Читать книгу Spirit Walk - Jay Treiber - Страница 14

Seven

Kevin had come to understand how one often sees the folly in seemingly casual actions, and he had spent countless miserable hours agonizing over a number of ill-advised decisions he’d made that long-ago weekend. Leaving Amanda Monahan to tend her deer that day was one of them. For the last half hour, he had coaxed the temperamental bitch mule up a rocky trail to what he thought was the agreed-upon horse gate. The whole way there, he’d measured each word he and Amanda had exchanged and found himself embarrassed and confused. Even then he’d regretted every decision—not helping her with the deer, what he’d chosen to say to her, the fact that he didn’t stay longer—all of it like a tickle in the back of his throat. When he found the horse gate, he sat leaning against one of the stay posts, hoping she would come riding up on Dunk. He had just opened the plastic on his second ham sandwich, when he spotted Bonny trotting toward him through the grass about a hundred yards down canyon. She’d apparently left her master and followed him and Sally.

“What are you doing here, huh?”

The dog lowered her head, waggling her body submissively at the affection in his voice. She sidled up to him and he scratched her neck. “Where’s Mandi, huh? Is she behind you?”

Kevin stood and looked down canyon the way he had come. No movement. He took another bite of his sandwich and reached down and scratched the dog’s head. “I bet she lost you taking that deer back to the trucks,” he said, half to the dog, half to himself.

The dog was whimpering then, sitting expectantly before him, her tail sweeping the ground, the same way his Lab at home acted when she needed outside. “What’s wrong with you?” he said. He tossed the remaining corner of sandwich on the ground in front of her. She seemed surprised at the gesture, nosing at the bread and meat a moment before licking it up and swallowing it. Still, the expectant look, the whimpering, the wagging tail.

Kevin held out his hands. “I don’t have any more, see?” She took a hop backward, a sort of buck, and yipped at him. The dog wanted him to follow her. He’d heard the baying from the hounds earlier and was inexperienced enough in lion hunting that he didn’t know quite what to make of it. It could have been the dogs sounded like that when they pushed up a jackrabbit, and Amanda hadn’t been around for him to ask. But now he suspected the baying had meant something more and that Bonny wanted to join in the hunt. Amanda was probably with the rest of the party, and he’d be left out.

“Okay, Bonny,” he said, untying his mule and mounting up. “Let’s see what you’re so worried about.”

Though she took him a bit further south than where he’d heard the other dogs, he followed her, about a quarter mile through the bottom of a short, rocky canyon. It was there in the sandy bottom that he spotted the tracks. He dismounted and called back the dog, who quickly complied. Kevin didn’t need Armando Luna’s skill to realize the prints had been made by a big three-footed animal.

“Damn,” he said to Bonny. “Maybe they’re on him, you think?”

But this didn’t make sense—the baying he’d heard was at least a mile further north, and there was no way the rest of the party could have come this direction. He squatted down to his haunches and with a small twig poked the edge of the most well-formed of the tracks. It was about the size of a medium-sized pancake. “It’s gotta be him,” he said.

Bonny’s patience was running out. She bucked backward a few hops and yapped at him, eyes bright and ears pointed forward. “Okay,” he said to her. “Hold on.” A moment’s apprehension, verging on panic, ran over him—the same feeling he’d had at nine when he became separated from his parents and sisters one Saturday evening at a crowded county fair. He was comforted at the sight of the old bald ridge north of him where he knew the trucks were parked.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll go a little more.”

The dog worked the bottom of the canyon some two-hundred yards, then broke from the wash to move uphill toward a low yucca-clustered saddle. Surprisingly, old Sally never balked, climbing from the relative comfort of the sandy bottom to the rock-and-brush-tangled hillside. This belligerent mule rose to the occasion when it came to chasing cats.

Once he’d topped the saddle, Kevin recognized the long shallow basin he’d glassed so many times. Just a few hundred yards this side of the New Mexico border, and about two miles north of Sonora, the half-mile flat was crowded with stands of Emory oak and cedar with several breaks speckled with bunches of bear grass. Knowing the basin was a good place for the old tom to cross, Kevin negotiated Sally into a clearing just below the saddle, climbed off and tied her and called back the dog then sat to glass a few minutes. He worked the brush hard, knowing a cat, even a black one, if hiding, would be difficult to spot.

After fifteen minutes, the big black cat stepped into view, though it took several moments for the stunning fact of it to take hold in Kevin’s mind. A rush from his heart climbed from his chest and whirred between his ears, and his hands shook so he could hardly steady the binoculars. His first thought had been “cow”—until he made out the yard of tail that followed the animal.

Some thousand yards away, the jaguar sat like a housecat on its haunches, the black fur and powerful muscle beneath so distinct under the afternoon sun as to appear unreal. Kevin didn’t think about his rifle, still sheathed in its saddle scabbard, and could only sit paralyzed, unhinged at the animal he’d only heard stories about.

Without taking his eyes off the black speck, which he knew now to be Pete, Kevin managed to open his fanny pack and set up his tripod, then mount his binoculars on it and not lose the animal. He’d done this all in a frenetic thirty seconds.

Pete was walking now, two-hundred pounds, at least, his head the size and somewhat the shape of the deep cast-iron skillet O.D. cooked camp eggs on. The limp was definite and pronounced—the left hind foot—and Kevin wondered at how an animal so impeded and so stark in shape and color could have for so long escaped his many pursuers.

The old cat stopped then, and looked straight up at the hillside where Kevin sat. He’d spotted the mule. For a solid five minutes he stared, the little dog all the while tensed to give chase, her growls like a small motor.

“Hold on, girl,” he told her. “Hold on.”

Pete suddenly appeared to make up his mind, turned and scurried east, belly low to the ground, not quite at a dead run. He disappeared in a series of blinking black flashes as he moved between the trees and into a brushy draw that was fed from the far ridge just this side of the New Mexico border.

Kevin didn’t think about the time—it was already late afternoon—or whether he would cross a state border or have to spend the night without food or bedroll. He, like the little dog, acted only on impulse, swinging up onto the mule and hissing down, “Let’s get, Bonny. Let’s get that old devil.”

But after he’d ridden down and found the tracks at the bottom, he’d gotten a little more firmly fixed in his senses. Bonny had become harder to bring to heel, and he’d had to call her back half a dozen times before she’d heeded, and he’d yanked her by the collar, hard. “You stay,” he told her. “You heel.”

He was thinking now, finally. Inexperienced though he was, Kevin had gained enough sense to know treeing the tom was probably out of the question with just one dog. Old Pete could take Bonny out with one fell swat, and the whole thing wasn’t worth killing someone else’s dog over.

Standing beside Sally now, he glassed the ridge some four hundred yards ahead of him. He tended to work the hillside with his binoculars from left to right, scanning from bottom to top, then from top down. He’d traversed about half the ridge when the old tom limped into his field of view.

Kevin didn’t hesitate this time, quickly lifting his Winchester from the scabbard, sitting and jacking in a shell. Pete was moving through the brush now on the shadowed half of the hill in no apparent hurry. Kevin could feel his breathing, deliberating the rise and fall of his chest, working it in rhythm with the crosshairs in his scope. The way his gun was sighted in, the one-hundred-thirty grained bullet would drop fifteen to twenty inches at the estimated range.

Pete passed into an opening, still moving slowly, and Kevin caught his breath, his finger giving perhaps a quarter pound more pressure on the trigger, but he did not shoot, and the cat moved again into the junipers. Kevin was unsure why he was not able to shoot, and would only determine the underlying reason some ten years later in a conversation with someone, that no one—including himself, including Armando Luna, and even John Monahan—genuinely wanted to kill the old black cat.

He watched the patch of alligator juniper in his scope until the cat emerged again, undoubtedly too far this time. Pete lumbered up into a clearing above the trees then gained the top of the ridge, his black figure sharpened by the graying eastern sky behind him as he disappeared over the other side.

It was perhaps five o’clock, but Kevin gave no mind to this. He mounted up, to Bonny’s delight, and began the climb up the ridge and through the saddle. Sally was easily raised to a canter as she found a good game trail that led to the saddle.

“You love me when it comes to chasing cats, don’t you, old bitch?”

When they’d crested the ridge, Kevin stopped his mule and called Bonny back. Staying mounted, he made a quick sweep with his glasses of the canyon below. He worked to calm himself as he knew the chance of a reasonable shot at the cat was high in the next half hour.

They moved down the lee side of the hill at a fair pace, Bonny all the way indicating a strong trail, and Kevin on ready with his palm on the rifle butt. They bottomed out again, and again gained the top of the next ridge—still, no Pete.

“You still have him?” he asked the dog. “You still on his scent?”

It was heavy dusk when they’d reached the four-strand barbed wire fence that marked the New Mexico state line, and Kevin realized then that a decision had been made without his having to think about it. The little heeler dog had never lost old Pete’s trail, but the old tom had picked up his pace, and it was clear they would not catch him before dark. There was a good chance, though, that Kevin could find the cat at dawn and with some luck could marshal a decent shot at him. Opportunities of a lifetime happened only once, and Kevin, young though he was, understood this intuitively.

Under the waning light, he looked back the way he had come but could no longer see the bald ridge where they had parked the trucks. The new moon, he remembered, had just begun and would offer only a crevice of reflected light to find the way back. Then his being able to find the vehicles and get there before the rest decided to leave was dubious at best. No, the decision had been made for him to spend the night.

He had water enough in the half-gallon canteen tied to Sally’s saddle horn, and the mule had watered three times at various tanks that day. He was surprised to find a plastic bag filled with about a half pound of homemade jerky in one of the side bags, the saliva under his tongue gathering as he opened the bag, the smell of the peppered venison rising to meet his nostrils. Bonny sat at his feet, apparently resigned that the chase was over for the day.

“Hey there mutt,” Kevin said to her. “I guess there’s enough here for both of us.”

Kevin knew they would worry, mount a search, be livid when they finally reconnected, but he also knew this transgression to be forgivable, a small fault when one backed up a step or two and really looked at it.

Two hours later and four miles west of where Kevin was camped, the men began to wait, then to worry. They’d gotten back to the trucks and trailers just before 6:00 o’clock expecting to find both kids, but neither was anywhere in sight. Amanda’s deer had been boned, the meat cut into strips and packed in a large pillowcase, the hide and head bundled in the truck next to the meat, but the girl was not around. The men discussed the possibilities, then waited in silence. Mild concern turned to worry and they mounted up and began a quarter mile circle around the perimeter of the parked vehicles, calling out the kids’ names the whole while.

After two hours of this, they quit their calling. Under a thin slice of just-risen moon, they sat their mounts in silence. The horses and mules under them, exhausted and footsore, snuffled and clomped their hooves in the dirt. By turns the last hour, each animal had barn soured, jerking its head and making feints toward the trucks.

The click of O.D.’s pin light broke the silence as he held it to his watch. “Eight-thirty,” he said to no one in particular. “I’m just about sure them kids is onto that tom cat. That good mix bitch probably hit a strong scent and those two just took after her.” He’d arrived at this theory two hours before and had mentioned it a half dozen times since.

Monahan shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “Could be. I just can’t see Mandi going off like that. She’s not done that sort of thing before.”

“I can see Kevin doing it,” Mondy spoke up.

“Me too,” Tom said.

They were quiet a moment, and all understood it was the rancher’s turn to speak. “Well,” he said finally, “she likes old Kev well enough to follow him, I guess.”

Another silence, this one quite uncomfortable, while all waited for John to speak again, which he did: “I sure don’t know what I’ll tell her mother, though.”

“Amen to that,” Tom said.

Though the men talked a few minutes about what next to do, three of them had already decided that to look and call any more that night was futile. They would return home, where they would alert the sheriff’s office and spend a sleepless several hours before they came back next morning, perhaps with a Cochise County deputy or two, maybe some search volunteers.

But Mondy had stayed silent as the decision was hatched. He had set his mind far earlier to the course he would take when he had strapped his bedroll behind the gelding’s saddle.

When the rest realized his intent, Tom spoke up. “You ready to pay me for that old horse if you end up busting a leg on him kicking around in this dark?”

“You think I wouldn’t?”

“Look, Mondy,” Tom said. “Those kids are perfectly capable of surviving a night alone in the hills.”

“And they’ve got that jerky and plenty of water,” John added. “That boy had on a lined chore jacket and Mandi has a down coat. Even if it hard freezes again tonight, they’ll be fine.”

But Luna was unmoved. “You guys got people to go back to,” he said. “I don’t. Not really. If I go back to Douglas, I’ll just end up at the Red Barn getting drunk. I don’t want to do that.”

“Now us and the sheriff’s department’ll have three fools to worry about out here,” O.D. said.

Mondy brought old Turk around and started him toward the east. “I’m an Indian, remember.”

“A fat Indian,” O.D. pointed out.

“Can you see your dick to pee lately?” Luna came back.

“Okay,” Tom broke in. “If you want to stay out here, it’s your own damn foolish decision. But if you don’t find those kids before ten o’clock tomorrow, meet us back at the holding corral and tell us what’s going on.”

“Will do,” Mondy said. “Thanks for the use of old Turk here, Tom.”

“Mind where he steps, like I told you.”

About an hour later, Mondy had picked his way to his intended destination. He’d made a cold camp, for no reason other than he felt no need for a fire, on a grassy saddle overlooking a long tree-crowded basin he and Kevin had hunted a number of times before. Though he was playing a hunch, the decision to go there had been driven by reason as well. If old Pete was on the prowl in the area, that basin served as a good gateway to both New Mexico and Sonora.

Mondy ate the extra burrito he’d saved and for a long while sat on the saddle overlooking the basin. He could see only the edge of the next small ridge opposite him and the general shape of the Escrobarra beyond that. Before he made his bed, he lit a cigarette, drew on it a few times then crushed it out before it was half burnt. He was thinking of a prayer, one based in his Catholicism, but the words came to him in the old language, and he began to say it. Perhaps his aim was some effect he’d only intuited at the moment, perhaps to give the prayer a kind of resonance and subtlety it deserved. Kevin McNally was his best friend, and his worry for the boy struck as deep, he felt, as that of anyone involved. Suddenly, he was visited by a passing regret that he’d not thought to go back to the trucks for a set of radios, as they surely would have come in handy.

When he’d finished, he looked out into the night. “I’ll find you,” he said. The stars were especially bright. “I won’t leave this ridge without you.”