The Bangtail Ghost

by Keith McCafferty

  “I can hear them,” Sean said. “They’re back on our side of the knob.”

  Garrett shook his head. “No. You’re chasing the echo. It’s a rookie mistake. Listen. Hear that, the ringing? That’s bouncing off the canyon wall. They’re still on up ahead of us.” He showed Sean the readout on the receiver, which indicated the hound’s position on a Google Earth map.

  “How long you figure before they tree?”

  “Cat has something to say about that. He gets up in the crags, dogs could lose him. But before we catch up, I want something understood. That crap Ettinger talked about at the task force, tranquilizing the cat until it can be proven guilty, we’re past that now. It’s just that I saw you stuffing a tranq gun into your backpack. This tom we’re on, he’s got the broken fang, he’s the one, all right. If we try to dart him, then that means I have to pull the dogs away and you’ll have to hold them back while I take the shot. Isn’t as easy as it sounds, and without the dogs to hold him, he’s like to sail off and it might be miles before he trees again or we lose him altogether. Then he kills another person, it’s on our heads. So he comes out of the tree with a 420-grain flat-point through the heart, no two ways about it. Are we on the same page with this?”

  Sean nodded.

  “Okay then, let’s get this over with so the valley can sleep tonight.”

  But it wasn’t over, not in the next hour, nor the four that followed. The hunt seemed to unfold in a trance. Twice, they came close enough to hear the hounds change from openmouthed bawling to chop barking, the harsh staccato barks meaning the cat had treed. But each time the cat jumped out of the tree before they caught up, and the chase continued.

  They were by now eight miles from where the dogs had first struck and were following the icon on the GPS receiver exclusively, even the echoes too distant to hear. They stopped often, putting their hands on their knees, blowing, the night raw enough to show the steam of their breath.

  “Tell me if this ain’t more fun than eating apple pie,” Garrett said between his stentorian breaths.

  “You ever think of pulling the hounds, pick the track back up in the morning?”

  “Hell, no. I couldn’t pull them off if I wanted to.”

  “Why are their names familiar?”

  “Those are the characters in ‘The Bear,’ William Faulkner’s story. That done it for me. I was working in Staunton, Virginia, at the insane asylum; shut that book cover and bought myself a bred bluetick the next day. I named her Lilly after me mum, nose as cold as a well digger’s balls. Said my good-byes to the loonies. Headed west and didn’t stop till I found something to run that was bigger than a coon. What? You didn’t take me for a reader, did you? I’m a fuggin’ Aussie. We like a yarn.” He cupped a hand to his ear. “Listen. That’s no echo, boy. They’ve turned our way. We’re getting close.”

  It wasn’t an echo, and a few minutes later the hounds were barking treed, and stumbling after Garrett down the far side of a ridge, Sean saw them for the first time in five hours. They were jumping up and rebounding off the trunk of a big pine tree, snapping shapes in a moonlit darkness. There was a sudden snarl from the lion as Garrett ran the beam of his big flashlight up the trunk of the tree. Sean followed Garrett’s flashlight beam and saw the cat. It was about thirty feet up, crouched on a branch, its teeth bared and its tail hanging down, long and thick.

  Garrett handed Sean his rifle and, one by one, he leashed the dogs, all but Bear, pulling them a short distance from the tree and tying them off to saplings. He told Sean to stay with them and keep hold of the leash on Bear. He couldn’t tie him to the tree or he’d hang himself trying to get at the cat.

  “Give me the gun.”

  Garrett started fitting a long-barreled flashlight onto a mounting system on the Marlin. “He comes down, whatever you do, don’t let go that leash. Even if Bear takes your hand off, don’t you let loose. I can’t have a dog on a cat before he’s dead. I’ve had a dead mountain lion rip a dog apart.”

  He sighted down the rifle, the light swirling up the tree trunk. The cat was gone. “What the . . .” Sean heard Garrett say.

  Then a shadow seemed to fall from the night sky, and the shadow of the cat met the shadow of the man, and Sean heard a sharp whelping sound and saw Garrett down on the snow. The lion, only its tail visible, was leaping away in great bounds into the ink of the night. The dogs were going crazy.

  Sean felt a hard yank as Bear broke free of his grasp and disappeared into the same blackness as the cat.

  “What the fuck? I tole you not to let go.”

  “Are you okay?” Sean shone his light. Garrett’s hat had come off and blood was streaming down his face and the back of his head. Sean helped him to his feet.

  “Fucking tom got me good. Shit, now loose them hounds. I’m gonna catch that bastard it’s the last thing I do.”

  “We’ve got to get that stitched up,” Sean said.

  “Do as I say. It’s a scratch. Cat was just trying to get away and got a claw caught.”

  And so the chase resumed. But this time, instead of unfolding in a trancelike way, there was a hard-edged reality to the hunt, the hounds baying and the two men’s labored breathing, and the night cold and the snow frozen hard enough on top that they had to post-hole through it. When they stopped to bend over and catch their breath, Sean could see the blood, black in the night, dripping heavily into the snow from the gash in Garrett’s head.

  “This is crazy, Buster, we gotta get you fixed up.”

  “What are you, a broken record? Fuck fixed up. It’s not like I’m pretty. Not like I don’t already have scars on this mug. Come on, now, he’s tired, he ain’t going up anymore, and he’s gonna tree, I can feel it.”

  And the cat did—it couldn’t have been more than a half hour later. This time it had chosen an isolated Ponderosa pine, the trunk as big as a culvert pipe, and Sean tied the hounds back, including Bear, and put his fingers in his ears, waiting for the thunder of the shot. He waited, seeing the shadow of the big houndsman shifting, Garrett angling for his vantage, the gun coming up, and still no shot. He saw Garrett vigorously rub at his face with his arm, and then he was walking to Sean, holding the rifle out. “You gotta take the shot, mate. I can’t see for the goddamned blood. Center of chest. Wait till you’re sure.”

  “I’ve never shot anything in my life.”

  “Then it’s baptism by fire. Take the fucking shot.”

  Sean found the cat in the circle of light and aligned the sights. His finger found the trigger.

  Ka-wham! The butt of the rifle pounded his shoulder. Sean brought the rifle down out of recoil and saw the cat pitch forward, then its claws were scraping at the bark and, turning upside down, it fell a few feet. Then Sean heard a branch crack loudly and the cat was on the ground. The heavy thud as it hit the earth was as final as the closing of a coffin lid.

  He ran the beam of his headlamp over the huddled shape under the tree. As the light swarmed up and down, the cat’s body became painted with colors—tan, white, the red of blood. Sean jacked another round—a metallic shuck-shuck—but the mountain lion was motionless.

  “Count to a hundred slow,” Garrett said. “You want to make sure.”

  Sean counted. Then he touched the lion’s right eye with the rifle barrel, as he’d seen Martha do after she shot the elk. He crouched and thumbed back the lion’s lips.

  “It’s him, right?”

  Sean barely registered the sound of Garrett’s voice. “Yeah, it’s him,” he said.

  In the eye of his headlamp beam, Sean could see that the right upper canine was broken short, hardly more than a stub, and was a sickly yellow-brown hue, like the nicotine-stained teeth of a smoker. The other three canines shone white in the moonlight. He also noticed partially healed wounds in several places on the cat’s body. Fights with other tom lions?

  “You don’t sound like you’
re too goddamned happy about it,” Garrett said. “Shit, mate, you just saved a life. Hell, maybe a couple. This cat wasn’t going to find God. He was going to keep killing. You and me, we’re going to be fugging heroes.”

  Garrett had freed the hounds. “I always like to let the dogs worry a cat once he can’t bite back. They earned it.”

  Sean averted his eyes as the hounds swarmed over the shape of the dead lion, growling, digging into the thick fur with their teeth. He turned his back to the sight. Now that the adrenaline was flushing out of his system, he found that he was moved by the cougar’s death, man-eater or not, and he felt hollow and curiously sad.

  Garrett slapped him on the back. “Cheer up, chappie—better than sex on a Sunday morning, what say?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Bright Carpet

  The headline on the front page of the Tuesday afternoon edition of the Bridger Mountain Star was top of the fold.

  KILLER CAT KILLED IN CHASE

  County Breathes Sigh of Relief

  Sean, sitting opposite Martha at her kitchen table, read the lede out loud:

  A mountain lion believed to have killed and partially eaten a woman in the Gravelly Range last November was trailed by hounds Sunday and shot dead. Hyalite County Sheriff Martha Ettinger confirmed that the same animal may also have claimed the lives of one or more other Montana residents in nearby mountain ranges within the past several months.

  Clarice Kincaid, 38, of Mesa, Arizona, and formerly of St. Ignatius, Montana, was killed the night of November 24. Her death caused alarm and some panic among Hyalite County citizens, sparking increased sales of firearms and vigilance over children and pets.

  “I’m just happy we got him before someone else lost their life,” Ettinger said at a press conference this morning. “We put a lot of man-hours in on this hunt, and for a while there I was afraid the cat had more than nine lives.”

  The lion was killed after a six-hour chase on Sunday by Buster Garrett, whose four hounds treed the lion in the Wolf Creek drainage of the Madison Range on a ranch owned by well-known Hollywood actor Joshua Byrne. Garrett was accompanied on the trail by private detective Sean Stranahan, 40, a member of the sheriff’s task force. The adult male lion weighed 176 pounds and appeared to be in good physical condition, with the exception of a broken canine tooth.

  Ettinger said the tooth linked the cat to Kincaid. Her body showed a bite pattern consistent with the injury to the cat’s teeth. A DNA analysis will be conducted to verify that the lion is the same one that killed Kincaid.

  Ettinger, who spearheaded the task force’s hunt, refused to release the names of other possible victims, pending genetic confirmation and notification of next of kin.

  “Let’s all get a good night’s sleep tonight,” Ettinger said. “The long nightmare is over.”

  The story jumped and Sean turned the page to see that he had a photo credit. It was a picture he’d taken with Garrett’s cell phone. The photo showed the big man holding up the dead mountain lion in a bear hug, the cat in the foreground in the wide-angle image, which stretched its size, the congealed blood making a horror of Garrett’s face. The photo had been taken with a flash and the cat’s eyes glowed an eerie green-white.

  “I wonder what causes that.” Sean’s voice was casual. He didn’t really expect a reply.

  Martha took the paper.

  “It’s called the tapetum lucidum,” she said. “It’s a layer of cells behind the retina of the eye. The English translation is ‘bright carpet.’ It helps night vision by bouncing back the image to the retina. The eyes of golden-eyed cats like mountain lions glow green, the eyes of blue-eyed cats, like Siamese, glow red. I came into the house when we had a power outage and there were my two cats looking at me in the beam of the flashlight, Sharmala’s eyes green as jade, Sheba’s like rubies. I thought I’d stepped into a Stephen King novel.”

  “But this cat was dead when I took the picture.”

  “All but its eyes,” Martha said. “It watches us even in death.”

  “This is a morbid conversation.”

  “What would you rather talk about? The party?”

  With three failed marriages between them, they’d agreed upon a simple civil ceremony in June—“fewer people to demand their gifts back,” as Martha put it—though she’d acquiesced when Patrick Willoughby, the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers Club president, offered to host a party for the newlyweds on the clubhouse grounds after the ceremony. A casual affair with fly rods welcome, waders acceptable attire, what with the caddis and Baetis mayfly hatches coming into full swing.

  Sean smiled. “Anything for you, darling.”

  “Now you’re mocking me.”

  “No, I’m just having fun with the love of my life.”

  She looked at him a little askance. “There are times I just don’t know what to make of you.”

  “Am I really forty?” Sean said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Confessions in a Virgin Mary

  Of Montana’s four recognizable seasons—mud, fishing, hunting, and skiing—it is mud season, roughly that interval between early March and late May, that moves most slowly and has the least to recommend it. Many weeks had passed after the lion’s demise when Georgeanne Wilkerson received the genetic test results performed on the toes found in the mountain lion’s regurgitation. It was not the news she might have hoped for.

  In a phone call with Martha Ettinger, Wilkerson explained that digestion of genetic material begins in the stomach, not in the small intestine, as was previously believed. The DNA found in the human toes had been degraded by pepsin, a stomach enzyme, to the point where it was no longer useful for comparative purposes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know that’s not what you wanted to hear.”

  “What will I tell her?” Martha asked aloud, after she’d switched off the phone. The question was rhetorical. She’d tell Miriam Ross the truth, that forensic science could neither confirm nor deny that a lion had eaten the flesh of her son. And so the closure the woman desired would remain elusive.

  But Miriam Ross’s personal nightmare was not the mood of the valley. It emerged from the winter darkness as a bear emerges from winter’s sleep, gradually, with blurred eyes and a cautiously snuffing nose—a bit of muck-up around the barn at an hour when none would dare be so bold only weeks before, a long-dormant snowmobile clearing its throat for one last hurrah, a fly rod assembled for the first time in months to catch whitefish for the smoker.

  The boys who played night hockey on the frozen tennis court in Bridger, and who had been forced indoors by the threat of the lion, cleared the snow off the last of the good ice and chose sides for the first time since the rink had frozen, with nothing but bent sticks and testosterone to protect them.

  And so, as the slipstream of routine chased the past into perspective, into a story, the transformation between dark and light, between winter’s dread and spring’s promise, was complete. Perhaps memories would have been longer had the victim been more significant. But who was she, really—only a hooker mourned by no one. If anything, it was the mountain lion’s stature that rose in the weeks following his death. He had given people who led comfortable lives a taste of primal fear, a thrilling glimpse into a time when the land was ruled by tooth and claw and man rolled boulders against the cave mouth and cowered within. And then he had conveniently made his departure, and just in time to pacify the Chamber of Commerce, where the phones were no longer ringing off the hook.

  Life had returned to normal.

  For all, that is, except Buster Garrett, whom Sean bumped into one day at the Ace Hardware. Garrett, with Sean’s blessing, had taken the larger share of the credit for treeing and killing the cat, becoming a minor celebrity in the valley. He’d even been the focus of an online feature in Field & Stream titled “Hunt for a Man-Eater.” Garrett told Sean that he couldn’t stick hi
s head into any bar in southwest Montana without someone standing him a drink. Too bad, he said, that all he drank these days were O’Doul’s near beer and nonalcoholic cocktails. He’d offered to buy Sean one at the bar off the lobby in the Bridger Mountain Cultural Center. Told Sean that Robin, who owned the joint, made the best Virgin Marys in the valley. They each had one. Garrett dabbed at his lips with a napkin.

  “Remember how I told you that our fight made me take a long look at myself, that I started going to AA just a few weeks later?”

  “I remember.”

  “That’s only part of why I turned around. Something happened around that time—I couldn’t forgive myself for it. Changed my life.” He took another drink. “Seven hundred seventy-seven days ago.”

  “You know the exact number?”

  He nodded and stared into his glass. “Seven, seven, seven,” he said. “My wife tells me it’s an angel number. It means I’m going down the right path now. I had been going down the wrong path and this was a low point. Or some mumbo-jumbo. She believes in angels, crystals, all that kind of stuff.”

  “I thought you two had split up.”

  “We did, we didn’t. Ties that bind, you know. We still have a few.”

  “What happened seven hundred seventy-seven days ago?”

  “What happened?” Repeated the words quietly to himself. “What happened is that I created a monster.”

  “No, you slayed the monster. We did.”

  He shook his head. “Do you know Beowulf?”

  “Only that it’s a legend or something.”

  “It’s an epic poem, the oldest written story in English literature. Man versus nature. Beowulf is a hero from a mythical land called in to slay a monster. Monster’s name is Grendel. He kills him, then finds that his job isn’t finished, that in killing one monster he has raised another from its slumber.”