Nevada Barr: Track Of The Cat

What was left of Sheila Drury had been wrapped in garbage bags. The park, bless its optimistic little heart, didn't boast a body bag. The green shiny bundle that had once been the Dog Canyon Ranger had been loaded onto a Stokes litter- a rolling wire-mesh stretcher-and trundled, carried, and wrestled down the stone-filled canyons.

Paul had been consummately professional. Anna had tried to appear that way though a hundred exceedingly tasteless jokes had stampeded through her mind during the long trek out. The seasonals-two naturalists and a ranger-who had come to assist were mostly quiet and sensible. The naturalists were both men-Craig Eastern and Manny Mankins. Cheryl Light was the seasonal law enforcement ranger.

A high percentage of National Park Service employees were summer seasonals. Winter found Guadalupe Mountains down to a skeleton staff. Most of the seasonals were highly educated. A number had advanced degrees. Some had families to support. Yet they left jobs and homes and husbands and wives for the privilege of living in a dormitory and working for six dollars and fifty-four cents an hour, no retirement, no benefits, and rent deducted automatically.

Many hoped, one day, to become permanent but the openings were few and closely guarded by tangled thickets of red tape. Anna knew Manny had been trying to get on permanently since his son was born four years before.

Craig Eastern's situation was a little different. He was a herpetologist on a two-year detail from the University of Texas at El Paso. Anna had been surprised Paul had brought Craig up Middle McKittrick. A shaky, easily alarmed man in his early thirties, Eastern was more at home with rattlesnakes, lizards, and toads than he was with people. He viewed most of humanity askance. The world was being destroyed by humans. The Guadalupe Mountains were the last bastion of untrammeled earth.

Anna had to admit that under pressure he bore up well, admirably even. Seeing Craig lift the corpse onto the Stokes, Anna had noticed how muscular he was. His nervousness made him seem like a little man, but he was far from it. Craig Eastern had been working out with weights-for years by the look of him.

Manny Mankins was the opposite. The wiry naturalist was a man of small stature who seemed a great deal bigger than he was. "Bantam cock," Anna's mother-in-law would have called him.

Anna had fought fire alongside the skinny, sandy-haired man for seventeen days. He'd worked everyone into the ground. That was on the Foolhen fire in Idaho. They'd slammed fire line twenty-two hours straight. Manny was still cracking jokes, swinging a Pulaski when the rest of the crew was barely scraping theirs over the duff.

The bath was growing tepid. Anna pushed the hot water on with her big toe, poured herself another glass of cabernet from the bottle on the toilet seat. Settling back in physical content, she let the image of the seasonal law enforcement ranger drift behind her half-closed eyes.

Cheryl Light was new to the park, entering on duty only a couple of weeks before. Stocky-around five-foot-five and maybe a hundred and fifty pounds-with shoulder-length permed hair. Anna placed her age somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five. With woodsy types it was hard to tell. Their skin wrinkled prematurely from sun and weather but their vitality was ageless.

Usually Cheryl laughed a lot. The kind of laugh that made others laugh too, even before they knew what the joke was. There'd been no laughter that day.

Cheryl had carried Drury's pack and, over the rough spots, one end of the Stokes litter. The woman was powerful but that's not what stuck in Anna's mind. What had impressed her was the unobtrusive way Cheryl had supported, eased, bolstered, comforted, bucked-up everybody around her. Apparently she did it without effort or even knowledge that she was doing it. A well-timed smile, a touch, a proffered drink from her water bottle.

Anna envied it. Kindness-true, unadulterated kindness-was beyond her.

If Cheryl's kindness was legitimate, Anna's resident cynic interjected the customary sour note. Unadulterated, altruistic kindness? It went against the grain. Still and all, it was kindness.

"I think too much to be kind," she excused herself to a disinterested cat. Had Cheryl found a way to laugh about it by now? Though she and Craig and Manny were all business at the scene, there would be jokes tonight after a few beers and, maybe, for Craig, some nightmares. Probably Anna wouldn't hear much about it and Paul, nothing. Everyone pretended there was no wall between the permanent National Park Service employees and the seasonals. And everyone knew there was. A veritable bureaucratic Jericho with no Joshua in sight. Everyone was transient. Seasonals came and went like stray cats. Even permanent employees seldom stayed in one place more than a few years, not if they wanted to advance their careers. People who "homesteaded"-stayed in one park too long-tended to come to think of the place as theirs; they developed their own ideas of how it should be run. The NPS didn't care for that. It made people less tractable, less willing to follow party line dictated from half a continent away.

Karl Johnson, the man who tended Guadalupe's stock, had been with the Park Service for fifteen years yet he'd never been promoted higher than GS-5, the grade of a beginning seasonal. His love of these mountains had cost him a lot. Sometimes Anna wondered if it wasn't worth it. Personally, the dashing from place to place made for unsettled lives; professionally, for duplicated paperwork and unfinished projects.

And the death of Sheila Drury, was it finished? Anna had been amazed at how little time the official investigation had taken. Benjamin Jakey, a sheriff out of El Paso and one of his deputies-a Pillsbury Doughboy look-alike who'd never stopped puffing from the hike in-had done some perfunctory poking around. "Yep. Lion got her. Surprised it don't happen more often," Sheriff Jakey said and the deputy puffed portentously. Jakey had looked through the grass, gone over the sketches Anna had made of the scene. The deputy shot a couple rolls of film and told Anna they wouldn't need hers.

That had been about it. The Feds would have it now-the park was federal land. But they would rubber-stamp it, Anna assumed.

Everyone would be surprised, here in the "wilderness," that lion kills didn't happen more often. "More often," Anna said aloud. More often than what. More often than never? Than once a decade? What? She must remember to find out come morning. And come morning, she had to write a witness statement for the county coroner, Nina Dietz.

It was she they had delivered the body to. Looking more like Aunt Bea than the keeper of the dead, she'd been waiting with the ambulance in the McKittrick Visitors Center parking lot. She'd ridden with Paul as he'd driven the body away.

No more Sheila Drury.

And, one day, no more Anna Pigeon. It was a sobering thought. Anna took a deep drink of her wine.

The front door opened, then clicked softly shut again. Piedmont slunk away to hide under the kitchen table. Anna heard a tape drop into the boom-box: Guy Clark's "Rita Ballou."

Rogelio.

Now, for a while, there would be other things to think about.

"Ana." A tap on the bathroom door and it swung inward. Anna liked the way he said her name. The Spanish "Ana," soft, beseeching. She liked his rebelliousness. They'd met while she was on special detail for the US Forest Service in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. Anna had arrested him for chaining himself to the blade of a bulldozer scheduled to cut road into a timber sale. He'd smiled at her and he'd winked. She liked the way he looked. The candlelight glanced off the flat planes of his face, threw his eyes into deep shadow, and glinted off the rich brown of his curling hair. Roger Cooper. Rogelio. A displaced Irish/Israeli from Chicago conducting his own brand of desert warfare.