CLAWS

by Stacey Cochran

  Miguel didn’t even think. He placed his hands on top of the fence and leapt over onto the field. The mountain lion was only fifty meters away from him, but it was charging toward right fielder Zach Reynolds.

  The place went nuts.

  Everyone was screaming and running away from right field. Parents rushed the fence behind home plate and screamed at their kids. Everyone was running from right field except this lone man, Miguel Priest.

  Little Zach Reynolds looked over his left shoulder as he ran away from the cat. The cat’s stride was fluid and smooth, and it bore down on him.

  “Nooo!” Miguel shouted. “Away!!”

  Parents screamed. The P.A. announcer said, “Everyone, remain calm.” And the mountain lion lunged onto Zach Reynolds’s back.

  Miguel was midway across right field. The mountain lion was on top of the boy. The little boy’s limbs kicked and flailed, and then the lion lunged and grabbed the boy in its mouth, locking onto him under his left rib cage.

  Zach Reynolds screamed.

  His arms and legs shook, but the mountain lion had hold of his side, and it lifted him up completely off of the ground. The mountain lion was easily three times larger than the boy, and it carried Zach in its mouth. It turned and started heading toward the opening in the fence, the boy’s kicking and screaming body bowed in the cougar’s mouth.

  Miguel roared and leapt onto the mountain lion’s back.

  The cat was huge. It tried to shake Miguel loose, but Miguel had hold of its tail in both of his hands. The lion didn’t stop, though, and Miguel was dragged behind the cat toward the darkness beyond the right-field fence.

  One of the parents filmed the whole thing with an eight-millimeter Sanyo video camera.

  • •

  Jarvis Cole looked up from the basketball court and saw the mountain lion running across the outfield. He dropped the basketball and started sprinting toward the baseball field.

  By the time he hit the fence along the first-base line, the giant cougar already had the boy in its mouth and another man was running toward the cat.

  Jarvis leapt over the fence, grabbed an Easton thirty-four-inch aluminum bat from the on-deck circle, and started running toward the mountain lion, the boy, and the man who was now holding onto the mountain lion’s tail.

  “Look out, man!” Jarvis shouted at Miguel Priest, but Miguel was on full adrenaline and wasn’t letting this animal get away with Zach Reynolds.

  The mountain lion turned its head, the young boy in its mouth, and Jarvis swung down at it with the baseball bat.

  The bat hit the mountain lion flush between the shoulder blades with a dull pong!

  The lion dropped the boy from its mouth and staggered under the blow. Jarvis took another swing at the giant cat, flush against the animal’s right ribcage. The cougar let out a fierce wildcat shriek, and it swung around.

  Miguel tumbled away and hit the right-field fence, and Jarvis Cole stood there ten feet away from the mountain lion. He held the baseball bat up in front of his chest, slightly over his right shoulder.

  “Come on!” Jarvis roared.

  The cat stared at him and swayed from right to left, its golden eyes locking on him.

  The little boy lay on the ground near the foul line. He was crying the terrible, shrieking cry of a child in serious pain.

  The cat bared its teeth and shrieked again, a sound like nothing Jarvis Cole had ever heard; the wildcat’s shriek was like a page-ripping-spitting sound, but deep and punctuated with a low guttural growl. Jarvis suddenly became very afraid.

  “I’ll kill you,” he shouted. “I’ll kill you!”

  And he hefted the bat up, readying to swing.

  The cat stared deep into his eyes, hissed and growled, and then it turned and trotted off through the opening in the fence, vanishing into the darkness beyond right field.

  Only one parent had the presence of mind to immediately dial 9-1-1 on her cell phone.

  • •

  By the time local authorities had a helicopter up in the air over the ball field, the mountain lion was four miles east of Prospector Park heading up into the Superstition Mountains. Of course, no one had any way of knowing this, and so the helicopter circled an area around the ball field shining search lights down on the ground from a couple hundred feet up.

  An ambulance was on the scene much faster, and parents and coaches guided it over to the opening in the outfield fence where a large group encircled Zach Reynolds. Miguel Priest had received quite a knock on the head, and Jarvis Cole had cut his hand pretty severely somewhere in the melee, but both of these were nothing compared to Zach’s injuries.

  The mountain lion had locked onto the boy along his left side just below his ribcage and then had carried him for thirty meters like that. The bleeding was pretty bad, and the EMTs quickly assessed that there was serious damage to his renal artery and vein. The boy’s floating rib and two of his lateral false ribs were crushed. There was possible damage to his ilium, and his screaming about the pain in his hip and his inability to move his left leg indicated a break in his femur.

  This particular mountain lion apparently had a bite radius about the size of a football, and it had used all of that to hoist up Zach Reynolds in its mouth. The boy would probably lose a kidney, but the skilled surgeons at Banner Baywood would keep him alive.

  A group of parents huddled around the fellow who caught the whole thing on his Sanyo video camera, and the guy seemed a little too excited with himself for having caught such a horrible thing on film. He actually said to his wife, “This thing is going to make us a ton of money.” And he played it over and over again for the curious to watch on the camera’s miniature video-display monitor.

  The first news crew arrived ten minutes after Zach Reynolds was carried away from the ball field in the back of the ambulance, but within an hour, every news station in the greater Phoenix/Mesa area had a van and/or news helicopter on the scene. Reporters were getting eyewitness accounts from everyone they could, and the size of the mountain lion fluctuated with every parent and child’s rendering of the story.

  Twenty-Three

  Governor Horace G. Redmond III settled into bed with a paperback copy of Rosemary Kingston’s Beyond the Edge. His wife smiled at him from her side of the bed, and she asked him about the book, rolled over, and snuggled up next to him.

  “It’s a pretty good book,” he said.

  Rosemary Kingston had been named to the Arizona State Literary Society, and the governor was scheduled to speak at her induction. His wife, Robin, however, aimed to kiss him on the lips, and the governor put the book down and embraced her.

  Horace G., strange as it may sound, was thoroughly in love with his wife of twenty-three years, and he spent considerable time each day daydreaming about making love to her. In an era when politicians generally developed a strangely icy (or at least “aloof”) public persona regarding private matters, Governor Horace G. (or “H.G.” as his close compadres called him) was a bit of a flirt.

  H.G. was a funny man, who could look at once boyish and deadly serious at the exact same moment. It was something about the way his mouth moved, a nervous smile, combined with extremely clear eyes that would lock onto you and not let you go.

  People first meeting the governor didn’t know whether to laugh or take him seriously, and that juxtaposition almost always set a person off balance, by which point the governor would say something so intensely earnest, warm and sincere that the person had nowhere to run but to accept him as a nice, pleasant, shrewd man. And people who went head on and attacked him with bitterness and vehemence were quickly made to sound negative or just plain angry. Some people felt that he could read their thoughts.

  “What are you thinking?” his wife said.

  She lay with her arm draped across his bare chest. His head was leaned up against the pillow in the bed, and he looked at her.

  “I was just thinking about this book,” he said, “thinking about the speech tomorrow.”


  Robin looked into his eyes a moment, smiled, and snuggled close on his chest.

  He said, “What’re you thinking about?”

  After twenty-three years of marriage, they weren’t always this compassionate and warm, but there were times when the stress of the job, the work, the worry over their children, when all of that subsided for a few hours and they were able to hold one another, and it all seemed somehow worthwhile.

  “I was just thinking about how much I love you,” Robin said. When she spoke, her breath made the hairs on his chest move slightly. “I feel like I’m the luckiest girl in the world.”

  She looked at him, and they both seemed like school kids again, not the fifty-somethings Arizona voters had elected to lead the state. There was so much energy and life in Robin’s gray-green eyes, and that was something that age hadn’t changed. They were both still kids at heart, and they loved each other tremendously.

  “I think we’re both lucky,” H.G. said.

  Suddenly, the phone rang, and Robin grabbed it. Horace could tell by her expression that it wasn’t good news. It never was, at nine o’clock at night. Robin handed him the phone.

  She lay back and watched him. She caught the words “mountain lion” and “attack,” and she knew it was going to be a long night. She lay there seeing his expression grow more and more serious. He listened to the voice on the other end of the phone.

  “What’s the police chief say?” he asked.

  Robin got up and walked over to the bathroom sink inside the governor’s mansion master suite. She wore a white nightgown, and she started to brush her teeth.

  “What about this expert down at U of A?” he asked.

  Robin rinsed her mouth and put the toothbrush back in the toothbrush rack.

  “And Charlie ‘The Chopper’?” he said. “When will he fly in?”

  “First thing tomorrow morning,” the governor said, and he hung up the phone.

  Robin climbed back into bed and turned out her nightstand light. Horace looked at her and realized they weren’t going to be making love tonight.

  “There’s been another cougar attack,” he said.

  She nodded her head.

  He said, “I’ll need to address the media first thing in the morning.”

  They lay there silent for a while, neither one wanting to talk about the fact that they had just been getting warm and cuddly but were both now on edge.

  Finally Robin said, “What about this hunter, this Charlie

  ‘The Chopper’?”

  Horace looked at her. She turned her head on her pillow and looked at him. Horace reached over and turned out the lamp on his side of the bed. He lay still in the darkness and silence of the mansion. Robin listened to his breathing.

  “He’s a hunter; he’s a sport hunter. And he’s ticked off at the bad publicity these attacks have caused at his resort,” he finally said. “He’ll be here. And he’ll be ready to hunt a mountain lion.”

  Twenty-Four

  In Oracle, there was a rain storm overnight, and Angie woke in the bed next to John Crandall. She lay there listening to the rain hammer the rooftop of John’s little home. It was a steady thrumming sound and to Angie it was peaceful and soothing. She got up from bed and opened the window in the bedroom so that she could smell the fragrance of rain in the high country.

  “What are you doing?” John asked. He glanced at the clock and saw that it was just past three o’clock.

  “It’s a storm,” she said.

  She stood there naked by the window, the dim light casting her skin in a kind of soft, blue sheen. John looked at her, then he pulled up his pillow so that he could lean back against the headboard and listen to the rain. He watched the shadows of rain from the window move steadily over her skin.

  Angie turned and looked at him in bed. She had a curious, eager look in her blue eyes.

  “Make love to me,” she said.

  John laughed. “It’s three o’clock in the morning,” he said.

  Angie crossed the bedroom to him. A strong gust of wind blew through the room, carrying the dampness of the pounding rain, and Angie climbed into bed and then onto John.

  • •

  By morning the storm had moved on, and the sky was bright blue. Angie woke and made a pot of coffee. She opened the windows in the house, and she turned the ceiling fans on to their lowest setting in the living room, the bedroom, and in John’s writing studio. The air was cool and damp, the breeze stirred the curtains in the bedroom, and John woke to the smell of brewing coffee.

  Angie put on a pair of sweatpants, a T-shirt, and a big ratty sweatshirt, and she took her coffee out onto the front porch. They had a glass mosaic café table on the porch, and the house was situated on a hillside with a view thirty miles down the mountain to Tucson. She set up her laptop on the table with the view, and she sipped her coffee from the steaming cup while she went through the morning’s email.

  She heard John rattling pots and pans inside in the kitchen, and a couple minutes later the fragrance of scrambled eggs and sizzling bacon came from the kitchen. Angie said loud enough for him to hear, “That smells really good, baby!”

  The sunlight was warm and the air was cool, and Angie listened to the birds twitter in a tree over at the side of the yard, while she drank her morning coffee and responded to her students.

  John brought her a plate of buttered toast, scrambled eggs, and three strips of bacon.

  Angie’s cell phone didn’t work up in Oracle, which she actually kind of liked because she could escape “up the mountain” when the business of school and administration got too crazy. Angie was a good looking woman and there was a growing buzz, and it seemed a lot of people wanted to be a part of the wave that was her rising star. Some mornings there’d be twenty calls before ten o’clock at her home number thirty miles down the mountain in north Tucson. And that was just the people she gave her number out to; so John’s cottage up in Oracle offered a much needed respite.

  And so it was actually Robert Gonzalez who called up to John’s house to let them know that there’d been another attack, this time at a Little League baseball game. John was cleaning the dishes in the kitchen when the phone rang, and he dried his hands off on a blue hand towel hanging from his fridge and answered the phone.

  “What’s up?” he said into the phone.

  “There’s been another attack,” Robert told him.

  “Oh, no,” John said.

  “Is Angie up there?”

  “Yeah, she’s just outside. When was the attack?”

  “Last night.”

  “Where?”

  “Up near Phoenix,” Robert said, “at a Little League baseball game.”

  “A Little League baseball game?”

  “The mountain lion walked onto the field and attacked a kid, the right fielder.”

  “Damn.”

  “The governor’s going to address the media at seven A.M.,” Gonzalez said. “That’ll go live and national, at what, nine A.M. Eastern? We’re going to pass through the eye of the hurricane between now and then, man.”

  Angie called from the front porch, “Who is it?”

  “Let me hand the phone to Angie,” John said.

  “Hello?” Angie said.

  Robert Gonzalez said, “There’s been another attack, Angie. I think this is our cougar. He walked right out onto an outfield in the middle of a Little League game and attacked a kid.”

  “Oh, shit,” Angie said.

  “The governor’s going to go live at seven,” Gonzalez said. “I’m en route to Apache Junction as we speak. Karen Fowler’s up there right now. There’s a state park, The Lost Dutchman—”

  “I know the Lost Dutchman State Park,” Angie said.

  “Karen says it’s a media circus up there,” Gonzalez said.

  “I take it they haven’t found the cat?”

  “No, it’s probably headed up into the Superstitions, the mountains east of Apache Junction,” Gonzalez said. “It’s like a city has spr
ung up at the state park. You don’t have a TV up there in Oracle, do you?”

  “No,” Angie said.

  “It’s on every station,” Gonzalez said. “This is huge.”

  “Third attack in just over a month,” Angie said. “No one’s going to go camping in Arizona for years.”

  “This happened in an urban area, Angie, a suburb of the fifth largest metro city in the United States. By ten A.M. tomorrow two hundred and fifty million Americans are going to know about Arizona’s mountain lions.”