The Cat Dancers

38

Cam had been shown back to Ranger Goode’s office after he checked in with the lobby desk, and Mary Ellen Goode was indeed a looker, as pretty as his previous interlocutor had been anything but. Five six or seven, bouncy short black hair, bright blue eyes, a figure that challenged the official severity of her Park Service uniform, and a roombrightening smile. She was obviously a woman who knew she was good-looking and had long since grown comfortable in her skin. He noticed that she also had a Dr. in front of her name on her Park Service name tag, which he’d discovered while making other observations. Her title was park ecologist. He introduced himself, showed ID, and then asked about mountain lions in the Smokies.

“Officially?” she said. “No gotchee. Panthers are considered to have been extirpated from the ecosystem in the Smokies. No confirmed sightings since 1920.”

“‘Extirpated’?” he asked.

“Polite word for hunted out of existence. There was one study done by a researcher named Culbertson in 1977 that suggests there were three to six mountain lions living in the park. They were probably descendants of the original nineteenth-century population. But nowadays we think that what people are seeing, if not a bobcat, might be escaped captive-bred western cats.”

“Is captive breeding legal?” Cam asked.

“Not in North Carolina, but it’s legal to own western cougars in Tennessee. The cats that have been caught or found along the East Coast states are usually defanged or declawed, which would indicate captive breeding.”

“But you do get sightings up here?”

“Sure, every year, a half-dozen or so. But no pictures and no sign whenever we investigate the area of the sightings. And some of the people doing the reporting wouldn’t know a mountain lion from a mountain goat.”

“How big could one get?”

“A hundred and twenty to two hundred and twenty pounds. Six, seven feet long. A rear pad print ought to be eight to ten inches across, or larger.”

He thought about the mark in the frost on the hood of his truck. “Big enough to take down a man.”

“Oh, heck yes,” she said. “Think about playing with your house cat on the sofa until it gets annoyed and starts working those hind legs. Now scale that up twenty times and visualize a two-hundred-pounder landing on you from a tree, knocking you flat on your back on the ground, hard enough to take your breath away, seizing your whole face in its mouth, clamping its fangs through your cheeks and into your sinuses, its front claws stripping all the meat off your baby back ribs while its hind claws spread your intestines all over the trail. All in about five seconds, with the appropriate sound effects.”

“I think I need a bathroom,” Cam said.

“Exactly. And they can do all that from the ground or from a run, too, as cyclists are discovering in not-so-remote parts of California. Ever seen the films of a cheetah overtaking a gazelle? A mountain lion can do that, too, just for not quite as long a distance. They mainly feed on deer, which are not slow animals.”

“And if this happened to a human, what would the cat do with the, um, remains?”

“Consume all the soft and squishy bits first, then drag the corpse to a hiding place, stash it under a pile of brush or up in a tree, and come back for seconds and thirds until everything was gone. Arms and legs would get carried back to cubs in the den if it was a female. Major bones crunched for marrow. Skulls emptied.”

Cam tried to push away the grisly images she was conjuring up. “Would they be easy to track?”

She gave him an appraising look. “Track? I think it’s your turn, Lieutenant. What’s this all about?”

He told her about the stories of cat dancers, reiterating most of what the large lady at Carter’s Trading Post had told him.

She started shaking her head about two-thirds of the way through his summation. “Very, very unlikely,” she said. “These are highly secretive nocturnal animals. You’d almost have to know where it was denning up and then work back around its hunting range. And even then

…”

“Then-what?”

“Well, these cats are interesting. They’re first-class hunters and even better ambushers. Highly tuned senses-hearing, smell, night vision, footfall vibrations, and just cat sense. You tried tracking a mountain lion without specially trained dogs? The cat would turn that game around right about sunset and you’d probably end up as dinner.”

“How about a really good tracker? Indian-good?”

She shrugged. “It’s possible, I guess. But I wouldn’t try anything remotely like it. Following a bear would be less dangerous than following a panther. And all this just for a picture? No way.”

He’d run out of questions, and as much as he’d have liked to have spent some more time with the beautiful Dr. Goode, he knew he should cut it off. He thanked her very much and asked how he could find some of the better guides in the area.

“Yellow Pages?” she suggested with a smile.

“I knew that,” he said.

Cam spent the rest of the day dropping by the various guide and expedition shops in the towns of Lore and Trailwood, learning little. That evening, he went for a short walk to exercise the dogs. It was short because darkness came suddenly and the temperature dropped right along with the light. He fed the dogs, left them in the cabin, stoked the woodstove, and went back into town around seven o’clock to find something to eat. The obvious central attraction was a log cabin lodge affair with wraparound porches. The place advertised mountain cooking, whatever that meant.

Inside, the place was divided into two main rooms, separated by the kitchen area. The smaller room was for dining and the larger contained a well-attended bar. There were two people in the dining room, but more like twenty in the bar, men and women. It was complete with jukebox, tables for two and four, a small dance floor, a place in the corner for a live combo, and a forty-foot-long polished hardwood bar. Cam took a stool at the bar, looked over the surprisingly good scotch selection, and ordered a Maccallan on one rock from one of the very busy bartenders.

He finished his scotch, covered his tab, and headed for the dining room. As he did so, three Park Service rangers in uniform came through the front door, and one of them was the lovely Dr. Goode. She smiled and waved in his direction as they headed for the bar, causing one of the young men with her to give him a suspicious once-over. He waved back and then let the waitress take him to a table.

As he was finishing dinner, the rangers left. A few minutes later, Mary Ellen Goode came back in and headed over. He started to get up, but she waved him down and slipped into a chair.

“Had dinner?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I’ll eat later.” She looked around for a moment to see if anyone was watching them. “Look, I’ve been thinking about your inquiry. Is this serious stuff?”

He told her about the chair, and then said only that a suspect had mentioned the term cat dancers as being somehow connected to the executions.

“Connected how?” she asked.

“Don’t know. Didn’t know what the term actually meant until the lady at the store told me. But since there aren’t any lions, I guess I’m going to declare defeat and go home.”

“Well,” she said, staring down at the table for a moment. “That is the official Park Service line. But…”

He finished eating, wiped his face, and pushed his plate and silverware aside. “Go on.”

“A ranger I used to date two years ago told me the same story once. In fact, he was thinking of opening a file on it, except he thought headquarters would laugh. He thought that it might be real, and that the people doing it were dangerous.”

“I saw a ranger packing a belt and a gun last night,” he said. “We don’t associate our national parks with dangerous people. You know, park rangers are all about warm and fuzzy bunny lectures.”

Her face clouded. “We have a lot of sworn officers now,” she said. “Two years ago, some bikers from Atlanta came up into our park and set up a crystal-meth lab in a camper. Two of our rangers went to investigate the smell, and the bastards gunned them down when they knocked on the door. One of them was Joel Hatch, my fiance.”

“Oops,” Cam said. “Sorry.”

“Well, bad things happen to good people, don’t they? The good news is that an Atlanta field office special team caught up with them in a bar in Blue Ridge, Georgia. Apparently, there was ‘resistance.’”

Cam nodded. “Resistance is good,” he said. “Saves everyone a lot of time and effort. But I’m sorry for your loss.” He wanted to tell her about Annie, then decided to let it go.

“Thank you,” she said automatically. “Anyway, I’d forgotten all about the mountain lion business until you asked today. I’d never heard that term- cat dancers -however.”

“Know a guide named White Eye Mitchell?”

“Only by reputation. Supposedly, he found a missing hiker five years ago, after everyone else had given up.”

“‘Supposedly’?”

“Well, we think he’d guided the man in. Rumor was that they’d argued, and Mitchell left him out there to calibrate his thinking. There was no proof of that, of course, and the rescuee wasn’t talking, for some reason.”

Cam nodded. “Could I ask you to pulse your sources up here, see if you can find out anything more?”

She looked at him. “You’re leaving some things out. Am I right?”

“Yes,” he said. “But I can assure you that my case is as serious as a heart attack.”

“Does our local sheriff know you’re here?”

“Yes, he does. I checked in with him first thing. But he doesn’t have the whole picture, either, and I was able to convince him that that was a good place to be right now.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll ask around. How long will you be up here?”

“Don’t know,” Cam said. “Until I find something.”

“Or something finds you,” she said softly.

It was his turn to stare at her. “What’s that mean, exactly?” he asked.

“I’m not entirely sure,” she said. “But the truly wild parts of this country seem to attract all kinds of edgy critters these days.” She shook her head, as if trying to dislodge a bad thought. “Don’t mind me,” she said with a smile. “Too much time alone, I think.”

“I can actually relate to that,” he began, but then two men came into the dining room from the bar and called hello to Mary Ellen. She excused herself and went to join them. Cam paid his bill and went outside. It was cold but clear, and he felt like taking a walk. The night sky was so filled with blazing stars that he actually stopped in the parking lot to look up at them.

When he got back to his truck, he found a small note stuck into the driver’s side window.

“I get off duty at 2300,” it said. “We need to talk.” This was followed by a cell phone number, and the signature was “M.E.G.”