Nevada Barr - Track Of The Cat

Anna believed the truth was, alone was safe. A woman alone would live the longest. Criminals were a lazy bunch. If they weren't, they'd get their MBAs and rob with impunity. They most assuredly wouldn't walk eight hard miles to hide. They'd check into a Motel 6 on the Interstate, watch afternoon T.V. and hope for the best.

What did that leave, she wondered, her eye once again against the viewfinder. Suicide? A bit odd to do one's self in, in full gear in a saw grass swamp. Heart attack? Stroke? Drowning? Lots of ways to die. Suddenly Anna felt fragile.

Evening was settling into the canyon's bottom. Soon she'd be wasting film. Three pictures left on the roll. Careful not to disturb anything, Anna leaned down and drew the curtain of heavy dark hair from Sheila Drury's face and throat.

There it was: another way to die. Oddly, the last and the first she had considered: lion kill. Claw marks cut up from Drury's clavicle to her chin. Puncture wounds-claws or teeth-made neat dark holes above the collarbone. Anna did not doubt that Sheila's neck had been snapped as well. It was the way the big cats made their kills.

For a long moment Anna stood, the dead woman at her feet, oblivious to the gathering darkness. Tears welling from deep inside spilled down her face and dripped from the square line of her jaw.

Now the lions would be hunted down and killed. Now every trigger-happy Texan would blast away at every tawny shadow that flickered in the brush. The government's bounty quotas on predators of domestic livestock would go up. Lions would die and die.

"Damn you, Drury," Anna whispered as ways to obscure the evidence appeared in and were discarded from her mind. "What in hell were you doing here?"

Steeling herself to accept the touch of dead flesh, Anna felt down Drury's jaw and neck, then lifted her arm. Rigor had already passed off. She'd been dead a while. Since sometime Friday afternoon or night, Anna guessed.

Her light trained on the ground, she moved past the body. Above Drury's head were two perfect paw prints. Behind them several feet were two more. Anna measured the distance with her eyes: a big lion.

Soon stars would begin to appear in the silver-gray ribbon of sky overhead. Before the shadowy tracks vanished in the growing gloom, she clicked a couple pictures of the prints and one last shot of the body.

There was no more film; no more to be done till morning. Aware of how desperately tired she was, Anna readjusted her headlamp to light her footsteps and trudged out of the saw grass. It seemed all she could do to drag one foot after the other.

The vultures did not drop down in her wake to resume their meal. Evidently the big birds did not feed at night. Anna was grateful. Not withstanding her appreciation of the food chain, she wasn't sure she could've stood a night listening to its graphic demonstration. The sepulchral snacking would've been unsettling, to say the least.

Wearily, she wondered why the lion hadn't eaten more of its kill, eviscerated it as lions usually did. Something must have frightened it off. Perhaps a hiker unaware that less than fifteen yards away, a corpse lay in the grasses, a lion hunkered by. The canyon was closed but occasionally hikers did wander in.

Surely, in this dry season with game so scarce, the lion would return. It might be nearby, waiting. One of the forsworn gods' little jokes: to have Anna's long-coveted first lion sighting be her last sight on this earth.

Anna didn't know if she was scared or not. She supposed she was because she found herself groping through her pack to curl her fingers around the cold comfort of her.357 Smith & Wesson service revolver. It was hard to be philosophical in the night. There was something too primeval in the closeness of death.

To her surprise, she was hungry. Life reasserting its claim, insisting on its rights and privileges. There was probably food in Drury's pack but Anna wasn't that hungry. Vultures watching a lion watching her hunt for the food their food was carrying: the chain grew too tangled.

Sheila Drury, was she watching as well? Anna didn't have to believe in God to wonder where people's spirits went when they died. Wonder if hers would go there, too.

Ghost stories from childhood crept uninvited into her thoughts and she found herself afraid to look toward the saw grass, afraid she'd see, not a lion, but a floating wraith.

With a physical shake of her shoulders, Anna pushed the night's terrors from her. Since Zach had died, and every night had been a night alone, she learned to put away fear.

Those nights, she remembered, she'd prayed for a ghost- a voice, a touch, anything. There was nothing then. And nothing now. Except a hungry night and, perhaps, a hungry lion.

Darkness closed on this rattling of thoughts. Overhead, the stream of stars grew deeper. Cold air settled into the canyon, flowed around her where she sat, knees drawn up,.357 by her side, staring into the melting mirror of the pool.

At some point Anna dug out the four Ritz crackers, the last chocolate pudding, and half a handful of gorp from her backpack and ate them. At some point after moonrise, when a light unseasonal rain began to fall, she unrolled her sleeping bag and crawled into it. At some point, though she would've denied it, Anna slept.

WlNClNG at the sting of water in the paper-thin saw grass cuts on her hands and arms, Anna slid down in the bath. Not a great bath by any means. Great baths had gone out with claw-foot tubs. The passion for showers that had replaced them with prefab white plastic boxes at the bottom of featureless stalls was incomprehensible to Anna.

In New York she'd lain for hours in the tub in the kitchen of a five-floor walk-up in Hell's Kitchen making pictures from the water stains on the ceiling and waiting for Zach to come home and make the wait worth her while.

Always he came home. Sometimes he made love to her. Sometimes he didn't.

Rogelio always did. Whether she wanted him to or not. Anna wondered what time it was, wondered if he would come, wondered if she cared, and took another sip of wine. Mondavi Red, her vin ordinaire. It was cheap, came in big bottles, traveled well in a backpack, and didn't taste half bad. Sipping again, she enjoyed the feeling of heat within and heat without unknotting her mind.

Piedmont sat just outside the bathroom door. His eyes glowed red in the light of the single candle. His thick, yellow-striped tail was curled neatly over his forepaws. Piedmont liked the sound of running water. Anna thought it was because he was probably born of a feral mother near the banks of the Black River somewhere down by Rattlesnake Springs. He would never come near the tub though. Perhaps because he'd half drowned in a flash flood. After the monsoon's worst cloudburst the July before, Anna had found him tangled in dead branches in the crotch of a tree.

The cat closed his eyes: going into his river trance.

Anna's gaze moved to the candlelight on the bath water, then, idly, down the length of her body. At thirty-nine she still retained her boyish figure but her skin didn't fit quite so snugly as it once had. Elbows, knees, neck, wherever the bending went on, there were wrinkles. Her muscles-better defined than when she was twenty-were beginning to look ropey. Still, it was a good body. Even in the face of the changing physical fashions touted in the glossy magazines, she had always liked it fine. A strong body: easy to maintain.

The water was unknotting her hair, unweaving the copper and the silver strands from the single braid she kept them locked in and spreading them around her shoulders like seaweed.

Ophelia drowned, Anna thought, or, in the New York theatrical agents' parlance of Molly's Friday ten o'clock: "An old Ophelia type."

A dead woman.