Wild Instinct

2

At the kill site, Gale, Predator Tracking Unit K9 handler Mike Carpenter, and Mike’s burly German shepherd, Knight, cross the plastic crime scene barriers under the watchful eyes of two uniformed deputies.

The men shrug off their backpacks and set their rifles across them. Knight stands leashed amid the oak leaves and acorns, whimpering and trembling, riveted by Mike’s pack. Here the ground is shaded by the big oaks that grow just east of the Ortega Flats campground.

Two sheriff’s SUVs preside from the dirt road nearby, lights flashing. From a camp clearing, a den of uniformed Cub Scouts and two supervising adults watch from atop a picnic table. Knight, taut on his lead, sizes them up for just a moment, then turns his quivering black nose to his handler’s backpack again.

One of the deputies leads them down a narrow game trail that wends through the shade of the oaks and to a patch of acorn-strewn dirt roughly ten feet square enclosed in yellow tape. The black, oily dirt appears wet.

Knight surges for the black patch but young Carpenter yanks back hard and cusses him.

Gale kneels just outside the tape, where a dusty shaft of sunlight slants through the trees and touches the earth in front of him.

He sees that the dirt and leaves and acorns aren’t black at all, but deep, drying red. Notes the pale scraps of gut and bone and sinew. And the intestinal fragments oddly purple now in the sun.

Carpenter orders Knight to sit down and stay, then pulls open a locking evidence bag from his backpack and gives Knight a whiff. Knight tries to take the red shop rag dampened with mountain lion pee bought on a hunting website, but Carpenter is ready for this, and he whips the bag up and away.

“Stay,” he says, easing the still-opened bag down for the dog to smell. Knight’s hackles flare, and his body trembles like a tree in the wind. Carpenter slaps the bag gently to Knight’s black snout, then seals it and puts it back in his pack.

Unleashes Knight, who bounds into the oak grove.

“Hunt ’em up, boy,” says Carpenter.

Knight works meticulously, quartering the meadow ground, nosing the hills of boulders sprouting dense manzanita and sage, and the matilija poppies blooming their last in the mid-October warmth.

Carpenter uses neither a whistle nor voice commands, animal tracking being a stealthy pursuit. Knight stops and looks back to his handler often.

Gale, who as a boy hunted quail and doves and sometimes deer not far from here, feels strange with the ponderous sniper’s rifle now in his hands instead of the trim 20-gauge bird gun his dad gave him for Christmas one year. The rifle is a Barrett MK 22, weighing just over fifteen pounds, with a range of two thousand yards. Gale had killed a fellow sniper at 1,275 yards in Sangin Valley, Afghanistan, as a Marine private, age nineteen. His target was ninety-two years old, according to his grandson, a Taliban informer.

Gale’s fifth, confirmed.

He stops for a moment, takes a slug of water from a canteen on his belt, listens to the far-off cars on Ortega Highway, watches a FedEx cargo jet easing down toward Orange County’s John Wayne Airport. He notes how little this land has changed since he was a boy, although the humans have stepped up their invasion by air, land, and sea. Just north of here, thousands of trucks on a dozen freeways daily belch to and from the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, the busiest in the country. Tonight, he’ll see satellites gliding through the stars.

He trades out his canteen for his Zeiss binoculars and scans the ridgelines of the hills, alert to the boulders into which the big cats blend when waiting for deer. The binoculars collapse a thousand yards into an optically pure circle in which a fence lizard basks on a south-facing rock.

The day cools into late afternoon as Gale, Carpenter, and the dog climb in elevation.

Nearing the base of the Santa Ana Mountains, Knight alerts in a thicket of toyon and lemonade berry, goes into that slinky, butt-down German shepherd crawl, and slowly follows a game trail into the darkening bushes.

Carpenter gives Lew Gale a respectful nod. Gale is his senior, and his skills as a department SWAT marksman and a Marine sniper put him first in line to shoot, on the very real chance that the lion has taken cover in the brush, curious, as most mountain lions are, or even considering an ambush of Knight, an easy kill.

Reversing his SWAT cap for an unimpeded view, Gale follows the dog into the thicket, hunches his shoulders through the high brush, hugging the Barrett to his chest. He thinks of patrol in Sangin, minus the constant, low-grade fear of being shot by a sniper from so far away he’d be dead without hearing the shot.

Which was how he’d killed nine men.

The copse opens into an arroyo lined with sycamores, their white branches heavy with yellow and brown leaves the size of dinner plates.

Gale listens to the crunch of his boots on them. Within his Acjacheme/Juaneño blood, he retains an ancestral talent for quietly stalking game here in these wooded hills.

The arroyo widens into a large meadow that rises gently into the Santa Anas of Cleveland National Forest.

No cat.

Knight turns and looks hopefully at Gale, who raises both hands palms-up and shakes his head, letting the sling have his rifle for the moment. Knight continues, his urgency gone but his movements still optimistic.

The meadow climbs toward the mountain but as Knight disappears over a rise and Gale makes its summit, he sees that the valley below is larger and deeper than he’d expected, and heavily wooded with oaks and sycamores and the pine.

White hoop buildings are tucked beneath the trees, dozens of them, and the strong, skunky smell of cannabis hangs in the cooling air.

No movement there, that Gale can see.

“Not again,” says Carpenter, coming up just behind him. “Some of these shitheads keep guard dogs. Pit bulls and other good killers, you know?”

So he blows three sharp notes on his Acme Medium Thunderer. Knight reverses direction and strains uphill, tongue flapping.

Rifles slung and handguns drawn, Gale and Carpenter put twenty feet between each other and start down into the dense woods, the stink of weed, and the eerie buzz of insects.

Some of the hoop buildings have been slashed into long shreds of opaque plastic that hang limp in the breeze. Making a statement, Gale thinks.

He sees a man dead on his back near the entrance of the third grow house. Hands bound. Eyes wide. A bullet hole in his forehead. Flies all over him. He looks to be Laotian, known for their slave labor on these illegal marijuana farms, which are owned and run not by Laotians at all, but by competing American gangs and Mexican cartels.

Toeing their way through the grow, Gale and Carpenter find big canisters of fertilizer and pesticide. Hundreds of yards of PVC irrigation pipes, and electrical cable for water and power to be bootlegged in from distant landowners and public utility lines. Plastic cisterns. Hoses everywhere. Propane bottles slung into the brush. Bales of chicken wire and plastic sheets to protect young plants. Trash and more trash: small mountains of black plastic bags torn open and emptied by animals, the flies buzzing in the cans, crows watching from the trees.

In spite of the dank stink of the marijuana, there’s not much weed left. The processed and pressed bales are too valuable to leave behind. The floors of the cleaning and packing tents are sticky with cannabis scraps and oil. Everywhere are mounds of useless stalks and stems too risky to burn.

Then, another Laotian man apparently executed near a cache of new irrigation valves, timers, spaghetti drip line, and emitters. And another, gunned down while trying to run into the woods, now slumped between plastic canisters of fertilizer, still holding a baseball bat in one hand.

“When?” asks Carpenter.

“Two nights? No vultures yet.”

“Seems right.”

“These cannabis pirates are bad people,” says Gale.

“Savages,” says Carpenter. “It started with the cartels.”

Gale ponders this for a moment. The “savages” remark unintentionally pricks his Native Acjacheme spirit, the Acjacheme known as trusting people, even of the conquering Spanish. Back in those days, there were occasional Indian threats of violence against the soldiers, Gale knows, but what were spindly Indian arrows used to kill birds and rabbits against the booming blunderbusses of conquerors?

Gale’s mother, Sally, is one of the kindest, most deeply accepting people he knows.

His proudly Spanish father, Edward Gallego, has a temper that follows no racial nor cultural lines.

At age eighteen, the year his father left home, Luis Gallego changed his name to Lew Gale.

“The Laotians are poor and peaceful,” he says. “So they get ripped off badly.”

“I’d rather not be poor and peaceful, if this is what it gets you,” notes Carpenter.

Another jet leans into John Wayne Airport from above. Knight sleeps under an oak, in a slant of sunlight.

Lew Gale sits on a boulder down by the shaded creek, calls the crime in to Dispatch on his satellite phone.

Fifteen minutes later, he sees a sheriff’s helicopter lowering to the massacre site. Then another.