Dead Silver

2

The next afternoon,Saturday, I spent banging around my cabin doing the chores that I let slide during the week. I was forever losing ground; it was like fighting a Hydra that grew back two heads for every one I lopped off. Besides the routine business of cleaning and laundry and such, new problems were endless-plumbing leaks, vehicle repairs, a garage roof caving under one too many snowstorms. Most often, I'd discover further wrinkles once I started trying to fix the original one; I'd end up driving to town for materials two or three times; and so on. By the time I got the situation under control, I'd have lost a couple more weekends, and the list kept on growing.

But that was far outweighed by the payoff. I could never have imagined a greater gift than this property, left to me by my father: twenty acres of conifers in the Big Belt Mountains, an area that was steep, rugged, and thickly wooded, with only a few gravel roads that were dicey at the best of times. Humans were rare.

If I hadn't had this place to come back to during a bad time in my life-the collapse of my marriage and career in California, more or less simultaneously-I wasn't sure I'd have gotten through. Keeping it cobbled together was sort of like living with somebody who drove you nuts, but who you loved and couldn't stand to be without. You did whatever it took to make things work.

I'd been thinking about the incident with Madbird and Darcy yesterday at Split Rock. He hadn't been headed outside to brace Seth Fraker-just to get a look at him, invite him in for a drink, size him up. But I understood Darcy's concern, too. Madbird already didn't like what he knew about Fraker; in all probability, he'd like him even less if they met, and that would be clear. Darcy was well aware of it, and in her view, she had nothing to gain and a lot to lose if it happened.

As for the "something" she'd thrown at us, paying any attention to it was silly. But I had come to suspect that there were cracks in the rational fabric of the universe, and such a "something" might just slip through once in a while and rattle cages. In other words, I'd gotten more superstitious instead of more levelheaded. There were a lot of factors involved, including that my nature and lifestyle tended toward the solitary. Then, too, the more I knew about the fairer sex, the more mysterious they became. That wasn't to say I'd bought into Darcy's gesture in any serious way. It just made me a trifle uneasy.

The supply of stove wood that I kept in the cabin was low, so I walked outside through the wet spring snow to stock up. When I got to the woodshed, my half-feral black tomcat-I'd never named him; I just thought of him as the other guy, which was probably how he thought of me-was crouched on a stack of split fir, staring intently toward the tree line, twenty-five or thirty yards away. I glimpsed the shape of an animal just inside there. It was good-sized, with the deep brown color of a mule deer. I hadn't seen any of them for a while, and I was vaguely interested that they were coming back.

But instantly, the real situation clicked into focus. This thing was sitting upright, which deer didn't do. It was built like a Rottweiler, with powerful shoulders, a heavy round head, and bone-crushing jaws.

This wasn't any muley. This was a big cat-the reason the deer hadn't been around lately.

I wasn't entirely surprised. I'd been seeing its tracks for the past couple of weeks, and assumed it was a cougar; this part of Montana had always been their turf. At a guess, he was a young male who'd been driven off by his elders and hadn't yet staked out his own claim. But there were some factors that didn't fit. Cougars usually kept moving around a large area, and they usually stayed well away from humans. I'd only ever glimpsed them in the backcountry, where I'd roamed a lot as a kid. In the past several years, since I'd been living in the cabin fulltime, I'd hardly seen a trace.

But this guy had been hanging around for a while, and he'd been coming within the boundaries of my property. Right now I was looking into his eyes, staring straight back at me. He must have heard me coming out of the cabin, and he hadn't budged an inch. No doubt he was hungry, too. Deer were the main staple of a cougar's diet. He must have been eking out a meager living on small critters.

Shy though cougars traditionally were, attacks on people were becoming more common. Probably they were getting used to us and losing their fear. They'd taken down several joggers around the West, and here in Montana not long ago, a pair of them had stalked a group of schoolchildren on an outing. Courageous teachers had gotten the kids to safety, but the cats hadn't even made any attempt at stealth.

I wasn't too worried, but I admit I suddenly found myself thinking about what I'd do if he came my way. The woodshed was just an open-fronted lean-to; the closest place that offered protection was the cabin, and I wasn't at all sure I could make it there ahead of him. My pulse rate started edging upward. But while I was trying to decide whether to stand my ground, or slowly work my way toward safety, or just flat-out run for it, he tipped forward from his haunches onto all fours and paced unhurriedly away.

That was when I saw his short black-striped tail, and realized he wasn't a mountain lion-he was a bobcat. The scenario started making more sense. They tended to find a home territory and stay there, and they seemed to have learned fast that we humans had our uses, such as providing livestock and pets for meals.

"You better watch it," I told the black tom. "You'd be an appetizer to him."

He kept staring with his wide green eyes, claws dug into a chunk of fir and tail switching in agitation as his mega-cousin leisurely moved out of sight, pausing every several yards to sniff the air and look around.

When the bobcat was gone, I completed my mission of carrying a few armloads of wood to the cabin. The tom jumped off his perch and followed me back and forth, butting against my ankles-wanting a drink of beer. I was ready for one myself. I dug into the forty-year-old Kelvinator and found a bottle of Moretti left over from a six-pack I'd splurged on a couple of weekends ago. I poured a splash into a saucer for the cat and worked on the rest myself, thinking about how to handle this.

On the one hand, I was relieved. I'd never heard of a bobcat attacking anyone. On the other hand, he was a really big bobcat. While I knew that wild animals and fish always grew with the telling, I also knew what I'd seen. I even wondered if a cross with a mountain lion was genetically possible. Besides his size, his coloration, brown and mostly solid, was more cougarlike; bobcats tended to be tawnier, with leopard-like black spots. And yet, there was no mistaking that tail.

I didn't want to shoot him-on the contrary, I was glad that creatures like him were out there, and I wanted to keep him there. I was just nervous that he'd eat my pet-the tom was extremely canny, but everybody made mistakes-and maybe even me. When the snow melted and the ground dried, he might head into the backcountry in search of more satisfying game, but that wouldn't happen for several weeks. And then again, he might not. I considered contacting the Fish and Wildlife Department, but that was a can of worms-strangers stomping around my place, and me losing any say in the matter.

I started leaning toward the notion that the best thing for everybody concerned would be to give him a good scare-let him know that he'd better stay away from human beings. But that was easier thought than done.

I'd start carrying a pistol when I went outside, I decided-one that threw big slugs and made a lot of noise. If I met the bobcat with a burst of explosions and chunks showering out of the trees around him, that might get the message across. The weapon would also be a comfort when I came home after dark and walked from my truck to the cabin, just in case he was bold and hungry enough to take on something bigger than a bunny.

I finished the beer and went back to puttering, while the tom curled up on the bed to sleep off his adrenaline and beer. I stacked the firewood beside the stove and started scrubbing out the blue enamel roasting pan I'd had soaking in the sink-waiting until a decent hour before I headed downtown for a Saturday evening tour of the bars, and maybe hooking up with a lady friend who wasn't interested in anything long-term, at least with me, but occasionally enjoyed the kind of company that was gone in the morning.

When the phone rang, it brought me a routine touch of angst. I wasn't crazy about telephones-another of my regressive traits. I used mine mainly for work and other necessities, rarely for chatting, and it seemed to me that unexpected calls usually meant either hassles or outright bad news. But the news would come anyway, and answering was the only way to get rid of asshole solicitors who'd otherwise keep tormenting you forever, so I picked up and grumbled hello.

At first I was sure I'd guessed right-it was some kind of a pitch. The caller was a woman whose voice I didn't recognize, asking for Hugh Davoren. But she sounded pleasant, slightly uncertain, and she even pronounced my last name right, to just about rhyme with "tavern." I tried to sound a little less brusque.

"Speaking," I said.

"This is Renee Callister. Do you remember me?"

That caught me by surprise. I hadn't seen Renee or heard anything about her since I was a teenager. Ordinarily, I'd have stumbled over a name from that long ago. But I'd been thinking about her family because her father, Professor John Callister, had passed away earlier this week.

After all this time, it seemed unlikely that she was just calling me out of the blue. I guessed that her reason had something to do with her father's death, which added a poignant element.

Professor Callister had once been a prominent figure in Montana, a highly respected wildlife biologist and defender of wilderness. But his life was ruined when his young second wife was murdered, along with the lover she was in bed with at the time. Uglier still, Callister was the chief suspect. He was never formally charged, but the murder went unsolved and he was never cleared, either. He'd spent his last several years in a nursing home, after a series of strokes left him incapacitated and, eventually, comatose.

That was the legacy his daughter, Renee, had inherited.