Nevada Barr: Track Of The Cat

Outside, in the shade of the spreading pine branches, their backs against a boulder, he and Anna bottle-fed the little lions.

Anna was transfixed. Karl's valley was indeed a magical place. "Was that you I heard whistling the day I rode Gideon up after their mother was shot?" she asked.

Karl nodded. He kissed the nursing kitten between its ears.

"Were you whistling Tender Shepherd'?"

"I knew it was you'd come for the babies. I wanted to tell you they were okay. But you couldn't know." He looked around his valley.

"No," Anna said. Karl's hospital was most illegally built and operated on Forest Service land. And the official park policy was to let injured animals fend for themselves or, if seen to be suffering, or if dangerous or offensive to visitors, to be dispatched. "Let nature take its course," Anna quoted.

"I'm nature, too," Karl replied. "This is my course."

Anna didn't argue. "The ketimine is for the animals?"

"Sometimes I have to put them out for a while so I can help them."

"How do you get them up here? This valley is like a fortress."

"I carry them," Karl said simply.

Anna was reminded of Father Flannigan's boys: "He ain't heavy, he's my brother."

"I can carry as much as three hundred pounds sometimes."

Anna believed him. He'd carried, on his back, everything the animals needed. And he'd carried them. "The deer?" Anna asked. "I saw them as I came in."

"Chris and Al. They got to stay here always now," he answered sadly. "Chris is lame and the littler one is blind. Outside, the cats and coyotes would get them. Maybe they'll come here and eat them but maybe not."

"Chris and Al?"

Karl said only: "The eyes." Anna understood. The does' eyes, so dark and trusting, were very like Christina Walters's.

"What are the kittens called?" she asked as he refilled the bottles.

Karl looked shy. On so big a man the expression was almost laughable but Anna didn't laugh. "Annabelle and Annalee."

"Anna."

"You came for them when they were left," he said. "They can play here," Karl added as the kittens, finally full, tumbled off their laps.

The kitten Anna held caught its claw in her shirt and began to struggle. Karl expertly squeezed the paw's pad and detached the claw from the fabric. "They're so little, they're not good at retracting their claws yet," he said. The gesture triggered something in Anna's mind. A connection she should be making and wasn't.

Karl gathered up both kittens.

"You must feed them more than once a week," Anna said as she followed him back toward the enclosure under the rock.

"While they're little I'll come every day. I don't like people seeing my truck all the time in McKittrick so they might guess. I drive up back of the Lincoln and come in there most times."

Anna drew a quick map in her head. A two-and-a-half-hour drive and a two-hour hike every day after work to feed his kittens. "When do you sleep?" she asked with a laugh.

"When they're bigger," he replied.

"Karl-" Something in her voice made him stop, turn, and look at her. "Your secret is safe with me. I won't tell anybody. Ever." Driven by the remarkable innocence in his face, Anna crossed her heart.

"I know that you wouldn't, so I put down the shovel," he said. It didn't seem odd to Anna. A man might be willing to face a gun armed only with a shovel to keep his family safe.

Karl let Anna feed the fawn. He had named her Yolanda after Manny's fawn-skinned wife. "Is this the fawn Manny radioed was caught in the fence?" Anna asked, remembering. "The one they couldn't find?"

"I got there first." He sounded triumphant.

A triumph deserved, Anna thought. Harland would've dispatched the little animal. It had been injured and it was too young to live on its own. Karl had worked it free of the wire and spirited it away. Anna guessed the blood she had sent to the Roswell lab had come from the body of the creature she held in her arms.

A low growl set Yolanda to struggling. The hairs on the back of Anna's neck prickled.

Karl gathered the little mule deer protectively to his chest as Anna turned and squinted into the recesses of the last and largest of the sheltered cages. A grown cougar lay in the shadows, his unwinking yellow eyes upon her. "My God," Anna breathed.

Karl nuzzled the fawn, started it nursing again. "He was shot in the hind end. I wouldn't've found him except I was looking after Manny's dog when they were gone and Dinky went with me to the West Side and set to barking. He's going to heal up soon."

"You found him on the West Side?"

"Out in the Patterson Hills by PX Well, way over there. I was checking the rain gauge."

"What will you do with him?"

"I'll put him to sleep, then I'll take him up onto the ridge where the babies' momma was killed and look after him till he wakes up good."

"What's his name?" Anna asked.

"Fluffy," Karl replied. Anna looked at him over her shoulder and he smiled broadly. "It's a joke we have," he explained.

Fluffy stretched, rose gracefully to his feet. Behind him, near where the stone wall met the grotto floor, there was a gleam of green, the color of a glowworm, but close to a foot long.

"What's that?" Anna asked, pointing.

"I cut it off Fluff's neck when I took off the radio collar. It's one of those things you shake up and then they light. Kids play with them in the towns."

"Ah… Fluffy… was one of our radio-collared lions?"

"I cut it off him and busted it so nobody'd come following the signal to see why he'd stayed in one spot so long. You can have it back," Karl offered.

Anna smiled and shook her head. Anything Karl busted was apt to stay busted. "This is where you were the night Sheila was killed, wasn't it?"

"I came up special. I thought what with that first lightning and the Forest Service flying all over looking for strikes, it would scare Ally. She was just little and blind."

"Lightning. Of course," Anna said. The pieces of all the puzzles were beginning to fit together into a single picture. "Karl, do you remember what day it was that you shoed Gabe, Sheila's horse, over in Dog Canyon?"

Karl began a long and laborious thought process. The fawn wriggled free and stood bandy-legged next to him sucking his fingers. "I got everybody new shoes in June. Mules first as they have such a lot of hard work. Then our guys. It'd've been after the fourteenth because they hadn't their good shoes on for the Van Horn parade."

Anna waited but that was as far as Karl could take that line of thought by himself. "Was it done before the first lightning storm when you came up here to be with Ally?"

Again Karl thought. "Yes," he said with certainty.

"So the fifteenth or the sixteenth," Anna said. Karl looked impressed with her reasoning.

Annabelle and Annalee skirmished for their attention then, and Anna watched Karl play with them, keeping the injured fawn safe from the fray.

Anna's mother-in-law, just turned eighty-one, said when she was a young woman she valued intelligence over all other human attributes. Now that she was older she valued kindness.

Anna was learning.

TWO days later, driving down Dark Canyon, the image of Karl's hanging valley floated pleasantly into Anna's mind. One mystery at least had been solved: she knew now what the inside of Karl's brain looked like. Not an attic full of well-cared-for toys, but a garden full of well-cared-for creatures.

She doubted her next stop would have such a pastoral outcome.

On Queens Highway she turned left, up through the Lincoln. She'd timed it so she would arrive at Paulsen's ranch just after lunch. Anna hoped to catch him at his house. Chasing over twenty-five thousand acres of lonely desert in search of the man didn't appeal to her in the least.