giant TV screen. She said, “He’s right there on the screen, just as plain as day.”

  These were the moments she lived for. Rippard had to pull some strings to create BIO 436, “Predators, Prey, and Their Habitats,” but it had turned into one of the most popular classes at the university. And it was moments like these when Dr. Angie Rippard knew she loved teaching.

  “Come on, people,” she said. “He’s on the left side of the road, about twenty feet up.” She looked around at them, but no one could spot the big cat. “There’s a predator that weighs one hundred and thirty pounds, waiting for you twenty feet up on your left.”

  She pulled two tables together and placed them end to end. Each table was about ten feet long. She stood at one end and pointed across to the other.

  “You’re out hiking with your girlfriend,” she said, pointing to a twenty-two-year-old who tried to shrug off the sudden spotlight. “And you got a male cat—how much do you weigh?”

  The guy sounded tough. He said, “One ninety-five.”

  “You got a male cat that weighs two-thirds your body weight,” she said, “from this end of the table to that end of the table. It’s got a bite powerful enough to snap your neck like a twig, and you can’t even see him.”

  She looked around the room at everyone.

  With the remote, she put the video on one/sixteenth-speed slow motion, and everyone in the classroom gasped as frame by frame an Eastern cougar, Felis concolor cougar, rose up from the grass at the side of the road and came right at the boy holding the camera.

  Rippard paused it as the cougar prepared to pounce. The cat was huge, easily nine feet from head to tip of tail. Its shoulders were powerful, and in the paused onscreen image, its mouth was opened in a snarl, whiskers wide, eyes focused dead ahead on its prey.

  “Eastern cougar,” she said, somehow emotionally detached, like a state trooper at the sight of a terrible car collision. “This guy only weighed about one-thirty.”

  She stood there for ten seconds, staring at the cat, and students began looking at one another. She stared at the cat another few seconds—an image of her brother’s face in her mind the last time she’d seen him—and then she clicked the TV off. Surprisingly, a groan of disappointment rippled through the auditorium. They wanted to see the attack.

  “Learn your grasses,” she said, calm and scholarly now. “Particularly the North American variety; they might show up as a bonus question on your midterm. There will be a section on birds, a section on bears, and you better know every snake in the Willard text. Be able to tell me poisonous from non-poisonous. And for those who want to read ahead, we’ll be starting up after midterms with sharks, the Hollis textbook.”

  Four

  Maggie Eiser steered the Ford Taurus station wagon carefully up the dirt road. In the passenger seat beside her, Chip sat up and tried to see over the dashboard. The pop-up camper creaked and moaned on the trailer hitch, and Maggie gave the station wagon just enough gas to keep the tires from spinning underneath them.

  “It’s steep, Mom,” Chip said.

  “I know it is, honey.”

  Chip was six, but Maggie was amazed almost daily at how intuitive her son was. He sensed danger well before adults thirty years older than him, and he understood people in a way that was eerie for a boy his age.

  “You shouldn’t hang out with her,” he’d told Maggie a year earlier, when she became close friends with a realtor in their Muncie, Indiana neighborhood. “She’s bad.”

  Of course, Maggie thought it was absurd. Three months later, though, Vivian Hornet (pronounced Hor-nay) was pulled over for driving recklessly, and the cops found eight ounces of cocaine in her glove compartment. Vivian was sentenced to three years in the state women’s correctional facility, and Maggie started listening to her son’s ideas more seriously.

  “We’re almost there, baby,” Maggie said. With both hands on the wheel, she glanced at Chip and gave him a smile. Chip looked at her, and then his gaze went back to the steep, rocky road in front of them.

  The speedometer had stayed between five and ten miles per hour since the road turned to gravelly sand, ten miles southeast of the little mountain town of Oracle, Arizona. They’d stopped at a Circle K in Oracle for charcoal and sodas, and the store clerk had told them the turn for Old Mount Lemmon Highway was two miles down the road. But this was anything but a highway; they’d passed a large yellow sign that read “4x4 Only Next 25 Miles.” Chip asked Maggie what “4x4” was, and she said that it was a car with a back area like their station wagon.

  The car came out on a ridge, and the road curved sharply back to the right. To the left, there was a steep drop straight downhill for about three hundred meters. Beyond that, the mountain sloped downward for six miles to the San Pedro River. They could see the steep desert peaks of the Galiuro Mountains on the opposite side of the valley.

  Old Mount Lemmon Highway was only about fifteen feet wide, and Maggie figured they were about a mile above sea level. The windows were down, a cool breeze wafted in through the car, and Maggie saw green trees in a canyon about a quarter mile in front of them.

  “I think that’s it, Chip.”

  “That’s Peppersauce?”

  “See how it curves inward? There are lots of trees. There’s a creek that comes down out of the mountains.”

  Maggie hoped it was Peppersauce Canyon because she could see what looked like a footpath rising straight up out of the canyon on the other side, and she knew her station wagon would never be able to make it up that incline.

  The road wound slightly downhill into the canyon, and soon they were under the forest canopy. The campground was on the left, and Maggie hit the brakes and said, “Look, Chip!”

  Chip sat up in his seat and looked out the driver-side window. A small herd of mule deer grazed in the campground.

  “Cool!” Chip said.

  There were four doe and one young buck, and they looked at the station wagon with their ears perked up. Maggie frowned because there didn’t seem to be anyone else in the campground, and the deer stared at Maggie’s car. Slowly, the deer started walking downhill toward the creek.

  “Looks like we’ve got the campground all to ourselves,” Maggie said. She proceeded over a cattle guard into the Peppersauce Campground, deep in the heart of the Coronado National Forest.

  • •

  The female mountain lion had trailed the deer for more than two hours. It was careful to stay uphill and downwind of the small group while she stalked them, but the noise of the car made her wary, and she momentarily lost their scent.

  The young cat was on a forested hillside about two hundred meters up from the station wagon and camper. She stood still and watched the car crawling slowly along, down near the creek.

  • •

  Maggie did a slow circle around the campground. It was cool in the forest’s shade, and late afternoon sunlight dappled the grassy floor. A gentle breeze stirred the tree leaves, and Maggie began to worry that the campground was out of business.

  “I don’t know, Chip,” she said. “It looks kind’a empty to me. What do you think?”

  Chip unfastened his seatbelt and leaned up against the dashboard. He looked out the window.

  “Do they have a bathroom?” he said.

  Maggie looked at him and smiled. Across the creek, she saw a dark wooden building with a restroom sign hanging on the front door.

  “There’s one right over there,” she said.

  She crossed a wooden bridge over the creek. The pop-up camper creaked and jostled, and it shook the Taurus. She pulled on across and started up toward the restroom. The dirt road leveled out.

  She parked in front of the bathhouse, and Chip got out and walked around the front end of the car. Maggie watched him, and he glanced up, smiled, and waved.

  He said, “I gotta go!”

  Maggie smiled. She noticed a blue payphone outside the bathhouse.

/>   While he was inside, Maggie pulled out her map. The road up to Peppersauce Canyon was marked by two close parallel lines, which indicated that it was a dirt road. It ended at the Peppersauce Campground. She glanced up and looked at her reflection in the rearview mirror.

  Jesus, she thought. You look tired, Maggie. You look absolutely worn out.

  Deep lines surrounded her otherwise pretty eyes, attesting to the countless sleepless nights she’d had of late. She looked like she was at the end of her rope, that it would only take a gentle push to put her over the edge. She’d lost her husband, and the only thing that kept her from ending her own life was her son, a little boy whose hope and optimism knew no bounds.

  Around her, Maggie saw there were about seventy campsites, and each site had a fire pit, a picnic table, a grill, and a little water spigot. There were no electricity or cable outlets.

  This was a “primitive” campground in R.V. jargon, and Maggie was just happy to see that there was a bathhouse in which they could shower.

  She saw a brown wooden bulletin board up near the entrance into the campground, and she started to get out of the car. Chip hit the door of the bathhouse and said “All done!” The screen door creaked shut and closed with a slap, and Chip walked around the front of the car and climbed into the passenger seat. Maggie saw that the screen door remained open wide enough to get a foot in the door.

  “Did they have showers inside?”

  “Two,” he said.

  “Did you check to see if they had hot water?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “They do. And they’re clean.”

  Maggie looked at her son and smiled. She reached across and ruffled his sandy blonde hair.

  “Come here, kiddo, and give your momma a kiss.”

  Chip leaned toward her and kissed her on the cheek. Maggie noticed Chip’s resemblance to his father in his cheekbones. He had his father’s personality, too: that endless optimism in his eyes no matter how dark or bleak the future.

  She said, “Now, let’s see what we gotta do to stay here.”

  • •

  The mountain lion walked cautiously toward the campground. She kept her eyes on the car and watched the little boy run around the front end of the car up to the bathhouse.

  The female cat lowered her shoulders and stalked in absolute silence. The brown fur on the back of her ears twitched with every little shift of sound and wind, and the cat changed her position accordingly.

  She drew into some brush at the edge of the forest about thirty meters from the car, and she lay down in utter camouflage and watched the humans below her.

  • •

  There was a sign on the bulletin board that said “Campground Open All Year,” and Maggie saw a metal box attached to one of the posts holding the large bulletin board. Chip stood on his toes and peered through the slot into the metal box, while Maggie filled out the camper registration form. The state of Arizona requested a ten-dollar-per-night fee per campsite, but they were obviously working on the honor system at this particular campground.

  Maggie put the ten dollar bill in the envelope with her registration form, and she handed it to Chip.

  “Just put it in the box, honey.”

  Chip beamed at getting to do this, and he slipped the envelope into the metal box. Maggie leaned over his shoulder and frowned when she saw there were no other envelopes inside the locked box.

  Maybe somebody comes by to pick them up daily, she thought.

  “Come on, honey,” she said. “Let’s pick us out a site.”

  • •

  They decided on site seventy-three because it was adjacent to the creek and not too far away from the bathhouse. A dark brown post had a white number “73” etched into it.

  Maggie checked the site’s water spigot and saw that it functioned, and so she backed the camper up into the site. Then she got out Chip’s bike from the back of the station wagon.

  “You can ride it around the campground.”

  “Thanks, Mom.” He pedaled down the narrow driveway at their site and onto the main dirt path that looped around the campground. He thought it would be cool to ride across the wooden bridge, and so he pedaled feverishly in that direction.

  Meanwhile, Maggie laid the wood blocks around the camper’s wheels, and then lifted it up from the back of the station wagon with the camper jack. She’d gotten proficient at setting up camp by herself since Frank had died three years ago.

  When he was alive, Frank loved to take Maggie and Chip camping around the Midwest and as far west as Colorado. But when the cancer got into his lungs, his death came mercifully swift. There was a six-month period after the funeral when folks from the church and around the neighborhood really rallied to support her, but eventually, there were other issues to attend to, and people slowly started backing away from Maggie Eiser.

  Kids around the neighborhood looked at her strangely, as though at a dog they were trying to figure out. Most of the families in her Muncie neighborhood were married and a good number had kids, yet Maggie found herself living alone with a toddler in a huge lakefront house that she and Frank had planned to grow into. Neighborhood kids thought it was a little weird. Truth was, she couldn’t imagine moving onto another man, and she doubted that there were any guys interested in a widow with a young son in tow.

  Eighteen months after the funeral, she went on her first date as a single woman in more than ten years. She was still using her married name, and she felt so out of the loop she didn’t know whether to talk about music, work, or sports. The guy was okay, but he was coming off of an emotionally difficult divorce, and there were just too many issues.

  “Honey!” Maggie called. “Don’t go off too far. Okay?”

  Chip parked his bike on the bridge, and he started wandering down the creek. He turned, looked at her with a smile, and waved.

  “I won’t,” he called up to her.

  Maggie stood there, her hands akimbo, and she watched him. She thought she saw something moving on the hill across the campground, but it might have just been the wind stirring tree branches and the bushes on the forest floor. She stared a moment more, but she didn’t see anything move.

  The pop-up camper opened with a hand crank below its license plate, and Maggie got it up and open, and then stepped up inside its door. She only stayed inside five minutes.

  She made the beds at either end of the camper, and she stepped out and got the water from the spigot attached.

  “Chip?” she called.

  She walked around to the front of the Taurus.

  She saw his bright red children’s bike standing up on the bridge against the railing, but she didn’t see Chip.

  “Honey?” she said.

  It was beginning to get dark, and Maggie wanted to get a campfire going before night set in, but she didn’t see her son anywhere at all.

  “Chip, honey,” she called. “We need to gather wood for a fire.”

  There was no answer, and she walked down toward the bridge and his bike. A breeze started from high up in the mountains and swept down over the treetops, rustling the branches. Now that the sun was setting, it was beginning to turn cool in the high country. Maggie bent down and steered his bike around.

  “Chip?” she called.

  She stood up in the middle of the bridge and looked around the clearing. She didn’t see a sign of her son anywhere.

  His scream ripped the wind right out of her.

  Maggie leapt down off of the bridge and started running along the creek’s bank toward the sound of her shrieking son. She rounded a corner on the creek and saw her son staggering toward her. Tears streamed down his face, and in the fading twilight, Maggie saw the swarm of bees ten feet beyond him, pouring out of an old log.

  “Chip,” she said, and she ran to him.

  Chip wailed, and his eyes were blind with tears and fright.

  “Mommy!” he cried, and Maggie picked him up in her arms and carried him as swiftly as she could away from the swarm of bees.
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  “Oh, baby,” she said. “Oh, my God. I’m so sorry. Oh, my God.”

  Chip continued to scream, but he was already calming down in the comfort of his mother’s arms. Maggie led him up to their campsite, and she sat him down on the picnic table. Quickly, she retrieved her first-aid kit from inside the camper and returned to him.

  “Where did it sting you?”

  Chip pointed to his left bicep. “Here,” he wailed.