CLAWS

by Stacey Cochran

  Ernesto waited ten seconds and tried again. “Roger, this is Ernesto, do you read me?”

  A voice squawked over Ernesto’s radio: “Ernesto, this is Roger, go ahead.”

  Ernesto’s brow furrowed with worry. He glanced at the jeans in the middle of the green. He looked at the blanket and clothes near the eucalyptus tree.

  “This is gonna sound odd,” Ernesto said into the radio. “But we got something up here at the fourteenth green.”

  There was a pause. Then, “Go ahead, Ernesto.”

  Ernesto held the back of his right hand against his forehead, gripped the walkie-talkie in his left, and said, “There’s a bunch of clothes up here on the green.”

  Roger’s voice squawked through the radio, “Clothes?”

  “Yeah,” Ernesto said. “It looks like some kids might have been partying up here last night.”

  “Oh, shit,” Roger said wearily.

  “No, it’s not what you think,” Ernesto said. “Their clothes are still here.”

  There was a pause. Ernesto could picture Roger standing there beside his white golf cart near the club house and first tee.

  “I don’t understand,” Roger finally said.

  Ernesto said, “There was a cell phone on the front of the green. I checked it. The last number dialed on the phone was nine-one-one.”

  Ernesto waited for this to register in Roger Saunders’s mind. He stayed close to his John Deere, but he pivoted his head around to see if he noticed anything else out of the ordinary.

  “Should I call the police?” Roger finally said.

  “I think we may need to,” Ernesto said.

  “Give me a minute,” Roger said. “I’ll let Paul know.”

  Paul G. Knowles was the course pro; he was a former NCAA second team All-American who’d taken over as Ventana Canyon’s Golf Pro back in 1998. Knowles was in the club house, greeting the morning’s first golfers and answering phones to take tee times for guests of the posh Ventana Canyon Resort.

  A minute later, Paul Knowles’s voice squawked over Ernesto’s two-way radio.

  “Ernesto, this is Paul. What do you got?”

  “I don’t know,” Ernesto said. “There’s a bunch of clothes. There was a cell phone. I checked the last number; it was nine-one-one.”

  “Is there anyone up there?”

  Ernesto looked around, his head pivoting. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’ve been up here about ten minutes, now, and I haven’t seen anyone.”

  “And their clothes are there?” Paul asked.

  “Yes,” Ernesto said. “All of their clothes. There’s a bra and underwear. Looks like it might have been a guy and a girl.”

  There was a pause. Ernesto imagined Paul Knowles rifling through his options.

  Ernesto said, “Whoever left here, left without any of their clothes.”

  “I’ll be right up,” Paul said. “Give me five minutes.”

  Twelve

  Sheriff Graham Tucker stood by an ATV on a ridge that jutted out from the mountains. He sipped coffee from a dark blue Thermos. The sky was just beginning to lighten with the first signs of dawn. The air was cold. The coffee steamed, and Tucker watched a hawk soaring on an updraft from the San Pedro Valley. His radio crackled.

  “You want me to get that, Sheriff?” Deputy Andy Jones asked.

  Tucker was with four of his best boys, and Andy Jones was the best of the four. They had six hounds and six pointers, and Sheriff Tucker had a single rifle strapped to the side of his ATV because that was all it would take to kill a mountain lion.

  Tucker’s radio crackled again: “Sheriff Tucker, this is Angie Rippard. We’ve got a lock on your position.”

  Tucker grabbed the radio and said, “Go ahead, Doctor Rippard.”

  And at just that moment, they heard the helicopter come over the top of a ridgeline just north of them.

  “We have the tranquilizer darts ready, but it’s hard up inside the canyon,” she said. “There’s not a lot of room. How many of your men have tranquilizer guns?”

  “Doctor Rippard, we may need to use more than darts with this cougar.”

  “If you kill that animal, I’ll make certain you never get re-elected, Sheriff. Is that clear?”

  Tucker clicked off his radio just as Robert Gonzalez said, “They’ve got an animal about two hundred meters south, southwest of their position.”

  Each of the deputies heard it.

  Tucker glanced from the LANSAT monitor on his ATV, to the narrow ATV trail. The mountain rose up steeply above the ATV trail, and the hillside above the trail was forested.

  Tucker looked at his four sheriff’s deputies. Everyone suddenly looked alert, realizing that a cougar was close. Tucker scanned the hillside above the ATV trail, but the light was still too dim and the hillside too forested to see anything other than trees.

  A cloud rolled over a high peak to the south.

  Tucker glanced at his rifle strapped to the side of the ATV. Andy Jones held his rifle up and scanned the hillside through the rifle’s scope.

  Tucker said, “See anything, Andy?”

  Andy just shook his head. “Nothing, Sheriff,” he said.

  Tucker turned back on the radio and said, “What would you say it’s doing?”

  Angie Rippard’s mouth dropped open when she saw the mountain lion’s signal blinking on the screen. Inside the helicopter, there was a little video display monitor, and the mountain lion was represented by a small white dot on the green screen. Pilot David Baker saw it, too, and he looked into Angie’s blue eyes.

  “It’s hunting them,” Baker gasped.

  “Can we get in close enough to fire the Telazol?” Angie asked.

  “I can’t push it up any higher into the canyon, Angie,” Baker said. “The canyon’s too narrow. It’s just too tight.”

  Gonzalez leaned forward from the backseat and looked at the monitor.

  “Those boys are going to kill that cougar,” Angie said.

  Baker thrust a finger at the monitor. “The cougar’s hunting them, Angie.”

  “That’s impossible,” Gonzalez said. “They’ve got dogs. Cougars are terrified of dogs.”

  But everyone in the helicopter stared at the screen, and they saw the little white dot moving closer and closer to the bunch of green and blue dots that were Sheriff Tucker and his four best deputies.

  Angie spoke into her headset, “Sheriff Tucker, you’re not going to believe this, but it appears that the mountain lion is hunting you. Look alive.”

  On the ground, Sheriff Tucker clipped his radio to his belt and strode over to his ATV. He removed his rifle from its case on the side of his ATV. He put the rifle to his shoulder and scanned the hillside. He saw nothing but trees.

  One if his deputies, Dale Bachman, started walking up toward the ATV trail.

  “Careful, Dale,” Tucker said.

  Deputy Jones said, “Sheriff, I think we ought to release the dogs. We could tree this cat in a matter of minutes.”

  Tucker stared hard at the hillside.

  “Sheriff,” Andy said again.

  “Yeah,” Tucker said, his eyes not leaving the hillside.

  “The dogs,” Andy said. “I think we should release—”

  Tucker raised a commanding index finger to silence him.

  Angie’s voice cut through the static of the radio: “Sheriff, the mountain lion is about fifty meters southwest of your position.”

  Tucker looked at Andy. “Release the hounds,” he said.

  Andy nodded and then let go of the dogs. The pack started barking wildly chasing down an old scent, and they took off running up the ATV trail.

  When they got two hundred meters away, Tucker said, “Where the hell are they going?”

  The four deputies watched the hounds vanish down into the canyon about four hundred meters away from them.

  “The mountain lion is about thirty meters southwest of you, Sheriff,” Angie’s voice said over the radio. “Can you see him?”

&n
bsp; All of the deputies scanned the forest hillside with their rifles. Dale Bachman was about thirty meters up from the group on the trail. He stood on the trail looking straight uphill into the forest.

  Angie’s voice was urgent over the radio: “Oh, my God, look out!”

  The attack came so fast it was a blur.

  Dale Bachman was standing on the narrow ATV trail. Behind him the mountain sloped down into a deep ravine, and right in front of him was a rock wall about fifteen feet high.

  The mountain lion came from the forest. Like a flash, it hit Dale Bachman, and both Bachman and the lion went over the trail and tumbled down into the steep ravine.

  “What the—?!” Tucker said.

  All four remaining men ran up the trail. They ran to the spot where the cougar hit Bachman, and they raised their rifles and scanned down into the ravine. They saw Bachman lying motionless a hundred meters down the hillside, and they saw no sign of the mountain lion.

  “Dale!” Tucker shouted, and he shimmied down the steep rocky hillside.

  Angie’s voice squawked, “The lion has moved up into the canyon!”

  But Tucker wasn’t listening. The hillside was extremely steep, but he and the deputies made it down to Dale in a matter of seconds, sliding and tumbling along. Tucker knelt down and touched Bachman’s neck, feeling for a pulse. There was none.

  “Damn,” he said, and he stood up and fired three shots into the canyon.

  Tucker started up a narrow trail into the canyon, along a worn cattle path that climbed as it went into the canyon. Deputy Jones followed him.

  Tucker heard the dogs barking farther up in the canyon, up on a hillside. Desert bramble branches slapped at him. Foliage grew bushy and thick on either side of him. He pushed his way higher into the canyon, now a distance from Dale.

  The walls on either side of the canyon were steep, but Tucker stayed in the wash in the middle. He was out of breath and sweating, and he saw something move across the path up in front of him.

  “Look out!” Andy shouted from behind.

  Tucker wasn’t sure what he’d seen, but he raised his rifle and fired two shots into the thicket. The sound of the gunshot echoed off of the canyon walls, a sharp crack! echoing over and over. Smoke cleared from his rifle, and Tucker pushed harder into the bushes.

  Suddenly, there was a terrible scream, and Tucker swung around. He looked back toward Deputy Jones.

  Andy Jones was screaming.

  Tucker raised his rifle up on his shoulder and made his way through the bush toward the sounds of Andy Jones’s screams. He saw something flailing around in the bushes ten meters in front of him, and he pushed through the last bit of foliage.

  “Oh, my God,” Sheriff Tucker said.

  Lying on the ground, Deputy Andy Jones had been ripped open. Andy had a horrified look on his face, and he was trying to put his intestines back inside his body.

  “Oh, my God, boy,” Tucker said.

  He knelt down over Andy, whose face had gone pale. Tucker grabbed his radio.

  “We need an emergency helicopter in here, now,” he shouted into the radio. “We got another man down!”

  He clipped the radio back on his belt and lifted Andy’s head up off of the ground. Andy looked up at him.

  “I don’t want to die, Sheriff,” he cried. He tried to hold his stomach together. “I’m afraid,” he said.

  “Hold on, boy,” Tucker said. “Hold on, Andy.”

  “I don’t want to die,” Andy said. “I don’t want to die.”

  “Shut up,” Tucker shouted. “Shut up, damn it!”

  Andy coughed and a deep red burst of blood shot up from his mouth. Tucker helped him turn his head to clear his throat. Andy coughed again, and his cough was thick with blood.

  “Hold on, now,” Tucker said, but he knew it was too late.

  He turned Andy’s face back toward his, and he saw the lifeless blank stare in his eyes.

  Tucker roared, “Goddamn it, no!”

  He stood up, grabbed his rifle, and fired up into the canyon. He fired again and again, until the gun was empty, and then he picked up Andy’s rifle and took off running up into the canyon.

  Tucker pushed through sharp and thorny bushes and stepped out into a clearing that allowed him to see up the canyon hillside. The grade was steep, but Tucker used his left hand to balance himself, and he climbed up the rocky slope. He got up above the tree line and saw his two remaining deputies heading up into the canyon toward Andy Jones.

  He grabbed his radio and said, “We have two men down up here. Repeat, two are dead. We’re about a quarter mile southwest of trail junction F.R. 4472 and F.R. 29. The mountain lion is on the loose. And it’s hunting us.”

  Immediately, voices crackled back from his three other teams and from the helicopter, and they were all speaking at once.

  “Emergency helicopter on the way,” one shouted.

  “Stuck on F.R. 4472,” another said.

  “How far south?” yet another said.

  Sheriff Tucker’s breath was truncated and thin. He scanned the opposing hillside, and he wiped sweat back from his bearded face. His hands shook, and his eyes darted around nervously.

  Then he saw the cat.

  It was on the opposite side of the canyon, about fifty meters up from the thick bush along the base of the canyon. It was fully exposed, and it moved along the steep canyon hillside. Tucker raised his shotgun up, but his arms suddenly felt like lead.

  He squinted his eye and stared through the rifle’s scope. At first he saw nothing but naked rocky hillside. He wiped sweat back from his eyes. He looked over the scope and saw the mountain lion still on the hillside. It climbed up the hill, moving farther up into the canyon.

  Tucker looked through the scope again and tried to find the cat. He passed over it once and then inched the rifle back to the left just enough, and he found the magnified image of the mountain lion within the scope of his rifle. The lion moved quickly up the hill, but it stopped every ten feet and glanced back down into the canyon.

  “Kill it,” Tucker said to himself, his hands shaking. “Bear down and kill it.”

  Tucker followed the cougar a moment more, inhaled, and let out a long breath that tasted coppery. At the end of the exhale, he pulled the trigger. His rifle kicked back hard against his shoulder, the sound of its firing loud. Pungent gunpowder smoke filled the air a moment, and Sheriff Tucker immediately looked up to see if he’d gotten the cougar.

  A cloud of rocky dust exploded where he’d hit the ground, and the cougar still moved quickly up the hillside.

  “Damn it,” Tucker said. He ducked back down behind the scope of the rifle again and found his mark. Inside his scope, there was a series of three little blue rings, and Tucker forced himself to bear down and be calm. He found the mountain lion and got the innermost ring located up toward the front right shoulder of the animal. He steadied himself, channeled his adrenaline, inhaled, exhaled, and fired the rifle.

  He knew the cougar was hit before he looked up.

  He looked across the canyon and saw the mountain lion slumped on the ground. Sheriff Tucker fell back in a kind of whooshing motion, his legs giving out from under him.

  He took his radio from his belt and said, “I got him.”

  Thirteen

  The reporters were local, but the story was going national. Angie Rippard stood on the sidewalk in front of Hildreth’s Market in the mountain town of Oracle, ten miles north of Peppersauce Campground. Two sheriff’s deputies were dead, and a woman had been attacked.

  One reporter said, “Can you be certain that the mountain lion you killed was the same one that attacked the woman and her child last night?”

  “Let me get something straight,” Angie said. “I did not advocate the killing of this animal. It was my recommendation that we relocate the animal.”

  “But an animal was shot and killed?” another reporter said.

  “That is correct,” Angie said.

  “What can you tell us a
bout this animal?”

  “It was a cougar,” Angie said. “A mountain lion. Felis concolor.”

  “What does that mean, ‘Felis concolor’?”

  “Cat of one color,” Angie said.

  “How big was it?”

  “The animal Sheriff Tucker was forced to shoot and kill was a female,” Angie said. “She weighed about a hundred and five pounds.”