As he surveyed his predicament, the mountain lion stepped casually out of the pines about thirty feet away and looked his way.
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Cam froze when he saw the cat between him and the riverbank. He tried to think what to do. Step back into the stand of pines? Pull out the. 45 and start blasting away-with both remaining rounds? Do the fifty-meter dash straight ahead and then jump into the river?
He stared at the big cat. It did not appear to be injured or even marked. He then wondered if it was the same cat that had mauled Kenny, or was it a different one? A mate? The cat looked right back at him, its black mask clearly etched in the bright sunlight. Its tail began to twitch. Cam quietly extracted the Colt and held it down at his side.
There was no point in going back into the trees. If the cat wanted him, it would have the advantage in there, and Cam would probably never see or hear it coming. The trees were too insubstantial to climb, and it was probably a couple hundred feet back to the nearest big pine.
The cat made that guttural coughing sound again and lay down on the gravel, its entire body pointed right at Cam. He’d seen house cats do the same thing when they had a mousie out in the middle of the living room carpet. For a crazy moment, Cam was tempted to walk over there, right at it, and see if he could shoot it like he’d shot the other one, right through the long axis of its body. But then he saw the muscles in the cat’s shoulders coiling. It lifted its lips at him, baring yellow fangs.
He looked longingly at the water, but there was no way he could outrun that thing if it charged. When it charged. He slowly knelt down on one knee, took a two-handed shooting stance, braced himself as best he could, pointed the. 45 at the cat, and cocked the revolver. The cat growled when he moved, but it still didn’t charge. Its tail was whipping back and forth now, its agitation clearly growing. Cam focused on its face along the blade sight picture and then dropped the point of aim slightly. If he fired now, he could probably hit it in the chest, but the shot would be slightly downhill and just far enough away that the drop of the round might result in a clean miss.
He commanded his lungs to expand and tried to keep his eyes from watering as he waited, the big Colt getting heavier in his hands by the minute. The cat began to inch forward on its belly, taking his measure the whole time, its eyes glaring in anger. Cam refined his aim point as the cat made its approach, still belly-down on the gravel, its breathing becoming audible as it made its move. Cam remembered reading somewhere that this was the time to make himself as big and tall as possible, to make the cat pause, but he didn’t want to disturb his shooting stance. He had only two rounds, and he’d probably only get off one shot before the damned thing was all over him. He remembered what the mortally wounded beast had done to White Eye, that speed bag hammering with those three-inch-long claws. And Kenny with his shirtful of innards.
The cat stopped, twenty feet away now, and began to quiver all over. Its head was down, giving Cam less, rather than more, of a target.
Then he remembered the camera.
Holding the gun in his right hand, he unzipped his left parka pocket and brought out the little disposable, slick in its plastic shrink-wrap covering. Being careful not to make any sudden jerking moves, he brought the camera up, pointed it at the cat, armed the flash, and fumbled for the shoot button. An instant later, there was a bright flash and the cat shrieked at him. He did it again, and a third time, and each time the cat yelled at him. But its eyes were blinking now and the flash had clearly upset its attack pattern.
He fired it again and again, and each time the cat reacted. After the sixth time, he put it back in his pocket and reset his shooting position. The cat was no closer, but it was still blinking furiously. Its tail was, if anything, whipping back and forth more vigorously, but the cool, careful “Here I come” expression on its face was gone.
At that instant, two shapes burst out of the trees between the cat and the riverbank.
The cat sensed and reacted to the new danger before Cam even knew what was happening. It whirled around on the loose gravel, still down in its crouch, and, flat-eared, fangs bared, roared at the two shepherds. They stopped in their tracks, spewing gravel out in front of them, and then spread out, one on either side of the cat, each one keeping about fifteen feet away, their fur and hackles up and showing more teeth than Cam had thought possible. Frick was to Cam’s right on the downstream side, while Frack held position nearest the stand of pines.
They’d left the cat one avenue of escape, which was to dive straight into the pines, but the lion wasn’t having it. It roared again and feinted at Frack, who answered with a pretty impressive roar of his own and even more ivory. He stood his ground, much to Cam’s surprise, while Frick kept moving, down on her belly now like the cat, growling and showing teeth, making the cat turn to keep her in view even as Frack started to slide toward his right. Cam was still so surprised to see the dogs that he hadn’t done anything, but now he did. He scooped up a handful of gravel and threw it at the cat’s back.
The lion whipped around and shrieked at him, giving the dogs another chance to adjust their positions. They clearly knew they were no match for an aroused mountain lion, so they weren’t getting closer, but they weren’t leaving, either. The cat now had three threats to deal with, and it was getting even more agitated. Cam realized he had a body shot now, but, to his own amazement, he found himself reluctant to take it. We started this, not the cat, he thought.
Run, goddamn it, Cam thought. Get out of here. He threw another handful of gravel. The cat spun around again, and this time both dogs feinted at it.
That did it. The cat shrieked one final time and then, in a blur of fur, leaped into the pines, easily clearing twenty feet without touching the ground, and was gone. The dogs ran up to the edge of the pines but wisely stopped, barking their fool heads off. Cam felt a wave of something like cold nausea sweep through his own plumbing and suddenly had to sit down. Frick came over and licked his face and neck, while Frack paced back and forth in front of the dense trees, nose down, as if he was trying to pick up the cat’s scent. Cam could still see that final leap, from a standstill, the same distance the cat had been from him, he realized. Even with the gun pointed right at it, he’d probably never have gotten even one shot off.
He had a sudden urge to answer a call of nature, so he got up and walked over to the riverbank, where the rushing water was visibly moving smaller stones along in the marginal current. Frick followed him, and then so did Frack.
He praised them while he took care of business, then lowered the hammer on the Colt and put it back in his pocket. He zipped the camera back into his parka. If that thing was working, Mary Ellen would finally have her proof.
“So where are the rangers, guys?” he asked. He saw that the dogs were both pretty wet, so they’d managed to get across somehow. He looked across the river at the north bank, but he didn’t see anyone over there. The big rocks he’d crossed with Kenny were now small mounds of turbulence out in the sweeping current. He knew what they were going to have to do: They were going to have to go into the river right about here and let the icy current take them through the entire turn and then strike out for the far bank.
He still had Kenny’s binocs around his neck, so he used these to survey the other side.
It was doable, if he could survive the cold water, and if he didn’t get slammed up against one of those now-invisible rocks by the current. As if confirming the urgency of the situation, he realized that the tips of his boots were now underwater. He looked back up into the high ridges above the canyon and saw that the dark cloud to the west was now taking lumpy definition along the entire mountain range. He could clearly see curtains of rain sweeping out of the cloud, which meant the river was by no means finished rising.
He wondered if the dogs would follow him into the river, or if he should tie them to him somehow so that they would all stay together. But with what?
They sat down before him, as if to say, That was fun. What’s the next g
ame, Pop? He knelt down to rub their heads, which is when the mountain lion erupted out the pines in a dead run and came right at them, eyes blazing, covering the gravel in twenty-foot bounds.
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It shrieked again and pounced at the nowclustered targets, mouth agape, front paws and claws spread wide, blotting out the sky. Cam barely managed to throw himself backward out of the way even as the dogs instinctively flattened, and the cat landed in the water, instead of on top of them. In an instant, it was swept away by the hungry current, even as it tried to turn back, legs thrashing, still determined to get at them. Cam, sitting on his backside, his elbows in the water, watched in shock as the mountain lion disappeared into the rumbling black river. He thought he saw its head pop up again quite a way downstream, but then he lost it again. Then the gravel under him shifted down into the current, and it was his turn to go for a ride.
He yelled for the dogs, but they just stood there as he was taken out into the middle of the incredible current, his lower body constricting with the sudden cold and his lungs refusing to work due to the shock of it.
Swim, his brain yelled at him, but nothing was working, and then his right knee whacked something underwater. It spun him around in a whirling pirouette, which completely disoriented him. He yelled again for the dogs to come, but he couldn’t see them and now had to concentrate on getting to the right side of the river and out of the powerful center current. He couldn’t swim, only thrash around while his brain tried to cope with the fact that he was hurtling downstream, totally out of control, the bank to his right a blur of trees and small rocks. He realized his body was shutting down, recalling all the blood from his extremities to his brain in response to the freezing water. The waterlogged parka was dragging him down.
“Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go,” he started chanting through chattering teeth, and he kicked out to get across the current, but the river kept turning him, so that every time he thought he was going toward the bank, he wasn’t. Then he heard someone shouting, and he caught a glimpse of Mary Ellen on the far bank, trotting downstream, yelling at him.
He hit another rock, and this one pinned him for a moment, causing a small tidal wave of water to rise up over his face. For just an instant, he thought, This is too hard. Just quit, just stop this fighting. He really couldn’t breathe, but launched out again, using the rock as a fulcrum, and actually made headway toward the bank. He hit another rock, this time with his stomach, and folded around it, helpless to straighten out and swim again. He kept his head above water and laughed hysterically at his predicament. The current was strong enough to pin him to the rock, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. His hands felt like two frozen bricks.
He looked up and saw that he wasn’t that far from the bank now, if he could only get off the damned rock. At that moment, he saw two black ears coming downstream at him. Frack swept by, a look of total terror on his face. Cam grabbed out for the dog and snagged his collar. The weight of the dog pulled Cam off the rock, and a moment later they were both rolled into the shallows by a standing wave in the current. Mary Ellen waded out into the water with a long branch in her hands. Cam grabbed at it with one hand and, holding on to Frack’s collar, she pulled the both of them to the shallows.
“Where’s Frick?” Cam gasped, not letting go of the black shepherd’s collar.
“Don’t know,” she shouted above the roar of the river. “Gotta get you dry, right now. You’re blue in the face. Let go of the dog.”
Cam pried his fingers off Frack’s collar and tried to sit up. All those soaking layers felt like a shroud, and he realized he’d been lucky they hadn’t drowned him. Then Frack barked and jumped through the shallows, stopping short of the real current. Cam looked. There went Frick, sailing by like a furry cork, ears and snout up like little sable periscopes, but much too far out in the center current. Cam yelled to get her attention, but she went on downriver and disappeared around a bend.
Cam got up and started to trudge down the bank. Mary Ellen caught up with him as he began to stumble badly, his leg muscles too cold to function adequately. Then the roaring in his head got louder than the river and he passed out.
He awoke to the sound and feel of a fire and saw Mary Ellen Goode coming back toward him with an armload of driftwood. He’d been dragged to a sitting position and placed against a large rock, and she’d built a fire in the gravel on the riverbank. The sunlight was no longer bright, and there was a cold gray haze. His parka lay in a heap next to him, his boots were upside down on sticks, and Frack sat on the other side of the fire, watching him intently. His knee hurt and he felt like he’d been punched repeatedly in the stomach, but all his extremities were responding to commands. The front of his clothes felt damp and stiff, but his back was still soaking wet. He shivered and coughed up some water.
“Welcome back,” she said, dropping the driftwood near the fire. “We thought we were gonna have to leave you out here.” She pointed with her chin at the massive dark cloud bank building up behind the high ridge.
“Any signs of my other dog?” Cam asked.
“Not yet, but she was swimming strong,” she said. “That cat probably made it out, too.”
“You saw it?”
“For about a second,” she said. “I had binocs on you when you came out on the point over there. I was trying to figure out how to get your attention, but I didn’t bring a gun. That was pretty close.”
“We’d met before,” Cam said. “Where’s Marshall?”
“Up at camp on the sat phone, hopefully getting a helo in. The weather jumped the gun on us. Where’s your deputy?”
Cam just shook his head. He didn’t want to deal with that right now.
“Did you find him?”
“He found me. That’s where I went last night.”
She nodded. “We kinda figured that out when we saw two sets of tracks. Marshall just thought you’d decided to go in on your own. I was disappointed. I wanted to go up there with you. See if this stuff was true.”
Cam thought about the camera in his parka, but he decided he’d keep that factor off the table right now. He rather doubted the film had survived immersion, even with the shrink-wrap. It was, after all, just a cheap disposable.
Mary Ellen hunkered down by the fire and pushed coals together. “We heard the shots,” she said. “But the river had come up by then. We had no way to get across.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Cam said. “You got me and Frack out of the river. Thank you.” Then he began to shiver uncontrollably.
She came around the fire, sat beside him, and folded her arms around him. He sank into the warmth of her gratefully, and she held him until he stopped shivering. Then, hearing distant shouting, they drew apart.
Marshall came down across the open meadow and joined them by the fire. “Three hours,” he said. He eyed Cam and the waterlogged shepherd. “Been swimming, I take it. Where’s your deputy?”
Cam looked out at the rushing current and said only that Sergeant Cox was dead. Both rangers just stared at him in surprise.
“You mean he’s in the river?” Marshall asked, glancing sideways at the rumbling water.
“Yes,” Cam replied.
A sudden gust of cold wind made them look over at the ridge, where the approaching front looked like a black wave building up on the distant back range. Cam thought he saw a flicker of lightning off to the right. The rock on the eastern face was changing colors in the intermittent sunlight.
“How high’s that ridge?” he asked.
“Almost five thousand feet,” Marshall said. Another cold gust blew down from the meadow in the direction of the approaching system, flattening the dying grass. “Three hours is going to be close. They asked if we could ride out the frontal passage. I told them no.”
“Good answer,” Mary Ellen said. She studied the cloud bank again. “We could, I suppose, if they have to abort. But that mess could be wild when it comes down this side.” She turned to Cam. “Can you walk?” s
he asked. He said he could.
“Good. We need to get back to the camp, get it ready for load-out.”
Cam lurched to his feet, grunting when he put weight on the knee, and then helped Marshall douse the fire. It wasn’t hard, as the river had risen to within five feet of where he’d been sitting. Cam took a last look downstream to see if Frick was coming, but there was no sign of her. He dreaded the thought of leaving her out here.
“Can you guys do the camp?” he asked. “I’d like to go look for my dog.”
Marshall looked at Mary Ellen, who nodded. “Okay,” he said, “but be back in two hours-max. And if you see that thing start down the slope, run back to camp. The tops of that ridge are about twelve miles away, believe it or not, but that storm may come down like an avalanche.”
Cam gathered up his wet parka and put on his boots, then went to look for Frick.
Two hours later, he trudged back up the hill toward the waiting rangers, Frack alongside, but no Frick. He’d scoured the riverbank, tramping downstream for an hour, then reluctantly turned around. The sky above was getting dark gray now as the approaching front began to descend over the mountain. The temperature had actually risen a bit and the air smelled of moisture. He’d put the parka back on; it was almost dry now. His head felt like it did when he had a bad cold coming on. The rangers had most of the camp taken apart and bagged up, but they’d left the larger tent up in case the weather did manage to beat out the helicopter. Mary Ellen handed Cam a cup of hot soup from the Primus stove.
“No luck,” he said as he wrapped both hands around the hot metal cup. She handed him a bologna sandwich as he finished the soup. He ate half of it and then pitched the other half to Frack, who was waiting outside the tent’s front flap. “I didn’t find any bodies, either,” he said. “Except for one deer.”
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