The Cat Dancers

43

Two hours later, they were grinding their way up a narrow mountain road in White Eye’s ancient Bronco, and Cam was thinking that road was probably not the right word. Track, maybe. Mountain-goat trail. Trace? The vehicle’s four-wheel drive worked just fine, but even with that, they were making no more than five miles an hour, if that, and often much less. White Eye had produced the vehicle from behind the cabin park’s office, where he’d also restored the electricity. Night-Night loped along behind the Bronco with seemingly endless ease, and Cam was grateful that she was outside and not riding in the backseat, two feet from his neck.

He had no idea of where they were. Mitchell had driven about a hundred feet down the county road toward town, abruptly turned right into what had looked to Cam like an empty meadow, and then pointed the Bronco toward higher ground. The snow wasn’t that deep, but it was crusted with ice, which made a crunching sound as they plowed through it, the nose of the Bronco permanently tilted up as they climbed.

About a half hour into the trip, White Eye had taken off his jacket and draped it over the center console as the heater began to kick in. Cam had done the same, piling his outer coat on top of White Eye’s. And then surreptitiously, using his left hand, he had picked Mitchell’s jacket pocket to retrieve three rounds. He’d quietly slipped these into his pants pocket. He’d have to figure out how to get the rounds back into the. 45 once he got his coat back on. He was pretty sure that White Eye meant him no harm.

And yet, he thought. Cam hadn’t forgotten the mysterious caller and the feline night visitor that little call had produced. Had that been White Eye’s work? How many trained mountain lions were running around out here anyway? He topped off their coffee mugs with the last of the coffee and put the pot into the backseat, which was piled high with gear.

“Where we going?” he asked finally.

“Catlett’s Bald,” White Eye responded. “Be there directly, long as we don’t hit no big drifts and the river ain’t full of melt.”

“What’s a bald?” Cam asked.

“Yonder’s some balds,” Mitchell replied. Cam looked through the windshield as the Bronco topped a rise, and the sight almost took his breath away. The entire Smoky Mountain range lay before them, wave after wave of moonlit humped granite ascending into the night sky as far as he could see from southwest to northeast. The nearest mountains rose up on either side of the track, thick with bare trees on the lower slopes but thinning out just below the individual summits, to be replaced with snow-covered domes. He knew from his maps that there were some six-thousand-foot-high mountains out here, but they all looked much higher than that from the vantage point of the twisting track.

“Bald refers to the tops, then,” Cam said. White Eye shot him a patient sideways look, as if to say, Yeah, dummy, that’s why they call them balds. Cam kept looking as they started down the back side of the pass, checking the side mirror to see if that big cat was still out there. He didn’t see it for a moment, but then he did. It was trotting along as if it did this every night of the week, and he would have sworn that it was watching him via the side mirror, too.

“So tell me about cat dancers,” he said, settling back into his seat as the Bronco nosed down into some bumpy snow. The moonlight outside was bright enough to create glare from all the snow.

“They’s seven of ’em,” White Eye said. “No more’n that. Don’t know who they are. They call themselves Bob, Frank, Jim, and the like, but the way they look when they say them names? Them ain’t their real names.”

“Young men? Old men?”

“A mix; thirties, fifties, ain’t no kids, if that’s what you’re askin’.”

“And what do they do, exactly?”

“First one come to see me fifteen, maybe sixteen years ago now, said he wanted me to find him a mountain lion. Called himself Carl. Early thirties. Big guy, hard, but not pushy about it. Guy you wouldn’t mess with in a bar. Had that look about him. That’s Carl. Didn’t give no last name, and I wasn’t askin’, seein’s he was showin’ cash money. Anyways, I told him they wasn’t any panthers left. He allowed as to how he knew I had one. That there surprised me some.”

“That was a secret?”

“Oh hell yeah. Illegal in C’lina. Legal over in Tennessee, but you gotta pay high for licenses and such. They get ’em from out west somewheres.” He looked sideways at Cam again. “I don’t b’lieve in payin’-taxes, fees, licenses, any of it-you understand.”

“Nice if you can work it,” Cam said. “How’d he know you had a cat?”

“Damned if I know, but he surely did. Knew she was tame and that she went with me time to time. Knew her goddamned name even. Said what he really wanted to learn was how to track a big cat. Asked him what he’d do if’n he ever caught up with one. You know what he says? Take its picture, he says. Surprised the shit out of me. I told him the notion was crazy and dangerous. He pulls out this envelope with five thousand greenback dollars in it. Asked if I’d reconsider.” White Eye chuckled at the memory. “Yeah, that was the word. Reeconsider his proposition. Shit. Took me about two seconds.”

“So there are wild mountain lions out here?” Cam asked.

White Eye didn’t answer for a minute as he maneuvered the Bronco across a frozen creek, shifting down into grandma when the ice crust broke and the vehicle lurched alarmingly. Cam found himself reaching for a handhold.

“Here? Uh-uh. Not here. Out yonder,” he said, gesturing with his head at the distant mountains. “ Way out yonder. Told him that. No vee-hicles. Shank’s mare all the way. Twenty, thirty mile in and some more straight up. Expensive damn hike. Said he understood. Said there was more money where that came from. He had time, years if need be. Said he was in shape for it and okay in the mountains, even in winter. I told him that was good, ’cause the best time to track a big cat was in the winter. Summertime, fall? You need kills and scrapes. And even in winter, you playin’ with fire.”

“Tell me why.”

“Big cats got seven lives and six senses. They know when someone’s fuckin’ with them, specially a human, specially on they own ground. ’Bout the time you get a good track goin’ on one, they like to have one goin’ on you. Trick is to know when that shit’s started, ’cause if you don’t, cat’s gonna take your picture, you get my meanin’.”

“How the hell do you know where to even start? This park is what, fifty miles square?”

“Not that big; it’s more like eight hunnert square miles. Somethin’ like that.”

“That’s still a lot of territory.”

“I got me an advantage, comes to scarin’ up a panther,” White Eye said with a sly grin.

Cam looked at him and then understood. “Night-Night.”

White Eye nodded. “Night-Night. Big ole tom up there in them far hills see a human, he’s gonna lie down and watch, but he ain’t never gonna show his face less’n you piss him off. But a female panther? Tom’s gonna sniff that stuff out from miles away and he’s gonna talk about it.”

“Then what?”

“Once I find one, we get the hell out of there. Cat won’t usually leave its territory, so when it quits followin’, I know where its home ground starts. After that, we’d come back in, Carl’n me, and I show him how to cut sign, track, and stay alive doin’ all that, so’s he can get his damned picture. Then I get my second surprise. I figger he has hisself one of them telephoto jobs, you know?”

“He doesn’t?”

“Uh-uh. Shows me this little damned thing, fit in your coat pocket. One a them throwaway things from Wal-Mart.”

“Not much range with one of them,” Cam said.

“‘That’s the whole point,’ he says. ‘I have to get close to use this. Real close.’”

“This is the crazy part.”

“Damned straight. I tell him, ‘You go right the hell ahead.’”

“What did he want you to do?”

“Find him a den. Had to be a female with cubs, ’cause tom’s don’t den up. Just the momma cats, and then only for a coupla months. After that, they hide the cubs with their kills.”

“And he wanted you to take him right to a mountain lion’s den?”

“I told him, ‘I’ll set me up camp a coupla miles away and you get to go creepin’ on in there one night and take yer fuckin’ picture, you want to. But I hear you scream, I ain’t ridin’ to no rescue until all the picnic noises stop and it’s daylight.’”

“Can you actually get that close?”

“I took that boy into the woods off and on for two full years, every time he could get out here to the Smokies. Summertime, wintertime, everything in between. Taught him how to Injun-walk, how to be hid and stay hid. How to change human smell into animal smell. How to listen. How to look. How to be still in one place-for hours if need be. How to hunt. You know what I’m sayin’? And I’ll say this-he had the natural-born sense for it. I’d’a swore he done it all before.”

“Who are these guys? Do you know?” Cam asked.

The Bronco banged over a downed tree hidden under the snow, rattling Cam’s spine and precipitating a dust fall inside the vehicle. White Eye kept it going as if nothing had happened, and then shook his head. “Ain’t no tellin’,” he said. “Crazy bastards, that’s what they are, for damn sure. Deer hunters. Bored with life. Sportsmen, they call themselves. Sorta like you.”

“Not like me at all,” Cam said. “I mean, I’m a cop. We hunt bad guys, but we do it with teams of detectives, technology, and prosecutors. No way in hell would I mess with a mountain lion or any other large wild animal on its own ground. I’ve never been that bored.”

“That’s just the word,” White Eye said. “That’s why they do it, I think. They was bored. Wanted them some real excitement. They was hunters already, but this-this was different. Real different. Called it a challenge. Got fire in their eyes when they’d come out. Especially Carl. Kept sayin’ extreme all the time. And I believe it turned into something else once Carl brought out the third one.”

“What was that?”

“Took Carl three years to get his first picture, ’long with fifty damn stitches on his back. Goddamned cat came this close-he snapped his fingers-“to takin’ his fool head off. This was out to the Chop. He’d gone down one a them mountain-climbin’ wires to get hisself level with the den, then swung hisself in to shoot that cheap-ass little camera. Cat went right at him, jumped the damn wire. They both fell fifty feet into a creek. Cat screamin’, Carl screamin’. Said I wouldn’t, but I come a-runnin’ anyway, used a rifle to run the cat off, and there was goddamned Carl, flounderin’ around in that creek. Deep December it was, blood all over the ice, and all that crazy fucker cared about was findin’ his damn camera, his back all tore up-I’m talkin’ the whites of his ribs showin’. I mean, damn! Hurt me to look at it.”

“But he got his picture?”

“Oh yeah, he got his goddamned picture. Coupla months later, Carl brings out a second one. Some common damn name. I forget. Bill, John, you know. Looked a little like Carl. Same money, though, so I wasn’t askin’ much about names. Trained the new boy just like I trained Carl. Graduation back out to the Chop. Anyways, I think these two turned the whole thing into some kind a test for the third guy. You want to be one of us, first you gotta get your face.”

“‘Face’?”

“That’s what they called it-didn’t count less’n you got a picture of the cat’s face from near enough so’s anyone seein’ it would fuckin’ know that the guy takin’ the picture was noshit close-up.”

Cam shook his head in wonder. A disposable camera was autofocused at eight to ten feet for the best picture.

They broke out of the woods and drove out onto a large meadow at the foot of a massive hill. Cam could just see the summit of the next mountain looming over its top. He glanced at the Bronco’s gas gauge, but there was plenty of fuel, even though the vehicle had been grinding through the snow in second gear.

“Yonder’s Catlett’s Bald,” White Eye said, indicating the mountain behind the big hill. He was able to go a little faster now that they were traversing the open meadow, although the snow was deeper. They were running without headlights, and they needed none. White Eye aimed the vehicle at the left side of the hill, where there appeared to be a small pass between it and the edge of the deep woods.

“Fourth one got hisself killed,” White Eye said, apropos of nothing.

“Whoa. How?”

“How you think?”

“Cat got him?”

“Oh yeah. Me’n Carl, we was hid out on a ridge ’bout a half-mile crow fly from the den. Whoever this Carl is, he’s the boss man. We was out along the back side of Whittier Mountain. They’s a canyon back there, where the Bullet River cuts through. This old boy went in after midnight, aimin’ to rope down to the den ’bout an hour before daylight. He fucked up crossin’ a feeder creek halfway to the cliff, made him some noise. Carl never did hear him, but I did. And so’d the cat. This boy didn’t come back, so we went in around noon. Found a foot in the creek, and a hat full of hair.”

“And the rest of him?”

Mitchell snorted. “Cub meat.”

“You hunt down the cat?”

“Hell no. Cat was just doin’ what she was supposed to, protectin’ her den. If there’s a den, there’s cubs. Carl said he tole each one of them sumbitches, ‘If the cat wins, the cat wins, and you lose. That’s it. Otherwise, this ain’t got no point.’”

“Damn,” Cam said quietly, but he was beginning to understand. Carl, or whoever he was, had turned this deadly little game into an initiation of some kind. But who were these guys? And initiation into what?

“But doesn’t that make the cat a man-eater?” Cam asked. “I mean, what if she gets a taste for it?”

“‘Gets’?” White Eye said. “Mister, they’s already got the taste for it, best I can tell. Look at them cats out there in California. They’s eatin’ folks right and left. And why not? They don’t call ’em mountain lion for nothin’. And besides, look at it this way: Most wild animals ain’t gonna fuck around with no damn panther. So here comes this twolegged animal, bangin’ around on the cat’s ground, don’t seem to know the fuckin’ rules, no respect. Panther’s gotta do somethin’ about that, ’cause, way he figgers, if it ain’t actin’ like prey, then it’s gotta be a predator, right? Pretty fuckin’ logical, I’d say.”

“Why do you have one around, then?”

White Eye smiled. “I like ’em. First one I found as a cub up on the Tennessee line twenty-odd years ago. Little fucker, mewin’ up a damn tree and starvin’. No claws up front. Got away from some breeder, I figger. Put him in the house, raised him up like a house cat. Used to have me some fun when strangers would come round my place, specially after he growed some. Thievin’ white trash comes around at night to steal him one a my chickens? Runs into Night-Night in the barnyard? Come daylight, I’m gonna find me fifty feet a goose shit ’cross my yard.”

They entered the narrow pass, straddling a blackwater creek running between the two elevations. They came out into a smaller meadow, with the full expanse of Catlett’s Bald rising in a sheer face right in front of them. Cam thought it looked like the pictures he’d seen of EI Capitan in Yosemite Park. There was a stand of densely packed tall pines to the left, and the ground rose to the south behind the pines, where there were large bare deciduous trees climbing that slope toward the bald. White Eye stopped the vehicle in the middle of the meadow, but left the engine running. The moonlight was bright enough that the pine trees showed their intense green color.

“Get your gear on,” he said. “Time to show you somethin’ about cat dancin’.”