Wild Instinct

4

In the early-morning light, Knight yips his lion alert on a narrow game trail that leads into the mountains. The big German shepherd snorts and shuffles, nose in the air, tail and hips low.

Gale, his stomach sloshing with an energy drink and protein bars, clomps along behind the dog, rifle in his hands and pack snug to his back.

They cover some ground now, Knight’s thick coat lifting and shifting, Gale falling into an easy rhythm behind the dog.

Knight veers suddenly off trail and zigzags through a swale with spring-fed cottonwoods and damp, calf-high grass. A quarter mile of this, and he stops and looks to Gale as if for advice. Then sneezes and drives his snout deep into the grass and sets a straight course down the middle of the little meadow, which leads him back to higher ground and the game trail.

He stops again and looks at Gale, snorts and yipes in frustration, then puts his wet nose to the air and continues along more slowly now, body relaxed and urgency gone.

“He was hot on a cat until the grass,” says Carpenter.

“You’d think the dew would hold the scent,” says Gale. He remembers with his dad and their springer spaniel, Ernie, working the little springs and creeks not far from here for quail.

But less than half a mile farther uphill, snorting his way through the mountain boulders, Knight alerts again and his body changes: muzzle up, hocks bent, hips low.

This is cat country, Gale thinks: the precarious piles of boulders, the dense growths of rabbit brush and manzanita growing between them. In the ten years he hunted these Santa Anas as an adolescent and young man, he saw only two mountain lions. Both of them tawny and still as the rocks, observing him from above in landscapes like this.

Knight leads his men up the base of the mountain in long switchbacks, ascending higher and higher.

Gale and Carpenter traipse along behind him, Gale feeling the elevation in his legs, and the weight of his heavy Barrett in his arms. The late-morning sun is warm. He lifts his SWAT cap and wipes his forehead on the sleeve of his flannel. Forty-three is the new sixty, he thinks. Just add an IED and bourbon.

Onward and upward.

Even as a boy, Gale disliked heights.

He tries to keep his eyes up and at the same time navigate the rocks and the spaces between them. His foot slips into a small crevasse and his ankle turns. He feels incompetent, mutters a curse, and looks back at Carpenter, climbing steadily toward him. Sees Knight out in front, scrambling up a boulder, front nails scratching, hind legs straining, Gale wondering at the animal’s fearlessness.

Elke Meyer on his phone, her voice clear. He remembers when there was no reception out here.

“How’s our mountain lion of interest?” she asks.

He tells her they haven’t seen the cat, but are getting close.

“We identified the victim as Bennet Tarlow yesterday,” says the undersheriff. “Sheriff himself did the press conference. The Coast Highway video went viral, of course. They’re calling him the Killer Cat.”

Gale feels a blip of anger.

“We can’t kill the wrong cat,” he says.

Or man.

“Lew, get it through your head that the old mountain lion on Coast Highway is probably our Killer Cat. The chances are overwhelmingly good. The corridors line up between Laguna and where you are right now. That’s what the Fish and Wildlife scientists say.”

A pause.

“Maria Brown from the Times wants to talk to you when this is over and the Killer Cat is no longer eating people. I told her I’d inquire.”

“Have Carpenter talk to her.”

“She wants you, Lew. Got herself a Pulitzer for that, as you know.”

“I’ll do my job, Elke, but I’m not talking to her again.”

“I know, I know, and I don’t blame you. But Lew, you could put us in a good light. Sheriff Kersey wants good light. Up for reelection soon. He asked me to make sure that you’re clear on that.”

“Let someone else take the shot, Elke.”

And clicks off.

They plod up the mountain with slow switchbacks through afternoon heat, stopping often to water Knight and themselves.

Knight alerts near a stand of toyon, red berries bright in the sun. The big dog heaves himself along a slender trail, then lurches into a tight chute between the boulders and disappears.

Ambush predator, thinks Gale. Ambush territory. They jump you from behind, crush your neck in unbelievably powerful jaws while their front claws clamp your shoulders and their rear claws rake open your back.

Gale again reverses his sheriff’s cap and ducks in after him, gun pointed down. Knight turns a corner, and by the time Gale rounds it, all he sees is the dog’s thick dark tail vanishing behind a rounded granite boulder the size and shape of a VW bug.

Gale follows Knight into a swale terminating at a stone rampart too vertical and tightly packed to climb without carabiners, ropes, and pitons.

Knight looks at Gale and whines, coat bristling, then takes off along the rocky base.

Gale catches up with him at a big rock, flat as a tabletop, on which the dog stands, looking up.

A mountain lion sits gazing high above them, framed by a V in distant rocks the same mottled tan as he is.

Gale can see the far-off dome of its head and little spikes of ears. If he hadn’t been looking for a lion, he wouldn’t have seen it. It could be looking at him. Known for their curiosity, Gale thinks.

Not to mention guile and stealth.

He swings down the monopod shooting brace, extends the leg to full length, and plants its foot firmly in the earth. Then raises the Barrett slowly to his shoulder. Knight watches him. The heavy gun balances perfectly on the brace, and Gale sets the distance for a thousand yards.

In the pure optics he sees the cat’s face as if it’s fifty feet away. The breeze moves a tuft of his chest hair. Killer Cat, no doubt. Gale sees the scarred face, the tan eyes, the tip-chewed right ear of the cat as on the security camera in Laguna Beach, taken a week ago.

He’s disappointed that he’ll have to kill this old cat.

He admires its boldness, endurance, and fortitude.

Admires how he padded from the Santa Ana Mountains to Pacific Vibrations Surf Shop on Coast Highway, and a week later back to the mountains behind Laguna to kill and eat the multimillionaire land developer Bennet Tarlow. Then dodged two professional hunters and an experienced tracking dog for nearly twenty-four hours and ten miles of the rough backcountry in which he was probably born.

Gale offs the safety, and the vibration shivers the scope out of focus for a split second, and when it resolves, the cat is gone.

Finger on the trigger, Gale scopes the rocks in a widening circle but no lion. Waits motionless and hears Carpenter crunching through the brush behind him.

“He’s up there, Carp. The big chewed-up one from Coast Highway.”

“Killer Cat. I will be damned. But I’m not surprised.”

“He was in that V above the boulders. Looking right at me.”

Carpenter swings up his Weatherby and peers through the scope. “What’s the best way around this mountain?”

“Knight can figure it out.”

Three hours later they’ve circumnavigated and climbed the mountain. Gale stands before the V where Killer Cat had been, the wind in his face.

Knight stares at Carpenter wild-eyed with scent, but he holds his handler’s commands to sit down and stay. He pants loudly, tongue lolling off the left side of his jaw, his flanks studded with sage pods and brambles, tail twitching.

“Hunt ’em up, boy! Hunt ’em up!”

Less than an hour later, weary Knight has lost the scent.

They hunt past dark and set up camp in a stand of digger pine. Gale looks forward to his bourbon again.

It’s Elke Meyer on the satellite phone.

“How’s my favorite lion-tracking detective?”

“I got a good look at him. Knight tracked him twelve miles from the kill site. It’s the big cat from Coast Highway in Laguna.”

“Did you shoot?”

“I offed the safety and he vanished.”

“How far out?”

“A thousand yards.”

“Wow.”

“Not much wind. It would have been a long but clean shot.”

“I’m glad you didn’t kill him, Lew.”

Gale can’t imagine why.

“Lew, um, the autopsy on Tarlow finished up just a couple of hours ago. He died from gunshot. Two bullets in the back of his head. Killer Cat chewed him but didn’t kill him. Tarlow had bled to death before the cat found him. Say nothing about this. So, get back to the kill site first thing in the morning and figure out who did this. Daniela Mendez — your new partner — will meet you. Do not tell anyone what I’ve just told you. Including Carpenter. That comes from Kersey, direct. A car registered to Tarlow was found parked in a campsite in Caspers — not far from where they found his body. It’s in impound now.”