But Kevin didn’t answer, caught in sudden surprise of the crystalline memory that had taken him.
“You know the one.”
“Yes,” he said, immersed now in the clear image of that mass of ocotillo crowned with orange blossoms. “I know the one.”
The ocotillo become all but invisible to anyone who lives in the southeastern corner of Arizona. From a distance, their shape is subtle, their limbs twisting from the ground like the legs of an upended octopus. But for anyone who leaves a roadway, walks over a rise or into a canyon, they become a formidable presence, any dense stand of them almost impossible to negotiate. Even these many years later, Kevin’s skin remembered their thorns. Tangled and gray, the ocotillos on that November morning were not in bloom.
Two canyons north of where they’d started their hunt, Kevin and Mondy cut the tracks of a large cat. They had encountered the prints—three of them, pressed deep in the mud along the bank of a rock spring—half an hour before, shortly after lunch, and still they could not agree on what kind of animal had made them. In the midday hours they tended to work lower in the canyons, hoping to push up bedded game, and had crossed the spring bottom when Mondy stopped and raised one hand. He stared down at the ground. The prints were undoubtedly feline, but Kevin found no reason for it to be any other than a lion, perhaps a mature tom. Armando Luna, though, would not be moved, his argument planted as the mountain they stood on. “This is Pete’s track, man. I know for sure.” Old Pete, El Tigre, a black jaguar the Mexicans sometimes called El Sombro, came from the south at intervals over the last ten years to ravage game and livestock, international borders and paid-for cattle and colts be damned.
“It’s probably just a cougar,” Kevin said.
Mondy was patient. “Cougar track is smaller and more square.”
“How do you know that?” Kevin regretted the question the moment it came. Tracking was Mondy’s one solid skill.
Mondy looked off toward the valley, the grassy flat stark under the afternoon light. “We’ve had this argument before.”
Two hours later, John Monahan squatted on his haunches before the same set of tracks. Forty-six years old, he was a third-generation area rancher, and his outfit encompassed a good part of the San Bernardino Valley along the New Mexico border. The Monahan family had hunted big cats as long as they had ranched and had gained national attention for their prowess.
Local lore had it that John harbored a personal vendetta against the cat in question. For the last five years, Pete walked on only three paws, for which the rancher himself, as the story went, could take personal credit. Having woken one morning to the sound of a screaming filly, Monahan, in bedclothes and slippers, caught the old tom—a surreal silhouette of black—just as he was dragging the mare’s dead week-old colt out of the corral. The rancher had picked up the Mini 14 instead of the .270—the two rifles stood side-by-side in the entry-room closet—and the cat, no more than a hundred feet from the house, had slowed for the dragging of the colt. The telescopic sight of the deer rifle would have gathered enough dawn light for a good shot, but Monahan had instead blazed out 22 caliber bullets, emptying the entire clip, never able see the pins on the open sights of the little carbine well enough to fire a killing round. And it was only after sunrise that he had found the few spots of blood. He’d fed the dogs, saddled the good mule, and set out knowing full well he’d waste a day—though he had to try—as Pete, lame though he was, would fly like a spirit back into Mexico. Kevin, though, had never heard this story from Monahan himself—nor was he inclined to enquire about it now, as he and Mondy watched the rancher examine the tracks.
John looked up where the sun had moved toward the horizon and stood a fist and a half above the Perilla Hills. “It’ll be getting on dark in an hour or two.” It took only a beat for him to make his decision. “My dogs’re about used up today. And Pete’s not going anywhere, not too fast, anyway—we’ll wait till morning.”
“It’s him then,” Mondy said.
Monahan thought before answering. “Magoffins over in Guadalupe canyon are missing two colts.” He nodded down at the tracks. “And a three-footed animal could have made those. I think it’s him.”
Mondy might have glanced at Kevin, some sign of his triumph, but he didn’t.
“Your dad and O.D. come with you?” Monahan asked Kevin.
“They were drawn for the December hunt,” Mondy answered, sensing that he and Kevin might be in trouble with the rancher. “We came alone today. I told this kid to start further north, more toward Cottonwood, but he didn’t listen.”
“Well,” Monahan said, his pauses uncomfortably long. “I’m not sure it’s good idea for anybody to be out here, especially near the border—damn dope runners sometimes get out this way.” He shook his head, looked sideways from under his winter Stetson at Kevin. “I don’t know that I’d even be out this way but that I have to look after my cows.”
At six o’clock the next morning, horse trailer in tow, they crossed the cattle guard and pulled up to the main house of the Cinder Knoll ranch. Thomas McNally, Kevin’s father, and his long-time hunting partner, O.D. Hallot, had come with them, unable to resist the chance of getting a glimpse of the big cat. The two men had ridden comfortably in the front of the King Cab Ford, while Kevin and Mondy had been stuffed into the back along with rifles, glasses, scopes, and ammo. Kevin and his friend had by turns accused each other of farting, hogging precious space, and stealing the last bit of coffee in the thermos, until O.D. had spoken up.
“Tom, slow this thing down to about forty.”
“Why’s that?”
“It’ll give these guys a better chance of survival when I throw their sorry asses out.”
The last half hour of the drive had been quiet.
A single flood lamp burned by the Quonset hut and corrals. John Monahan was loading four bridled and saddled mules into a well-used stock trailer. The last one had spooked slightly at the lights of the truck and Monahan had since calmed the animal and slapped it on the rump and it clumped into the trailer with the rest.
“Gentlemen,” was his greeting when the last of them, Kevin, had emerged from the truck.
They shook hands all around and had to speak above the dogs. Kevin counted six, who bayed from their pens for the excitement of the hunt. Tom gestured at the stock trailer. “Looks like we have more animals than people. I brought my two geldings.”
“No,” Monahan said, “Amanda’s got a deer tag. I just loaded up that damn sorrel mule she likes so much.”
Amanda Monahan, the rancher’s petite fifteen-year-old daughter, with whom Kevin had a speaking acquaintance at school. A cold tingle moiled at the bottom of his belly as he tried to recall whether he’d combed his hair and how well he’d brushed his teeth that morning. The girl was two years behind him (he a senior and she a sophomore) and had blossomed the last six months. Their slim relationship was based on a single conversation they’d had a year before about James Harriot’s All Creatures series which both had read.
The girl had slipped unnoticed into the cab of her father’s pickup, where she fired the ignition, grinding the diesel engine to a start, an impatient signal that she wanted to get this enterprise under way.
“Well,” Monahan said. “Looks like we’ll get out of here before noon, anyhow.”
To Kevin’s chagrin, though, his father had asked the rancher if the two-hundred-fifty pound Armando Luna could ride in his truck and the girl in the king cab to make better use of space. The