by H. V. Elkin
“Anything else you figure I ought to know?”
“One thing, yes. You know a tiger grows to want the protection of its cage.”
“But this one didn’t feel so protected in its cage.”
“Yes, but just the same, a tiger like this, out of its cage, she only wants a place to hide. She feels that everything outside the cage is her enemy.”
“Like we’re gonna be.”
Hansen nodded, a suggestion of a sadistic smile on his face. “See you in the morning,” he said.
That night, Cutler bedded down in the mess tent for a while. Then he got uncomfortable with all that canvas stretched over his head and took his blanket outside, around the tent where he could see the moonlit landscape. He had his six-gun within easy reach, once a necessary precaution, now a habit. He lay awake for a while remembering his encounters with American cats, trying to figure out if there was anything in his past experiences that might be useful now, and he finally decided no. He was about to go hunting an animal he knew very little about with a man he could not trust. It was enough to keep a man awake all night, but to Cutler everything had to be new once, so he went to sleep, falling rapidly into deep unconsciousness and then just as rapidly returning. He had sensed a movement near him, and when his eyes opened his gun was in his hand. But there was a soft, reassuring hand on his. He looked into Molly’s frightened animal eyes.
Her voice was breathy. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come up on you like this.”
His hand relaxed on the gun. “It’s okay. I usually look before I shoot.”
“May I stay a moment?” she asked. “I won’t if you don’t want me to.’
“Stay,” he said, although her nearness at night was making him uncomfortable.
She knelt beside him, her hands folded in front of her. “I couldn’t get to sleep. I kept worrying about you going off tomorrow with Eric. I don’t know why, either. That makes it all the more bothersome. It’s easier when you know why you feel the way you do.”
Cutler thought that Molly was saying the kind of thing that he always suspected Iris of keeping to herself. It sounded like the kind of premonition Cutler wanted nothing to do with anymore. He tried to get rid of this one, as he did the others, by reasoning them out. “You’re just worried about the circus,” he told Molly.
“Maybe,” she admitted.
“Well, worry in’ never helped anything.”
“It’s easier to say that when you’re going to go out and do something about it. Staying here and waiting makes it worse.”
“Understand that.”
“Can I come with you?”
He hesitated. He was tempted to say yes, even though he knew inviting Molly would be putting Hansen’s nose out of joint. He was tempted because he thought it might be useful to have a third party along, a witness whose presence might help Cutler trust Hansen more.
She went on quickly when she saw he was thinking about it: “It’s not like I’ve had no experience. In a way, I’ve worked with Anna, when she was being trained to ride the horse. I’m really the only other person, besides Eric, who’s had any experience with her.”
He looked up into her pleading eyes, then raised himself on an elbow. Getting to sleep had become a low priority. Now the most important thing was to help this disturbed girl feel better. And yet, although he wanted very much to say yes, he knew he could not invite her to join the hunt. But he avoided saying no directly. “What do you figure Eric would say about you comin’ along?”
“Eric?”
“Well, you’ve known him a lot longer’n you’ve known me. But I notice it ain’t him you’re askin’.”
She nodded her head. “He wouldn’t want me to come.” She looked away.
“But you figure if I said it was okay he’d have to go along with it.”
She nodded her head and did not look back at him.
He reached out and put his hand on hers. “Well, there’s your answer. You don’t ask him because you know he wouldn’t want you to come. And I can’t afford a situation that’s gonna make it any harder tomorrow than it has to be.”
She looked down at his hand on hers. “I just want to help in some way instead of just staying around here.”
He nodded. “I’m sorry.”
She could see that he meant it. “It’s not just the circus I’m worried about.” She stared at him, and he got lost in her eyes for a moment.
Then he blinked and said, “Yeah, I know that. And I appreciate your bein’ concerned.”
She looked back down at their hands. “Would you like me to stay?” She waited a moment, then looked back into his eyes. “Or go?”
“You’d better go.”
She looked wounded. Then she started to get up, but his hand held her there. “Notice,” he said, “I didn’t say what I’d like, but what you better do.”
She looked puzzled.
He did not know how to explain it to her. “You’re very young.”
“Not that young.”
He tried again. “And your life’s been kind of stopped. No travelin’ somewhere, no show . . . not even able to get to sleep to forget about it for a while . . .”
“Are you just saying I’m restless then? That I’m just looking for a distraction of some kind?”
She had figured it out for him. “Ain’t that possible?”
She hesitated, wanting to deny it. Finally she blurted out, “Does it matter?”
Then he wondered why in the hell it did matter. If she was not looking for a long-lasting relationship, neither was he. Then he realized that if she was looking for a distraction right now, he was not. “Tomorrow could be tough,” he said, “and I need some sleep.”
“Oh.” She was disappointed, but she understood. “Yes, of course.” She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. Then he put his arms around her, drew her down and hugged her tightly. He felt her nestling against him and becoming instantly comfortable in his embrace.
Before he weakened too much, he slid his hands around to her shoulders and held her away from him. “Good night then.”
She looked confused for a moment, then reached out and touched his cheek with her hand. “Good night?”
He nodded slowly.
Then she nodded, too, and got up. She stood there a moment looking down at him, then walked away very slowly, as though she hoped he would call her back.
But he did not. It was true, after all, that sleep was the sensible thing tonight. But after she was gone, he lay awake for an hour and listened to the coyotes calling to each other in the moonlight.
Chapter Six
There was a sullen nervousness about Hansen as he rode with Cutler. Cutler was not surprised or bothered that Hansen looked unhappy about going on the hunt with a partner. But mixed up with the discontent was anxiety, and that made Cutler wonder if, for all his inexperience with tigers, he would not have been better off to go on this hunt alone.
It was more than Hansen’s mood that made Cutler uneasy. There was also the way Hansen’s mood expressed itself in obstinacy. Even though they were both carrying shovels and there was a roll of canvas tied like a bedroll behind each saddle, Hansen had insisted on lugging along his rawhide whip. What did he hope to do with that? What good could it do against a tiger that probably would no longer want to respond to orders from the trainer? If it came to a showdown with Anna, Hansen would be better off with a rifle or even a knife, the weapons that Cutler was carrying. The whip had to be some symbol of pride for Hansen and, at this point, both the whip and the pride were useless encumbrances. When you went out after a dangerous, unpredictable animal, you had to do it coldly, without emotion. You had to be able to keep in control of the situation. It was as stupid to hunt with pride as it would have been to bring anger or hatred along.
A little to the north and halfway between the circus lot and Langtry, they came to the spot where the sheep had been attacked. The herd was moving on in search of the little grazing that existed farther north. There wer
e the traces of blood and there were tracks of the cat. The tracks went off to the northwest. The tracks were plain. Cutler looked from them to Hansen.
“Yes,” Hansen answered Cutler’s look, “I see them now. I guess I got distracted by the way the ground was churned up near the fight, and I went off the other way. Didn’t notice the tracks. But I see them now all right.”
Cutler nodded, even less confident in his partner now than he had been before. “Happens to the best of us,” he said. And to the worst of us, he thought. “Well, now that you see the tracks,” he asked Hansen, “they tell you anything?”
“Sure, that Anna went off that way, probably toward those low rock hills. She might even be holed up there somewhere.”
“Yeah,” Cutler nodded, “anything else?”
“No, not that I can think of.”
“Well, does it look to you like she carried off one of those sheep she went to all the trouble of killin’?”
“Oh, no. But didn’t we know that already?”
Cuter shook his head. “If we did, nobody told me about it. Now if Anna went off without one of the sheep, what state would you say she was in right now?”
“Hungry.”
They rode on to the sheep herd and spoke to the pastor in charge. Speaking to the man in Spanish, Cutler learned that the sheep had indeed been attacked by the tiger because the shepherd had come upon her during the kill. The shepherd had frightened her off and the sheep carcasses had been taken away for butchering. Had the shepherd seen in which direction the tiger had run off? Yes, he had. Did he remember Eric Hansen being there the day before? Yes. Didn’t he point out to Hansen which way the tiger had gone? Yes, he had, of course.
Cutler turned to Hansen.
Hansen asked what the shepherd had said and Cutler told him.
“Is that what he was trying to tell me?” Hansen shook his head. “It was all a lot of gibberish to me. I couldn’t tell what he was saying, babbling on in Spanish and pointing his fingers all over the place.”
Cutler continued to stare at Hansen.
“Look,” Hansen said, “I don’t speak that man’s language. Okay, maybe I should’ve known I’d need someone who did in this part of the country. But when you’ve got a tiger to catch, you don’t think of things like that.”
Cutler looked back to the shepherd and told him that he was a deputy for Judge Roy Bean. The shepherd smiled and nodded. Cutler said they would have to borrow one of the sheep. The shepherd handed up a small one, and Cutler rode off with the sheep slumped unhappily over the saddle in front of him.
“I got some news for you you won’t like, Eric,” Cutler told him as they rode on following the tiger tracks.
“That wouldn’t surprise me.”
“You probably already put it together that we brought two shovels because two men were goin’ to have to use ‘em.”
“Oh, I’m very clever about things like that.”
“It’ll be hard work in this soil. You might even get your clothes dirty.”
“Oh really, Mr. Cutler? Well, if it comes to digging, I’ll certainly try my best to earn your respect.” He meant it to sound insulting, but the nervousness that crept through took the intended edge off it.
If Cutler heard this, he ignored it, for his attention was directed toward where the tracks seemed to lead, into a low rock hill. Cutler reined up and Hansen followed suit. Cutler said nothing but pointed to the hill that had one or two dark spots which might be animal dens.
Hansen whispered, “You think she’s up there somewhere?”
Cutler nodded.
The sheep started to bleat. Cutler put his hand over its nose to quiet it. Then he dismounted with the sheep and tied it to a lone ocotillo. The sheep became quiet. Cutler mounted up and nodded.
They rode on in an arc away from the hill until they could see it was shaped like a horseshoe with its ends pointing to the southwest.
Cutler pointed to a spot some forty yards away. “We’ll dig there.”
“Why don’t we just go to the hill after the tiger?” Hansen asked.
“You said you wanted her alive, didn’t you?”
“Why, yes.”
“You try to walk up to that tiger like she was a puppy dog and you’re gonna have to shoot her. You’re the expert, Eric, but my guess is you won’t capture her alive by cornerin’ her.”
“Probably not,” Hansen admitted.
“Okay, then over there’s where we’re gonna dig the pit.”
“But then what . . . ?”
“Save your breath for work.”
They dug the pit. And it was, as Cutler had promised, hard work. The soil was dry and sandy so far down that the sides kept caving in. They had to cut some sticks from brush and use them with rocks to brace up the sides. Hours later they had a pit ten feet square and about as deep.
“Think she can jump out of this?” Cutler asked.
“Don’t think so,” Hansen said.
Cutler wondered if Hansen was telling the truth or if he had just had his fill of digging. “Well,” he said, “just in case you’re wrong, we got to get here with rope right after she falls in. I figure she’ll try to claw her way up the brush, and the whole thing’ll cave in on her if we’re not here to stop her before she does.”
Hansen said, “I’ll be surprised if that even becomes a problem.”
“The problem now,” Cutler said, “is to get out of here without havin’ it cave in on us.”
Cutler pried up some rock from the bottom and stacked it high enough so he could reach the top and ease himself out. “Okay,” he called back, “now kick the rocks over.”
“Then how’ll I get out?”
“Kick the damn rocks over!”
Hansen finally did as he was told, then Cutler lay on his stomach, reached down into the pit and eased Hansen up over the side. Then they built a network of sticks over the top, placed some small rocks on these and scattered dust, some of which clung to the tops of the sticks, the rest sifting down into the hole.
“I can’t believe she’ll go for this,” Hansen said.
“We got to fix it so she’s got no other choice.”
They stuck more sticks in the ground, leading from two sides of the camouflaged pit in a funnel-shaped line toward the two ends of the horseshoe-shaped hill, so that the last two sticks were fifteen feet apart. Then they unrolled the canvas against the sticks, forming two walls leading to the pit.
Cutler looked at their work. “There,” he said. “It’s just like capturin’ mustangs, except instead of turned dirt, we got canvas. Instead of a corral, we got a pit. This is probably how they’d do it in India if India was Pecos country.”
“Except,” Hansen said, “we got to get Anna inside the canvas.”
“Sure. She’s got to have a good reason to get inside the canvas. Then she’s got to have an even better reason to keep goin’ to the pit.”
“Suppose you got that figured out, too.”
“Well, you said she was hungry.”
Cutler went back to the sheep and led it to a spot near the wide mouth of the canvas funnel. He tethered it there. “Okay,” he said, “there’s the bait. But we won’t give her a chance to eat it.”
He led Hansen back to their horses. “Get your rope,” he said, taking his own off the saddle horn. When he turned around, he saw that Hansen held not only the rope, but also his whip. “Will you stop actin’ so foolish!”
Hansen looked at the whip, then reluctantly put it on the ground near the sheep.
“Throw it off to the side,” Cutler said. “That’s enough to make Anna veer off. She ain’t got no love for that piece of rawhide.”
Hansen picked up the whip and threw it off. “Satisfied?”
“I hope so.”
“Now what do we do?” Hansen asked. “Ring a dinner bell?”
Cutler looked down at his rope and turned it in his hands. He saw the scar on his hand, the one that had been made by a bear trap. There was the bullet scar near the
thumb of one hand. And the rough calloused look of hands that worked hard without gloves, so that they had grown a rawhide of their own. As a man’s hands were changed by experiences of living, so his whole personality was molded over the years. And attitudes got to be ingrained, like dirt rubbed so deeply into the hands it would never come out. Everything that Cutler had become told him he should shoot this man between the eyes now and save himself a lot of trouble later. Cutler weighted the fact that Hansen was probably ten years younger and decided he was still not young enough to be biding behind such childish sarcasm. Since the animal trainer was old enough to know better and still behaved so badly, the things about Hansen that irritated Cutler must have become, over the years, permanent parts of his character, the kinds of quirks that only went away when the spirit left the body. But Cutler had not formed into the kind of man who would shoot someone over the tone in his voice. Sometimes that had turned out to be a good thing. Sometimes it had not. Now he fingered the rope, and his anger went into his hands so it could stay out of his voice and his eyes as he spoke to Hansen, slowly and quietly, the way a father might speak to a troublesome son, appealing to a common sense that might not exist, but knowing it was too late for a trip to the woodshed to do any good.
“It’s like this,” Cutler said, measuring his words. “We’re doin’ what we can with what we got to work with. And we’re takin’ a chance that Anna ain’t gone rogue so bad she won’t still behave like her kind.”
Hansen opened his mouth, but Cutler held up his hand. The gesture, and maybe even the look of that hand, stopped Hansen before any words got out of him.
“Just listen,” Cutler said. “Don’t open your mouth because it clogs up your ears. Just listen.”
Hansen closed his mouth into a cynical grin, but that faded as Cutler stared at him and waited.
“Now,” Cutler said. “I think you get most of it. You get it that the sheep’s to get the tiger out of her den, the canvas is to guide the tiger to the pit. As soon as she’s in the pit, we got to be by it, and we both got to throw a lasso around her neck. If she gets out, we got to stretch out to opposite sides of her and hold tight so she can’t come at either of us, and we got to hold on until she gives up. You got that much?”
