Carolyn McSparren - Safe At Home

Suddenly she was all mouse again, anxious and subdued.

“The scent of meat woke her, not you. Ah, m’dear,” Mace said over his shoulder, “might we be ready for a bite of breakfast?” He smiled over at Tala. “I’d say you’ve been christened Baby.” The lioness stared at him with narrow, yellow eyes.

“Watch it, Mace,” Pete said. “A hungry cat is a dangerous cat. Your dictum, remember? First time I went to work at the zoo.”

“This particular baby, however, is missing both her front claws and her top left incisor,” Mace said. “She could still kill me, but she’d have to work at it.”

“What?” Tala asked. She looked from the older man to the younger. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“No reason to,” Pete told her. “Didn’t make much difference last night. But it means she’s been somebody’s pet—inasmuch as a lion can ever be a pet.”

“But people will still try,” Mace said, neatly arranging bits of meat and bone in a steel bucket. The lioness rumbled in anticipation.

“Surely they know better,” Tala said. “I mean, look at the size of her, and you say she’s still young.”

Pete shrugged. “They watch a National Geographic special or an episode of Nova and see a bunch of cute lion cubs playing around on-screen and they think how great it would be to have something like that. So they pick up the phone and order one.”

“Order one? Like a pizza?”

“Not quite that simple, but even now that the government has cracked down on importing exotic animals, there are plenty of places where you can buy a lion cub born in the States and have it brought to you, if you’ve got the money, that is.”

“But it’s illegal to own exotic animals, isn’t it?” she said. “In Tennessee, I mean.”

“Sure is,” Pete agreed, forking another flake of hay toward Belle. “Some people think they’re above the law. Of course, in some places lions are used to police marijuana patches and other illegal operations. Scarier than dogs.”

“My word,” she exclaimed. “You mean she might have been guarding something up by the Hollow? What about the deer? How could you keep her from roaming to hunt?”

“Maybe you couldn’t. Maybe she got out and her owner shot her when he couldn’t get her back.”

“I can’t believe that. I grew up in the Hollow, and I wander all over it in the summertime. There’s not enough flat land to grow a decent crop of collard greens, much less marijuana.”

“All the easier to hide the plants in, m’dear,” Mace said. “You’d be surprised what some people will get up to in the name of money. Still, I wouldn’t think anyone would have declawed her or defanged her for use as a guard. More likely she was a pet that got too big and was dumped too far from home to find her way back.”

“And then shot?”

“Possibly by someone who thought she was a cougar,” Pete said. “She’s the right color.”

“But they’re protected,” Tala said. “And terribly rare. My husband was a warden and spent a good deal of time in the woods, but even he’d never seen one. I certainly haven’t. As we said, Tennessee has awfully strict laws about exotic and protected animals. People were surprised you were able to get permission to bring in your elephants.”

“You should have seen the hoops I had to jump through,” Pete said. “And the girls aren’t going to eat the neighbor’s poodle—or the neighbor’s kid, come to that.”

“No. But they might stomp him, mightn’t they?” Tala asked.

“Highly unlikely. I only take female Indian elephants. They can be a nuisance and certainly get cranky sometimes, but now that they can move around the place freely, they enjoy life—possibly for the first time since they stopped nursing on their mothers. And I’ve gone to great pains with the twelve-foot fences to ensure they don’t go rampaging through the soybean fields around here.”

Mace held the steel bucket out to Pete. “Here. Feed the lioness.”

Pete felt Tala’s breath on his shoulder as he turned away from her and walked over to the lioness’s enclosure. The cat raised her body on her right paw and tried to stand. She made a deep trilling sound in the back of her throat, then let out a full-throated roar that shook the steel walls.

“Hold on,” Pete said. He set the bucket down in front of the door to the enclosure, opened it a few inches and used the end of his pitchfork to shove the bucket inside. Then he quickly closed and locked the door.

The cat instantly swiped at the bucket with her muzzle and knocked it over so that its contents spilled on the concrete in front of her blanket. She collapsed in front of it and began to eat noisily.

Pete stood and felt Tala’s hand on his arm. Her fingers felt warm and gentle.

“She’s hungry. That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s a good sign.”

“What happens now?” Tala asked.

“Damned if I know. We could be in big trouble just having her here. I need to call the Fish and Wildlife people. Find out what they want to do with her. You know anybody over there I could talk to?”

“I guess so. But please, don’t call yet. I know they’ll drag her off. Maybe they’ll shoot her!” Tala’s dark eyes were enormous.

“Look, she obviously belongs to somebody. Illegally, but maybe somebody’s looking for her.”

“The same somebody who’s already tried to shoot her! The one who bought that cute little cub a couple of years ago. You can’t abandon her.”

Maybe he’d been wrong about her being a wimp, Pete thought. Plenty of fight in her now.

“I can’t risk the sanctuary either.” He gestured toward the girls, who were watching the interchange avidly, as though they understood every word.

“She needs sanctuary, too. Just because she’s not an elephant…”

“I am not licensed as a big-cat sanctuary.”

“Somebody must be.”

He took a deep breath. “Dammit, I can’t take on new problems. I have my hands full with three elephants. Do you have any idea how much it costs to feed even one cat that big?”

“How much?” Tala asked.

“What?”

“How much does it cost to feed a big cat?”

Pete glanced over at his father, who had leaned his rear end against the end of the examining table, crossed his ankles, and was regarding them as though they were playing mixed doubles at Wimbledon. “Dad?”

“Nebraska Zoo Food charges ten bucks per ten-pound feed. Normally she should have one a day, but skinny as she is, and with her wound, I’d say two a day plus extra vitamins would be more like it.”

“That’s a dollar a pound, two thousand dollars a ton. Plus shipping and handling?” She looked at Mace.

Mace shook his head. “No tax either. Animal food is not taxable.”

“I know that. We used to raise pigs.” She turned back to Pete. “You haven’t told me how much the surgery and drugs and things are going to cost.”

Pete had already decided not to charge for his services. But he needed to convince her that keeping the lioness was not an option. “At least a thousand dollars,” he said, and stared Mace down as though daring the other man to contradict him. “Even if we were to keep her until she’s well, we’d have to construct a decent enclosure for her. And she’s got to be kept clean, medicated. It’s a hell of a job.”

“We…I…have an account at the co-op in town. They have heavy-duty construction fencing and steel posts.”

“Somebody’d still have to build it. And that would mean letting them know we’ve got a lion on our hands. Besides, that doesn’t solve the problem of what to do with her in the long run.”

“Don’t you know any sanctuaries for big cats?” Tala asked, desperation in her voice.