“Scary,” Angie said.
“Could you feel it?” John asked.
“The lightning?” Robert said. “No, it was far enough ahead of the car that I wasn’t like struck or anything. But I was close enough to literally see the sparks fly up off of the pavement.”
“Damn,” Angie said.
“What about you?” Robert asked Angie.
“The last time I ever saw my brother was in a terrible monsoon,” Angie said. “He was a funny guy, my brother. You know he had scars, from the attack and all, and when we were kids everybody made fun of him. He kind’a grew into it, though, by high school; you know, he found ways to make fun of his face. He’d dress up like a ghoul at Halloween and shit like that. I don’t think he could have made it through those years without a sense of humor. He made people laugh, you know.”
“He married young, right?” John said.
“Too young,” Angie said. “I think a big part of it was that he was with the prettiest girl in school. He made her laugh, and it was a time when everyone was doing the non-superficial thing. I don’t know, maybe she really loved him. I just remember that storm.”
“What happened?” Robert asked.
“The plan was to drive out to the National Monument down in the Chiricahuas,” Angie said. “He got her parents in a car, and I tailed behind them with her baby brother and sister. We got nailed by a storm south of Willcox, and it totally freaked out her family. They were shouting to let them off at the next town; only, the next town was in Mexico!”
“Damn,” John said.
“I think all of the bravado and humor that he’d shown all those years just finally caved in,” Angie said. “I mean he’s married to this girl, you know, and they’re your standard country club fair, and he’s this freak, with his face, you know? I think it just scared them that their blonde-haired blue-eyed daughter had married this guy, no matter how good her intentions. I don’t know; they got divorced six months later, and my brother moved to Hawaii.
“I think he was totally humiliated and couldn’t stand to look at me, couldn’t stand to look at anyone who had known him all those years. I don’t know; it just sort’a stopped him in his tracks. I haven’t talked to him in fourteen years. How screwed up is that?”
They all looked out and saw that the hail had stopped. The precipitation changed over to rain, and they sat there inside the shelter like three kids trapped in a storm on the walk home from school.
• •
The mountain lion caught their scent through the pounding rain while it was burying the deer. Its head snapped up, and it looked over the mound of leaves, branches, and pine straw. It was raining so hard it was difficult to see far through the trees, but the cat heard the sound of laughter and became tense and territorial.
The mountain lion licked its lips and looked down at the partially buried deer. A single hind leg stuck up from the pile like a hoofed tree branch. The big cat pawed at it so that it wouldn’t be sticking straight up into the air and noticeable to any scavenger that might happen along in the coming hours. It was largely a clean site, and the big cat continued to pile up brush over the deer with its front paws, making it even cleaner.
It sounded like the laughter was coming from just over a ridge. The forest was alive with rain, and a creek formed to the left of the mound.
The big cat continued to pile up scrabble and branches over the deer. It circled the mound a couple times and looked cautiously up the hill. It sniffed the air. It listened to the pounding rain on the trees and the forest floor. There was a flash of lightning in the sky, and then a crash of thunder shook the tree branches.
A bird squawked angrily, desperately somewhere in the treetop canopy, and the cat listened hard, listening for the sound of humans again. The rain was intense.
The big cat detected movement up the hill. The trees were too thick to see quite what it was, and daylight was quickly fading from the storm-darkened skies, but the cat had heard this sound before, and the sound had soon been followed by a successful kill.
It was the sound of a human. It was the sound of a human singing.
• •
John sang Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” playing air guitar with his shotgun. And all around them the forest was alive. They were soaked through to the bone, and they were ready to be back at the cabin where they could take a shower, dry off, and enjoy a nice dinner together. Perhaps, they could even build a fire in the fireplace while the storm raged outside.
There were three bottles of wine that Angie knew of (she’d packed them), and she could think of nothing better than being out in the woods with her boyfriend, one of her best friends, a good meal, a fire, and a warm dry cabin in the woods while a thunderstorm raged all around them.
But for right now, the trick was to make it back to the cabin. It was raining so hard it was somewhat difficult to keep up with the trail in front of them. Their hiking boots were soaked, and the trail was muddy, and so they kept slipping and sliding as they walked up the ridgeline.
Angie checked her water-proof Timex and saw that it was a quarter to six. Jesus, she thought. We better hurry up, or we’ll be stuck out here after dark.
“Hey, Robert,” she called through the pouring rain. “Are you sure this is the right trail?”
Robert had to yell over the pounding rain, “What’s that?”
“The trail!” Angie shouted. “Is this the right trail?”
Robert leaned in close and said, “I think so.”
Angie looked into his eyes and realized for the first time that they might be lost. The thought hadn’t occurred to her because Robert was leading them, and it was his cabin, and these were supposedly woods with which he was familiar. And he’d been chipper ever since they left the lean-to about an hour and half earlier. But it should have only been a two-mile hike from the lean-to back to the cabin, and they should have covered that ground in forty minutes, an hour at the very slowest.
Angie saw the worry and doubt in Robert’s eyes, even though he covered it up well with a chipper smile.
“I’m pretty sure,” he said loud enough over the pounding rain.
Angie nodded, and they walked on for a while. John continued to sing. He apparently had the entire Led Zeppelin catalogue memorized. It made Angie remember her high school prom, when the DJ had played “Stairway to Heaven,” which was quite possibly the hardest song in the world to dance to at a prom, and she and her friends had laughed at their own silliness and awkwardness of dancing to a song that started off very, very slow and ended very fast.
“Could you sing something else?” she said.
John must not have heard her because he kept on singing.
“John?” she said loudly over the rain.
John turned around and looked at her. He wiped back rainwater from his forehead, eyes, and mouth.
“And carry that rifle a little more carefully,” she said.
“What?”
“Stop singing, man,” she said.
John looked annoyed that she’d be requesting him not to sing. He was just enjoying himself, trying to make the best of a shitty situation. But he complied.
He muttered something, and Angie wasn’t having any of it.
“What’d you say?” she said.
He turned around and looked her squarely in the face. “It’s not a rifle,” he said. “It’s a shotgun.”
Angie looked over his left shoulder. Robert had continued on up the trail, but he seemed to realize that they had stopped and so he stopped and turned around and looked at them in the pouring rain.
“What’s the matter with you?” Angie said without hostility.
John looked into her eyes, and he seemed to realize she wasn’t being hostile.
“I sing when I get nervous,” he said. “You know that, Angie.”
She realized he was scared and said, “Come here, baby.”
She kissed him squarely on the lips, leaned back, and said, “Everything’s gonna be alright. Oka
y?”
She looked into his eyes. He nodded as if to say “okay.”
“I love you,” he said.
Angie smiled awkwardly. “I love you, too,” she said.
The rain poured on them, and they looked at one another.
John smiled a little crazy-eyed, and they carried on into the driving rain that continued to hammer the forest.
• •
The big cat followed the group of three through the pouring rain and the forest trees. It was uphill from them, watching them slip and slide through the mud. The cat moved in on them swiftly, drawing closer, but it stayed uphill tracking them with its eyes through the downpour, through the trees.
The cat was wary because it had never encountered three people alone like this in the woods, and it had certainly never attacked three people alone like this in the woods in a driving thunderstorm. The cat was curious, but it was fiercely territorial, too, and it had learned over the past year that humans were not dangerous, yet they scared away many other animals that it needed for food. As such, they were a threat to its survival, and they were easy to kill.
The cat watched the group of three disappear over a crest in the hill, and it cut short the distance between itself and the humans by taking a direct line over the hill.
When the mountain lion came over the hill, it was suddenly within twenty feet of the humans. But it was behind them and to their left, and the humans were completely unaware of its presence just twenty feet behind them through the trees.
Angie was at the back of the group. Robert was out front, and John was in the middle, and they walked single-file on what Angie could tell was no longer a trail at all. She stepped around a prickly pear cactus, and she looked ahead of her at Robert and John.
“I think this may be it up here,” Robert called through the rain.
Angie checked her wristwatch and saw that it was twenty past six. The official sunset was about six-fifty, but because of the storm and the dark clouds overhead, it was already dark enough that she couldn’t see more than thirty feet. Her shoes and socks were soaked through, and she felt that the socks had gotten all bunched up down inside her boots. The air temperature had dropped about thirty degrees since before the rain began earlier that afternoon, and it would certainly continue to drop as night set in. Temperature variations in Arizona—in desert environments in general—were dramatic. A daytime high of ninety degrees oftentimes yielded a nighttime low forty degrees cooler.
And they were in the high country, some six thousand feet above sea level. It was about fifty-eight degrees, and after nightfall set in, the temperature could easily drop to forty. By midnight, it may well be near freezing up here, and they were all soaked through to the bone. The prospect of spending a night outside in these conditions if the rain continued was daunting.
Angie’s shoelace came untied, and she knelt down to tie it. She felt the rain beating against her back, soaking her through to the bone, and she took the soaking wet shoelaces up in her hands and tried to give them a tie. Out of habit as much as anything else, she glanced back over her left shoulder.
She saw something up the hill from her. The rain was pouring hard, and it was difficult to see very well, but something was up on the hill. It was so close it took a moment to register.
The mountain lion stood two feet left of a giant ponderosa pine tree, and it just stared at Angie. It was soaked, and Angie could not believe her eyes. She was hit with such a rush of adrenaline it was difficult for her to comprehend what she was seeing.
The cat was easily as long as a sofa from its head to the base of its tail. With the tail, the cat was over twelve feet long, longer than some cars.
Her hands shook as she loaded a tranquilizer dart in the rifle. She got the rifle up with its butt firmly against her shoulder. The cat just stood there; it had absolutely no fear of humans. Rain beaded down the steel of the rifle barrel, and Angie lowered her head to see down the gun’s sights. Her breath was coming out thin and ragged, and she felt white-hot adrenaline. Everything on her felt weak, wet, and tired.
She had never in her life seen a mountain lion as large as this one. It was huge.
For a moment, time stood still. Robert and John had continued on through the woods. They didn’t realize that Angie had stopped to tie her shoes. They didn’t realize that Angie was standing there, staring at their cougar. They didn’t realize that for the past thirty minutes they had been stalked by an animal twice the size of each of them, an animal nearly three times Angie’s body weight.
Angie suddenly felt the cold. She felt her own feeble mortality gripping her. She realized that if she did not hit this animal, it would kill her. There was no guilt. There was no remorse. There was no law, other than the law that simply stated that the larger, faster, smarter creature in the next thirty seconds would live to face another day.
Angie’s index finger wrapped around the trigger. She clenched her jaw. Her blue eyes were clear and fierce. She followed the animal through the sights of her rifle. The cat stared at her.
“Come on,” Angie muttered.
And she squeezed the trigger.
The hammer clicked, but there was no kickback. Angie stared down the rifle’s barrel, but she realized that the rifle had misfired. Without moving an inch, her eyes looked at the rifle’s hammer and saw that it had sprung. But the rifle didn’t fire!
A wave of fear-driven nausea washed over her because she knew that she was going to die. It was like panic, but she was still alive. She was without a gun, but she was still alive.
Suddenly, she heard John and Robert shouting from behind her. The giant cougar just stood there on the hill, staring down at them. It seemed to gather that the two men were screaming and shouting at it.
John’s shotgun fired with a loud crack! that echoed through the forest and the downpour.
They rushed up beside her. Robert’s hands were shaking, but he was trying to get his .357 out of the leather holster on his right hip. He nervously yanked it out, and the gun fired and hit the muddy ground about three feet from his right foot.
Angie shouted something at him.
John dropped down on one knee, and he raised his shotgun up to his right shoulder. He took aim and fired. The sound of the shotgun blast echoed through the forest. The air filled with the acrid smell of ignited gunpowder. All three of them looked up and saw that the mountain lion was just standing there, still, standing there on the hill no further than a living room’s distance away from them.
“Kill it, John!” Angie shouted.
John took aim a third time, fired, and the forest filled with the sound of his shotgun echoing. Robert held his .357 up shakily and squeezed the trigger. It, too, fired, and the sound echoed all around them in the forest. They could smell the gunpowder.
And then all three watched in horror as the mountain lion took two steps forward, coming toward them.
“Oh, my God!” Robert shouted.
“Run!” John screamed.
“Don’t run!” Angie shouted.
The mountain lion took another four steps. It was only fifteen feet away from them, now. But all three were so scared they couldn’t even begin to think about firing straight. John raised his shotgun up and fired again. They saw a splash of mud about two feet in front of the cougar where the bullet struck the earth.
Mud splattered up and hit the cougar. The cougar shook its head, and then raised its head up and snarled at them. Its front incisors were easily three inches long. Robert yelled at the cat.
Angie hoisted her rifle up like a baseball bat. All three stood their ground, screaming and shouting at the cougar.
The rain continued to pour. A bolt of lightning flashed across the sky and was instantly followed by a crash of thunder so loud it shook the trees around them in the forest. Rain splattered up from the ground.
Suddenly, John started running toward the cougar.
Angie screamed at him, but he was on the cougar in less than a second. He was yelling like a crazy
man.
The cougar raised its right front paw and struck John’s left hip. It looked like a child knocking a doll off the edge of a table.
Angie watched in horror as John flew five feet to his right and hit the muddy ground hard. The cougar just stared at them. John lay face down in the mud. He groaned.
Angie held her rifle up and slowly approached the animal. She tried to insert a fresh tranquilizer dart in the gun, but her hands shook too badly. She shouted at it.
“Go on!” she shouted. “Back off!”
The cougar took two steps to its right, but it kept its eyes on Angie the whole time. They looked like two fighters circling one another. Angie screamed and shouted and swung her rifle out at it. The giant cat was only a few feet away from her, but she got herself between the cat and John who lay face down in the mud.
CLAWS Page 15
