The Bangtail Ghost

by Keith McCafferty

  “I like to see people squirm,” Blake said. “I’ve been called hirsute since puberty, mostly behind my back because I had hard fists and used them, but the term is incorrect. Hirsutism is a condition specific to women, symptomatic of an endocrine disorder. I have a genetic condition called hypertrichosis. That means I’m hairy as an ape. The length is due to a longer anagen, or growing phase. If you want to know a secret, I’m proud of it. I’ve always admired the Asiatic lions. They have beautiful curly hair compared to their African cousins. When I was studying lions in the Gir Forest, in India, our guides called me ‘Kesin.’ It means the ‘Long-Haired Lion.’ You can call me Drick. Help me out.”

  Sean took the offered hand, noting the furry knuckles and the long length of the fingers, which were shriveled from immersion in the tub. Blake spoke to the closed door of the yurt.

  “Scarlett, would you please make our visitor feel at home? I’ll be at the enclosure and back shortly.”

  There was no response.

  “Should I go in?”

  Blake smiled. “Scarlett’s hearing is acute. But, like a cat, she doesn’t always answer your call.”

  “She is your sister?”

  “She is my sister. She is my wife. The latter relationship is culturally unacceptable, so it is not said to my face. We are inseparables, if that is a word. With the other, anything is possible. Without, nothing. We are compatible in every way, including the way of a man and a woman. We are not conceiving a child, so the problems associated with consanguinity are not an issue. Let us live our lives as others do theirs.”

  Sean knocked and then entered the yurt, which was airy, with a large living space, a small sleeping quarters, and a tidy kitchenette. The floorboards were knotty and figured, the peeled-log furniture a warm blond. A woodstove was set upon a foundation of river stones. A love seat sported an African-animal motif, and there was a casual arrangement of hard-back chairs centered around a white birch table, one end of which doubled as an office. Two worn zebra rugs made a geometry on the diagonally laid floorboards, and running around the yurt’s interior at chin height was a continuous shelf on which squatted an arrangement of bleached skulls, showing cavernous eye sockets and large canine teeth.

  All this Sean took in at a glance, but as he entered, his eyes were arrested by the woman sitting on the love seat. She had long strawberry-blond hair that partly shielded her face. She set down the glass she was holding and gently moved the head of the cat that that lay beside her, resting its chin on her lap. She rose and turned to face him. As she did, her hair shifted and Sean saw that the right side of her face was scarred. An angry worm of raised white scar tissue, starting in the hair at her temple and skirting the orbital bone of her right eye socket, ran diagonally across her cheek, ending in a blister near the point of her chin. Another scar, starting an inch from the first and running parallel to it, disappeared under the lapel of a terry-cloth robe identical to the one Sean had handed her brother. She walked to greet him with purposeful strides, her limp all but unnoticeable as she closed the distance. “I am Scarlett. And this”—she turned to the cat, which had not moved from the love seat—“this is Tatiana.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Tatiana

  She is beautiful,” Sean said. And the cat was, with her frosted blue-gray coat, flared facial ruff, trapped-in-amber eyes, and tufted ears.

  “Tatiana is a Canada lynx and she is more than beautiful,” the woman corrected. “She is transcendent. But I must warn you. I raised Tatiana, but she is still a very wild animal and we must keep our voices down and refrain from sudden movements.”

  “Can she smell my dog?”

  “Perhaps. She most certainly can smell your dog on you. That creates tension that shows in her eyes, which are dilated more than you would expect from the brightness of this room. With cats, one must read their expressions like a book, always turning pages quickly because the cat is writing as you are reading, and you must pay attention to what you read. It is when you fall behind and become complacent that you risk being caught off guard.”

  “Is that what happened to you—you were caught off guard?”

  Absently, she traced a forefinger down the longer of the scars. “No, that was not Tatiana.” For a moment, she seemed to go somewhere far away.

  “How did you obtain her?” Sean asked.

  “A bear hunter found the den. It was May, no tracks of a lynx in old snow, so he thought the mother must be dead. He reported the den and FWP consulted with us—we were involved in a lynx study at the time—and the decision was made not to intervene but see if the cubs—Tatiana had two brothers—could survive by catching mice and rabbits. Typically, lynx stay with their mothers for at least a year, learning to hunt, and the cubs looked to be about six months old. A trail camera was placed by the opening of the den, but the males moved away and were not seen again. Tatiana remained close by but grew weaker and became very thin. Four days passed when she did not trigger the motion sensor of the camera. It was assumed she was dead.

  “I found her alive, but breathing shallowly. I wrapped her in my coat and carried her back to where we were living. Drick criticized me for not letting nature take its course, but of what scientific value would it have been to let her perish?”

  “Your husband said he’d be at the enclosure. Do you keep other cats there?” The word husband was out before Sean could reel it in.

  “Is that how he called himself? My hus . . . band.” Drawing the syllables out. “He would say that. It implies possession more than the other word. Brothers and sisters are more easily thought of as equals, don’t you believe so? They do not take a vow to honor and obey. But to answer your question, no other cats for several years now. We had an African lion from Botswana. Tuft, we called him. Before we got him, he’d been living behind a fence on a game farm where there were no thorns to tear out his mane, so he would bring better money from a hunter when he shot him. Hunter is not the word. Murderer, perhaps. But that was long ago. Only his bones are here now.”

  She turned her head. “There,” she said. “I can hear my brother’s footsteps.”

  Sean could hear nothing, but turned to see Blake coming through the doorway. “I see you have not offered our guest coffee,” he said.

  “I thought we might show him the enclosure first. I assume you placed the quarry.”

  “Yes, we are ready.”

  They pulled boots on at the door, and Scarlett snapped a leash onto Tatiana’s collar. The cat became immediately alert, her eyes burning. Scarlett explained that the lynx knew that when she was led to the enclosure, which was double-walled with cyclone fencing and covered several acres, one of two things would happen. Either the carcass of a deer would be hidden for her to uncover or a rabbit or pheasant would be released for her to chase.

  This morning’s sacrifice was a winter-phase snowshoe rabbit. The grounds inside the fencing, Sean saw, were grown up with small trees and bushes, with great boulders and rock ledges with overhangs and dark cavities, and even a rivulet that crooked down toward Swallowtail Creek and was dammed to make pools of water.

  Drick opened the outside door and then the inside one, and Scarlett entered the enclosure and freed the cat from the leash. The lynx, untethered, bolted forward in a blur, then slowed to a stalk, one forepaw up, poised, then the other, her belly low to the snow. Sean watched, fascinated, as Tatiana passed within twenty feet of the hare, which, sitting on a patch of snow, was all but invisible, only its pebble eyes, cinder nose, and the black outlines of its large ears giving its position away.

  Scarlett returned from the enclosure and took Sean’s hand in her strong fingers. “Watch now,” she said. “It can be over in a blink.”

  Then the cat saw the rabbit. She crouched in the snow, her long rear legs tucked underneath her, alternately pumping. A heart-in-the-throat moment stretched and Sean could feel Scarlett’s fingers squeezing. Then Tatiana se
emed shot from a cannon, a gray-blue streak as the hare burst away in a spray of snow. The chase was on. Sean found that he was rooting for the rabbit, which was all but caught several times, but then, with an extra kick or sudden change of direction, escaped. Suddenly there was a blur of white; the hare, jumping, was caught midair by a paw, and, flipping end over end in the air, was caught by the cat’s teeth as it fell back to earth. A drawn-out squeal, then a crunch Sean could hear from sixty feet.

  The victor lifted her head, the rabbit’s neck clamped in her jaws, and carried it into the trees in the farther reaches of the enclosure, the long rabbit legs dragging in the snow. She was gone from sight.

  Sean turned to Scarlett, who relinquished her grip on his hand. She turned to him, her face flushed from the excitement. He saw a tremor of thrill in her eyes.

  “Isn’t death beautiful, though,” she said. “It never fails to make my heart race.”

  “Have you ever thought of trying to return her to the wild?” Sean asked.

  It seemed an innocent question, but neither of the Blakes ventured an answer. Sean heard the shook-shook call of a Steller’s jay. The bird’s sharp eyes had seen the blood on the snow.

  “Let’s go inside,” Drick said at length. “We can all do with a spot of tea, as the Brits say. If I am to be of service, then I need to hear every detail of your last few days. They appear to have been eventful.”

  * * *

  • • •

  AS SEAN RECOUNTED THE STEPS that had led to the discovery of the body, Blake listened with rapt attention, leaning forward from his chair with his chin resting on steepled fingers. He occasionally prodded Sean with a question, and several when Sean described the scream that he had heard in the night. But for the most part he simply nodded, while his sister, having resumed her position on the love seat, seemed to have retreated into that other world, as Sean had seen her do in glimpses when they’d met. After Sean finished, Blake asked him to repeat his story about being stalked, and as he listened, Blake sat back and laced his hands over his abdomen. He let the silence settle a little, and a little more, then spoke with the air of a professor who knew his subject, and warmed to it.

  “There is a name for what you experienced, when the sudden growl caused you to freeze. It is called crypsis, a defense mechanism that is hardwired into a region of the brain known as the amygdala. If becoming motionless is not effective at removing the threat, and the predator becomes aggressive, your glycogen will break down, and you will experience a surge of energy. Your bladder and colon may evacuate. Your hair will stand on end. Then a decision in the subconscious will be made. Fight or flight? The good news is that if you are attacked, endorphins will kick in and you might feel nothing at all as your bones break. I’ve heard survivors of lion attacks in Tanzania call it a dream state. On the other hand, others experience great pain indeed. So there is luck involved. But you came here to ask about man-eating, and I will tell you what I know.”

  Blake nodded to himself. “Understand, Sean, that in seven out of ten cases, the circumstance that has turned a cat into a man-eater is a wound. In the eighth case, it is old age. In the ninth, scarcity of natural prey. There are places in Africa and India where there is simply no more game for the great cats to prey upon, and of necessity they turn to the one animal that is both vulnerable and in plentiful supply. I think we can dismiss prey scarcity in the present scenario.”

  “You implied there was a tenth case.”

  “Yes, it is that, contrary to common wisdom, humans are in fact natural prey of the great cats, and have been since their coevolution. The only reason the human death toll is not higher is because the cats have learned that man, or rather his weapons, poses a threat, and so they avoid conflict. This avoidance behavior is passed from mother to daughter and son. But pockets of habitual man-eating persist. The most noted examples are the Ganges River Delta, called the Sundarbans, in India, and in Kruger National Park in South Africa. Each year, young Mozambican men attempt to illegally cross the park to find work on the farms and in the mines of South Africa. It take three days for these men to run the gauntlet of Kruger’s three hundred lion prides. Estimates of deaths run into the thousands. Some I have met do not view it so much as a tragedy than as a form of natural border control.” Blake shrugged. “My sympathies are with the victims, of course.”

  “I understand that your father was a game ranger.”

  “Yes, in Kruger. You have done your homework. I followed in his footsteps and was part of a team assembled to try to find solutions to the problem. That is why I am not sympathetic to the situation faced by your Sheriff Ettinger. She refuses the help of the one person who has hands-on experience with man-killing cats.”

  “Why did you leave and come here?”

  “That is a long story and not pertinent to our shared concern. I became persona non grata, let’s leave it at that.”

  “Do you think this cat will strike again? My understanding is that serial killing by a mountain lion is very rare.”

  “Unheard of,” Blake said. “Most mountain lions that have killed humans in present times—that is, have eaten them—have themselves been killed before they struck again, or disappeared afterward without apparently claiming more victims. Yet that possibility exists. I would urge you to tell your sheriff to not be so preoccupied by the present situation as to neglect the past. There is a possibility that this unfortunate woman was not the cat’s first victim, or even its second. If, in fact, that proves to be the case, then you are facing a state of emergency, for the odds that it will claim another life rise dramatically.”

  He abruptly rose to his feet. “Come, I wish to show you something.”

  He walked to the shelf with the skulls and picked up one that was enclosed in a plexiglass case. He opened the case and handed the skull to Sean. It was surprisingly heavy and, compared with the others, darker by a shade. Sean saw that the right upper canine tooth was broken and the front teeth were worn to the bone.

  “You are looking at the skull of the Chowgarh tigress,” Blake said. “She was reported to have killed sixty-four humans in the foothills of the Himalayas. I have inserted a metal hinge so that I can open and close her jaws.” He worked the great jaws open and shut. “That is for demonstration purposes when I speak at film festivals. I have had a checkered career, Sean, and in one of those checkers I produced and directed films. Nature documentaries, but movies, too, ones you might categorize as indies.”

  “Coproduced.”

  Sean turned to regard Scarlett. She raised her eyes. “It was my camera, after all,” she said.

  “Yes, thank you for the correction.”

  Sean looked from one to the other, surprised by the sudden tension between so-called inseparables.

  “My point is that one of those indies made me a tidy sum—”

  “Us.”

  “Yes, us. In any case, when I heard that the private party that owned the skull had put it up for auction, I depleted my bank account—our bank account—to obtain it. I don’t regret a penny.”

  “I do.”

  Scarlett smiled briefly. It was the first false note of expression Sean had seen from either of them. “I think I’ll go out to the spa,” she said. “So you men may speak without my . . . clarification.”

  Blake frowned into the space she had vacated. He then went on as if there had been no interruption. “What do you see?” he asked.

  “The broken teeth, of course.” Sean had not mentioned that the wounds on the victim’s throat showed that one canine tooth had been broken short. Had it been the right front canine? He couldn’t recall, but it would be a strange coincidence if it was. He made a mental note to check with Doc Hanson.

  Blake was speaking again. “Yes, the injury is undoubtedly why this cat became a man-eater. Now, I’m going to tell you what you cannot see, and what could not have been known in 1930, the year that she was killed. Unti
l, in fact, much more recent advances in science.”

  He took the skull from Sean’s hands. “I had this examined by a paleobiologist at Montana State University. He was able to identify the isotopes and mineral composition of the teeth to confirm that this animal’s diet was largely human. He also used a method called X-ray microtomography that allowed him to see inside the teeth and examine their patterns of growth. These X-rays showed that when the tigress was in the prime of her life, several months passed when she ate next to nothing at all. I think it’s safe to conclude that this behavior was precipitated by the wounds to her mouth, most likely the result of gunshot. As the first human kill attributed to the tigress was in December of 1925, we can make an educated guess that the wound occurred prior to that.”

  Blake replaced the skull inside the cube.

  “Think of that, Sean. Despite being on the brink of starvation, this tigress refrained from killing the one large mammal she could overpower. She must have been very near death before finally succumbing to her desperation. Such an animal merits our sympathy, not our hatred. She broke no laws of nature, only of man.”

  “This is very interesting, but I don’t see how it helps us get closer to our lion.”

  “That is because you didn’t permit me to finish speaking. What I’m trying to tell you is that this tigress had to adopt drastic measures in order to complete her function in life. That function is, of course, to pass on her genes to the next generation. To do this, she would have to somehow survive, and this she managed to do by having one of her grown cubs, a female, take over killing for her. The extent to which she depended on her cub became apparent after it was killed, for she was so deteriorated that many of the villagers she attacked subsequently were able to survive the assault, if with horrific wounds.”

  He looked pointedly at Sean, as if he had said something revelatory and was waiting for the second shoe to drop.

  “Are you suggesting this is our situation?” Sean said.