“What are you doing here, huh?”
The dog lowered her head, waggling her body submissively at the affection in his voice. She sidled up to him and he scratched her neck. “Where’s Mandi, huh? Is she behind you?”
Kevin stood and looked down canyon the way he had come. No movement. He took another bite of his sandwich and reached down and scratched the dog’s head. “I bet she lost you taking that deer back to the trucks,” he said, half to the dog, half to himself.
The dog was whimpering then, sitting expectantly before him, her tail sweeping the ground, the same way his Lab at home acted when she needed outside. “What’s wrong with you?” he said. He tossed the remaining corner of sandwich on the ground in front of her. She seemed surprised at the gesture, nosing at the bread and meat a moment before licking it up and swallowing it. Still, the expectant look, the whimpering, the wagging tail.
Kevin held out his hands. “I don’t have any more, see?” She took a hop backward, a sort of buck, and yipped at him. The dog wanted him to follow her. He’d heard the baying from the hounds earlier and was inexperienced enough in lion hunting that he didn’t know quite what to make of it. It could have been the dogs sounded like that when they pushed up a jackrabbit, and Amanda hadn’t been around for him to ask. But now he suspected the baying had meant something more and that Bonny wanted to join in the hunt. Amanda was probably with the rest of the party, and he’d be left out.
“Okay, Bonny,” he said, untying his mule and mounting up. “Let’s see what you’re so worried about.”
Though she took him a bit further south than where he’d heard the other dogs, he followed her, about a quarter mile through the bottom of a short, rocky canyon. It was there in the sandy bottom that he spotted the tracks. He dismounted and called back the dog, who quickly complied. Kevin didn’t need Armando Luna’s skill to realize the prints had been made by a big three-footed animal.
“Damn,” he said to Bonny. “Maybe they’re on him, you think?”
But this didn’t make sense—the baying he’d heard was at least a mile further north, and there was no way the rest of the party could have come this direction. He squatted down to his haunches and with a small twig poked the edge of the most well-formed of the tracks. It was about the size of a medium-sized pancake. “It’s gotta be him,” he said.
Bonny’s patience was running out. She bucked backward a few hops and yapped at him, eyes bright and ears pointed forward. “Okay,” he said to her. “Hold on.” A moment’s apprehension, verging on panic, ran over him—the same feeling he’d had at nine when he became separated from his parents and sisters one Saturday evening at a crowded county fair. He was comforted at the sight of the old bald ridge north of him where he knew the trucks were parked.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll go a little more.”
The dog worked the bottom of the canyon some two-hundred yards, then broke from the wash to move uphill toward a low yucca-clustered saddle. Surprisingly, old Sally never balked, climbing from the relative comfort of the sandy bottom to the rock-and-brush-tangled hillside. This belligerent mule rose to the occasion when it came to chasing cats.
Once he’d topped the saddle, Kevin recognized the long shallow basin he’d glassed so many times. Just a few hundred yards this side of the New Mexico border, and about two miles north of Sonora, the half-mile flat was crowded with stands of Emory oak and cedar with several breaks speckled with bunches of bear grass. Knowing the basin was a good place for the old tom to cross, Kevin negotiated Sally into a clearing just below the saddle, climbed off and tied her and called back the dog then sat to glass a few minutes. He worked the brush hard, knowing a cat, even a black one, if hiding, would be difficult to spot.
After fifteen minutes, the big black cat stepped into view, though it took several moments for the stunning fact of it to take hold in Kevin’s mind. A rush from his heart climbed from his chest and whirred between his ears, and his hands shook so he could hardly steady the binoculars. His first thought had been “cow”—until he made out the yard of tail that followed the animal.
Some thousand yards away, the jaguar sat like a housecat on its haunches, the black fur and powerful muscle beneath so distinct under the afternoon sun as to appear unreal. Kevin didn’t think about his rifle, still sheathed in its saddle scabbard, and could only sit paralyzed, unhinged at the animal he’d only heard stories about.
Without taking his eyes off the black speck, which he knew now to be Pete, Kevin managed to open his fanny pack and set up his tripod, then mount his binoculars on it and not lose the animal. He’d done this all in a frenetic thirty seconds.
Pete was walking now, two-hundred pounds, at least, his head the size and somewhat the shape of the deep cast-iron skillet O.D. cooked camp eggs on. The limp was definite and pronounced—the left hind foot—and Kevin wondered at how an animal so impeded and so stark in shape and color could have for so long escaped his many pursuers.
The old cat stopped then, and looked straight up at the hillside where Kevin sat. He’d spotted the mule. For a solid five minutes he stared, the little dog all the while tensed to give chase, her growls like a small motor.
“Hold on, girl,” he told her. “Hold on.”
Pete suddenly appeared to make up his mind, turned and scurried east, belly low to the ground, not quite at a dead run. He disappeared in a series of blinking black flashes as he moved between the trees and into a brushy draw that was fed from the far ridge just this side of the New Mexico border.
Kevin didn’t think about the time—it was already late afternoon—or whether he would cross a state border or have to spend the night without food or bedroll. He, like the little dog, acted only on impulse, swinging up onto the mule and hissing down, “Let’s get, Bonny. Let’s get that old devil.”
But after he’d ridden down and found the tracks at the bottom, he’d gotten a little more firmly fixed in his senses. Bonny had become harder to bring to heel, and he’d had to call her back half a dozen times before she’d heeded, and he’d yanked her by the collar, hard. “You stay,” he told her. “You heel.”
He was thinking now, finally. Inexperienced though he was, Kevin had gained enough sense to know treeing the tom was probably out of the question with just one dog. Old Pete could take Bonny out with one fell swat, and the whole thing wasn’t worth killing someone else’s dog over.
Standing beside Sally now, he glassed the ridge some four hundred yards ahead of him. He tended to work the hillside with his binoculars from left to right, scanning from bottom to top, then from top down. He’d traversed about half the ridge when the old tom limped into his field of view.
Kevin didn’t hesitate this time, quickly lifting his Winchester from the scabbard, sitting and jacking in a shell. Pete was moving through the brush now on the shadowed half of the hill in no apparent hurry. Kevin could feel his breathing, deliberating the rise and fall of his chest, working it in rhythm with the crosshairs in his scope. The way his gun was sighted in, the one-hundred-thirty grained bullet would drop fifteen to twenty inches at the estimated range.
Pete passed into an opening, still moving slowly, and Kevin caught his breath, his finger giving perhaps a quarter pound more pressure on the trigger, but he did not shoot, and the cat moved again into the junipers. Kevin was unsure why he was not able to shoot,