More Than A Cowboy. Peggy Nicholson
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Adam was expecting that level of trouble here in sleepy southwestern Colorado. Whoever he was hunting was a catkiller, not a mankiller. But all the same, why take a chance on someone linking him to a top biologist with the Division of Wildlife? This part of the state was enormous in size, but not so blessed with population. Strangers were noticed.
So from now till hunt’s end, he’d be Adam Dubois, freebooter and line-camp man, just a smiling Cajun cowboy, drifting through life. Not a care in the world. No worry to anybody.
“You babysitting?” he inquired in the truck, while he traded one of the cold Coronas he’d brought for a roast beef sandwich.
“Nope. Watson’s for you. He’s on loan from a friend in Montana, a biologist with the Forest Service. That hound’s the best lynx tracker in the lower forty-eight.”
“No.” Adam frowned at the dog in the truck ahead. With his chin propped on the tailgate, the brute gazed at them pitifully. His woebegone face was wrinkled in concentration, as if he were trying to levitate a sandwich and call it home. “Thanks, but no thanks.”
Adam had had a dog once upon a time. A gangly, knock-kneed yellow mutt he’d found on the street. He’d been a grab-bag of every breed you could name, but brave? Damn, but that dog had been gutsy, and with a great sense of humor to boot. Johnny, he’d named him. Johnny-Be-Good. They’d shared the same bed from the day he’d found Johnny to the day the social workers had dragged Adam off to his first foster home.
They’d promised they’d give him his pet back in a week or so, but that had all been a soothing lie. By the time Adam had realized this and gone looking for his friend, hunting through every pound in New Orleans a thirteen-year-old could find, the dog was…gone. He blinked his eyes rapidly in the waning light and scowled. “Last thing I need up there is a chow hound.”
Last thing he needed was a dog, or anybody else, tripping up his heart. That was one lesson he’d learned and learned very well. First with his dad, then his mom, then Johnny, then most lately with Alice. Alone was the safe way—the only way—to travel.
“Besides,” he continued into Gabe’s disapproving silence, “the only dogs that are welcome on the summer range are working dogs. Cattle dogs. Any mutt that runs the cows is sure to be shot.”
“He minds his manners. Heels, comes, sits and all the usual. When Watson isn’t eating or tracking, he’s sleeping, according to Tracy. He wouldn’t get in your way.”
“He’d take up half the cabin I’ll be living in, and five’ll get you ten he snores. No thanks.”
His cousin shrugged and bit into his sandwich. Some hundred miles to their west, the sun was a blood orange, squashing itself past a jagged line of purple mountains. A splash of fiery juice, then it squeezed on down. The ruddy light cooled instantly to blue. Down in the valley, the city twinkled.
“It’s a pretty big area you’ll be patrolling,” Gabe observed mildly, at last. “The lynx are spread out over some two thousand square miles, and no telling which one of them our guy’ll decide to stalk next. Reckon it’d be like hunting for an ant in a sandpile, if you don’t know where to look. At least Watson could point out the cats, then you’d take it from there.”
Adam shrugged and sipped his beer. The dog drooled in the twilight. “Think he’s still operating out there?” Adam asked finally, to break the edgy silence.
“’Fraid so. We’re down to forty-four animals. Collar YK99M3, a male from our original batch, stopped signaling last week. Last heard from ten miles north of Creede.” Gabe sighed and reached for the rolled map he’d brought from his truck. Unscrolling it across the dash, he tapped an inked-in asterisk with a tiny notation beside it. “He vanished right there. And that one really hurt. He was one of the lynx I flew up to the Yukon to collect and bring back here. A big healthy two-year-old with a white bib on his chest like a housecat, and paws like catcher’s mitts. Freed him myself. He looked so…right…floating off into the woods, the day we let him go. Home and free.”
Gabe rubbed a hand across his face. “Dang it to hell! How anybody could bring something that pretty down… Why they’d ever want to…”
Adam grunted his sympathy. That was something a homicide cop often wondered, seeing the aftermath of killings in the city. The good and the beautiful willfully smashed. Ruthlessly brushed aside. Such a waste, such a shame. Any time you could stop it, you felt a little bit better, a little bit bigger. Like you’d done your part, fighting the good fight. Making the world safer for the fragile things that mattered.
Taking the map from his cousin, he spread it over the steering wheel and squinted in the dusk. Checked its mileage scale, then grimaced. Damn, but the West was big! Distance took on a whole different meaning out here. He’d known it already, but looking at it now, peak after peak, range upon range… And roaming out there somewhere in all that craggy wilderness, a bunch of forty-pound cats…
And whoever was stalking them.
“You really think he’d be useful?” The mutt had a home and an owner, after all. He was only on loan. No commitment necessary, beyond opening his cans for the next three months.
“Show you something.” Gabe slid out of the truck, strode over to his own, and leaned in its open window. He pulled out a battered Stetson, then offered it to the dog. “Kitty, Watson! See the kitty?”
The dog pranced and nosed the hat, yodeling his approval. That hollow banging was the sound of his tail, slamming the sides of the pickup.
“Nice kitty. No, boy, sit. Staaay.” The dog sat with an anguished yelp and Gabe brought the hat to Adam’s window. “Lynx hatband,” he noted, pointing to its greasy circlet. “Tracy found it in an antique store. It’s got to be fifty years old at least.”
“And she trained him on that? You sure he’s not chasing mothballs?”
“He’s found plenty of lynx in the Mission Mountains. They’re doing a census up there and he’s accounted for most of ’em, at least in Tracy’s section. Distract him for a minute and I’ll show you.”
Adam sighed, grabbed a bag of potato chips and went to the hound. Stood glumly by while the dog inhaled one chip after another, then wiped his hands on his jeans as Gabe returned from the dark. “Now what?”
“Let’s finish our supper.”
They ate, talking when the mood hit them, but mostly in comfortable silence. The same way they’d ridden the range as kids, not so far from where they now sat. Adam said finally, “Had my own notion about how we could nail this creep. Most economical way of making a collar.”
Gabe turned to prop his shoulders against his door. “How’s that?”
“We do a sting. Instead of searching the mountains for the bad guy, we sucker him to us.”
“I like it, but how?”
“You said, back in N’Orleans, that the one thing these cats haven’t done is have kittens. Is it still that way?”
“So far, I’m afraid so. Oh, we’ve seen signs of courting behavior. According to their satellite signals, the males have been moving around for the last six weeks, searching for ladies. But with only forty-four lynx remaining, they’re spread so thin on the ground, and they only have a one-week window to find each other, while the females are fertile…”
“So nobody’s scored yet?” Adam demanded dryly.
Gabe shook his head. “No. Not that we know of. We’ll try to contact as many of them visually as we can this summer, especially any females whose signals go stationary. Maybe a queen will den up with kittens, though if she does, she’ll keep them well hidden. It’ll be next winter before we know for sure. We’ll snow-track them then. Look for juvenile footprints following a female’s.”
“But kittens, that’s what the pro-lynx camp wants, right? It’s the proof that your repopulation program is starting to work.”
“Exactly,