P Deutermann - The Cat Dancers

“‘Extirpated’?” he asked.

“Polite word for hunted out of existence. There was one study done by a researcher named Culbertson in 1977 that suggests there were three to six mountain lions living in the park. They were probably descendants of the original nineteenth-century population. But nowadays we think that what people are seeing, if not a bobcat, might be escaped captive-bred western cats.”

“Is captive breeding legal?” Cam asked.

“Not in North Carolina, but it’s legal to own western cougars in Tennessee. The cats that have been caught or found along the East Coast states are usually defanged or declawed, which would indicate captive breeding.”

“But you do get sightings up here?”

“Sure, every year, a half-dozen or so. But no pictures and no sign whenever we investigate the area of the sightings. And some of the people doing the reporting wouldn’t know a mountain lion from a mountain goat.”

“How big could one get?”

“A hundred and twenty to two hundred and twenty pounds. Six, seven feet long. A rear pad print ought to be eight to ten inches across, or larger.”

He thought about the mark in the frost on the hood of his truck. “Big enough to take down a man.”

“Oh, heck yes,” she said. “Think about playing with your house cat on the sofa until it gets annoyed and starts working those hind legs. Now scale that up twenty times and visualize a two-hundred-pounder landing on you from a tree, knocking you flat on your back on the ground, hard enough to take your breath away, seizing your whole face in its mouth, clamping its fangs through your cheeks and into your sinuses, its front claws stripping all the meat off your baby back ribs while its hind claws spread your intestines all over the trail. All in about five seconds, with the appropriate sound effects.”

“I think I need a bathroom,” Cam said.

“Exactly. And they can do all that from the ground or from a run, too, as cyclists are discovering in not-so-remote parts of California. Ever seen the films of a cheetah overtaking a gazelle? A mountain lion can do that, too, just for not quite as long a distance. They mainly feed on deer, which are not slow animals.”

“And if this happened to a human, what would the cat do with the, um, remains?”

“Consume all the soft and squishy bits first, then drag the corpse to a hiding place, stash it under a pile of brush or up in a tree, and come back for seconds and thirds until everything was gone. Arms and legs would get carried back to cubs in the den if it was a female. Major bones crunched for marrow. Skulls emptied.”

Cam tried to push away the grisly images she was conjuring up. “Would they be easy to track?”

She gave him an appraising look. “Track? I think it’s your turn, Lieutenant. What’s this all about?”

He told her about the stories of cat dancers, reiterating most of what the large lady at Carter’s Trading Post had told him.

She started shaking her head about two-thirds of the way through his summation. “Very, very unlikely,” she said. “These are highly secretive nocturnal animals. You’d almost have to know where it was denning up and then work back around its hunting range. And even then

…”

“Then-what?”

“Well, these cats are interesting. They’re first-class hunters and even better ambushers. Highly tuned senses-hearing, smell, night vision, footfall vibrations, and just cat sense. You tried tracking a mountain lion without specially trained dogs? The cat would turn that game around right about sunset and you’d probably end up as dinner.”

“How about a really good tracker? Indian-good?”

She shrugged. “It’s possible, I guess. But I wouldn’t try anything remotely like it. Following a bear would be less dangerous than following a panther. And all this just for a picture? No way.”

He’d run out of questions, and as much as he’d have liked to have spent some more time with the beautiful Dr. Goode, he knew he should cut it off. He thanked her very much and asked how he could find some of the better guides in the area.

“Yellow Pages?” she suggested with a smile.

“I knew that,” he said.

Cam spent the rest of the day dropping by the various guide and expedition shops in the towns of Lore and Trailwood, learning little. That evening, he went for a short walk to exercise the dogs. It was short because darkness came suddenly and the temperature dropped right along with the light. He fed the dogs, left them in the cabin, stoked the woodstove, and went back into town around seven o’clock to find something to eat. The obvious central attraction was a log cabin lodge affair with wraparound porches. The place advertised mountain cooking, whatever that meant.

Inside, the place was divided into two main rooms, separated by the kitchen area. The smaller room was for dining and the larger contained a well-attended bar. There were two people in the dining room, but more like twenty in the bar, men and women. It was complete with jukebox, tables for two and four, a small dance floor, a place in the corner for a live combo, and a forty-foot-long polished hardwood bar. Cam took a stool at the bar, looked over the surprisingly good scotch selection, and ordered a Maccallan on one rock from one of the very busy bartenders.

He finished his scotch, covered his tab, and headed for the dining room. As he did so, three Park Service rangers in uniform came through the front door, and one of them was the lovely Dr. Goode. She smiled and waved in his direction as they headed for the bar, causing one of the young men with her to give him a suspicious once-over. He waved back and then let the waitress take him to a table.

As he was finishing dinner, the rangers left. A few minutes later, Mary Ellen Goode came back in and headed over. He started to get up, but she waved him down and slipped into a chair.

“Had dinner?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I’ll eat later.” She looked around for a moment to see if anyone was watching them. “Look, I’ve been thinking about your inquiry. Is this serious stuff?”

He told her about the chair, and then said only that a suspect had mentioned the term cat dancers as being somehow connected to the executions.

“Connected how?” she asked.

“Don’t know. Didn’t know what the term actually meant until the lady at the store told me. But since there aren’t any lions, I guess I’m going to declare defeat and go home.”

“Well,” she said, staring down at the table for a moment. “That is the official Park Service line. But…”

He finished eating, wiped his face, and pushed his plate and silverware aside. “Go on.”

“A ranger I used to date two years ago told me the same story once. In fact, he was thinking of opening a file on it, except he thought headquarters would laugh. He thought that it might be real, and that the people doing it were dangerous.”

“I saw a ranger packing a belt and a gun last night,” he said. “We don’t associate our national parks with dangerous people. You know, park rangers are all about warm and fuzzy bunny lectures.”

Her face clouded. “We have a lot of sworn officers now,” she said. “Two years ago, some bikers from Atlanta came up into our park and set up a crystal-meth lab in a camper. Two of our rangers went to investigate the smell, and the bastards gunned them down when they knocked on the door. One of them was Joel Hatch, my fiance.”

“Oops,” Cam said. “Sorry.”

“Well, bad things happen to good people, don’t they? The good news is that an Atlanta field office special team caught up with them in a bar in Blue Ridge, Georgia. Apparently, there was ‘resistance.’”

Cam nodded. “Resistance is good,” he said. “Saves everyone a lot of time and effort. But I’m sorry for your loss.” He wanted to tell her about Annie, then decided to let it go.