Jenna Kernan - Hunter Moon

“Look,” she said, finding an interesting track at the edge of a drying puddle. “Dog.”

“Coyote,” he said from some forty feet off.

She gripped her rifle tight as she squatted to examine the print. Why hadn’t she learned to track?

“This way,” Clay said, and she followed him past the cut of dirt, up the steep incline sprinkled with quaking aspen. She glanced up at sunlight shining its last rays on the golden leaves and smiled at the beauty. With her focus elsewhere, she did not see Clay stop and nearly ran right into him. He stood with hands on hips, staring down. She heard the buzz of many flies before her attention snapped to the three cows all lying motionless in the tall grass. Her cows.

Izzie gave a little cry and tried to rush past him. But he halted her with one hand, effortlessly bringing her back to his side.

“That your brand?” he asked.

She glanced at the flank of the closest cow and recognized the two interlocking circles.

“Yes. Are they dead?”

The question was answered by their absolute stillness. It was two heifers and one yearling. Their legs stuck out straight as if they had been stuffed and then toppled, and their eyes were a ghostly white. Izzie calculated her herd. One hundred and eleven in all, minus one to Clay, minus three to death was a hundred and eight. But that included the fifty-one now impounded. She glanced around, searching for more dead cows. This was a disaster.

She threw up her hands in frustration. “What are they doing way up here?”

“You got a fence between this and the upper pasture?”

“Too much ground to cover. They mostly just stay together in the pasture.”

Clay pointed at the grass. “Coyotes chased them.”

Izzie fumed and lifted her rifle to her shoulder, searching for the coyotes. Then her brain reengaged, and she realized coyotes couldn’t take down two heifers. They’d been after the yearling.

Clay rested a hand on her shoulder and gave a squeeze before releasing her. She turned from her dead cattle to glance up at him.

“Coyotes didn’t do that! There’s not a mark on them.”

He nodded his head and glanced back at the carcasses. Flies buzzed and landed in their nostrils and on their filmy white eyes. She looked at the lolling tongues and noted the saliva was a neon-green color. She’d never seen anything like it before.

“What’s that?” she asked, her voice a whisper.

He shook his head. “Not sure. Sick?”

The very thought of that caused a surge of terror to crash through her like a wave, the impact rocking her on her feet. Clay steadied her with a gentle clasping of her elbow. She shook him off, looking for a fight.

“My cows aren’t sick!” she said, more to herself than to him. She could think of no greater catastrophe than sick cows. But her eyes locked on the green sputum. Oh, Lord help her if they had something contagious. The tribe would order them slaughtered. She’d be left with nothing. And without the cattle, she couldn’t maintain the permits. She gripped the rifle tight and tried to think.

Clay withdrew his phone from his front pocket.

She clasped his wrist, feeling the cool skin and the roping tendons beneath.

“Wait a minute.”

He did, but his face was granite.

“Give me a second.” She glanced around as if someone would come to her rescue. But no one ever did that. She stared up at Clay. “Someone chased my herd onto the road. Now they are trying to make it look like my cattle are sick. It’s another setup.”

“Maybe. Need a vet to know for sure.”

She gripped the forearm of the hand that held the phone.

“Don’t call them,” she begged.

His eyes widened, and his mouth gaped. Then his look went cold and his posture still. Her cheeks burned with shame. Had she just asked him to break the law?

He lifted his arm, and she let her numb fingers slip from his sleeve as the shame burned her up with the last of the sunlight.

Clay drew up a number and pressed the call button. A moment later she heard a familiar voice. “Gabe? It’s Clay. I’ve got a problem.”

Chapter Five

Clay and Kino had gone over the tracks using floodlights. Kino agreed with what Clay saw. Gabe was busy directing the investigation, but he took a look at some of the more important signs. All the Cosen boys had learned to read sign from both their father and from their maternal grandfather. Reading sign was a part of their inheritance and the skill that had made their ancestors so valuable to the US Cavalry. And Clay’s ancestors had found Geronimo. It was why their tribe was still on their ancestral land, an anomaly for most Native peoples.

Some things never changed because now Apache trackers were in demand with Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs and, lately, the US military. Clyne had spent six months as a special instructor in Afghanistan teaching elite military units how to track terrorists in the desert. And Clay and Kino had only just returned from the Sonora Desert, where they had tracked drug traffickers entering over the Mexican border.

Clay was cold, hungry and surly by the time Gabe got the go-ahead to call the Office of the State Veterinarian, from tribal officer Arnold Tessay. Clearly, Izzie had forgotten her offer to buy him dinner. Right now, he could eat that frozen pizza cold.

Both Tessay and Clyne arrived well past dark. The tribe’s president was in Washington testifying before the House of Representatives on Indian Affairs. Gabe also had called Donner, since he managed the tribal livestock and needed to be made aware that there might be some new illness killing cows on the Rez. Gabe told Clay that Donner was calling both Pizarro, who covered the tribe’s cattle business, and Soto, who oversaw livestock health. Donner and Pizarro arrived together. Clay knew from his boss’s angry stride that he was pissed. He was a big man, nearly as tall as Clay, though twenty years and forty pounds separated them. His face was fleshy and had been pulled by time and gravity. Behind him came Boone Pizarro. By contrast, Pizarro’s skin stretched tight as a drumhead over his angular face, and his body was thin with ropy muscles. Clay heard that his wife preferred the casinos to cooking, but whatever the reason, Pizarro had a perpetual hungry look. Both men stopped before him, expressions stern.

“I don’t remember sending you over here again,” Donner said to Clay.

“No, sir. Ms. Nosie asked me to check for sign. Her herd didn’t break loose. The fences were cut.”

Pizarro’s mouth went thin. “Cutting is a serious charge.”

Thankfully Gabe stepped up at that moment. “They were cut, all right.”

“And you didn’t see this earlier?” said Donner.

Izzie interjected now. “Maybe it was the bullets that distracted him, or being pulled in for questioning.”

Donner cast her a sour look. While Pizarro laughed, Clay gave her a slow shake of his head. He didn’t need that kind of help. His boss was angry enough. Plus sarcasm might not be the best option against a man who had the authority to quarantine her entire herd. Beside him, Izzie fumed but said no more.

“You got any suspects?” Pizarro asked Gabe.

Tessay moved closer to Clyne, making Izzie the lone woman in a circle of men. She always had been, he realized, as a rancher and before that with her two brothers and father. But Clay noticed they’d closed Izzie out. He stepped back, and she wedged in beside him.

“Nope,” said Gabe, his posture relaxed. “Just starting the investigation.”

If he was stressed by the late hour or the presence of his superiors from the tribal council, he gave no sign and instead only radiated confidence and authority. Clay admired that. Gabe was a keen observer of everything, and he was very good at noticing inconsistencies. Perhaps that was why he went into law enforcement. Or it could have been to make up for their father. That was a tough legacy.