Part 2
Cal photographed the camera in place and cut its strap, though he knew any alert was already gone.
The case carried no name, only a scraped patch where a serial label had been. Whoever owned it had expected strangers to find the machine eventually. Cal slid it into an evidence bag and called dispatch again from the shelf above the ledge. This time a woman’s voice answered before the dispatcher could finish.
“Cal, don’t touch the restraint.”
He closed his eyes for one beat. “Hello to you too, Nora.”
“Did you touch it?”
“No.”
“Good. How many breaths in thirty seconds?”
No daughter in her voice, then. Dr. Nora Mercer, an Arizona Game and Fish Department wildlife veterinarian, was speaking to a field officer who might become one more problem if he needed to prove he was useful.
Cal returned to the shelter of the ledge and counted. The female’s sides moved shallowly beneath her winter coat. When he reported the number, Nora asked about blood, position, alertness, the color of the exposed tissue, and whether the cable tightened when the animal shifted. Her questions came clipped and exact. He answered in the same way.
“She’s cold and shocky,” Nora said. “The pressure on that leg may be limiting blood loss. If you release it before she’s immobilized and we can control the wound, you could make things worse.”
“I know what a tourniquet does.” The pause on the radio was brief, but he felt it.
“Then you know why you’re going to leave it alone. Put up a windbreak if you can do it without changing her behavior. Don’t feed the cub. Don’t try to crate him. Keep both in sight.”
“How long?”
“The north road is drifted. We’re bringing the tracked rig from Patagonia and a deputy from Santa Cruz County. An hour and twenty if the switchbacks are clear. Longer if they’re not.”
Cal looked at the sinking sun. The temperature had already fallen into the twenties. “You coming?”
“I’m the veterinary lead. My supervisor cleared the emergency assignment.”
Eight months earlier, he had written an after-action report about her. During a mountain lion capture, Nora had crossed a marked safety line when the sedated cat stopped breathing. She had restored its airway; a technician rushing in behind her had fallen and broken a wrist. Cal’s report had been accurate until its final paragraph, where he recommended that Nora be removed from backcountry leadership until she accepted what he called a more disciplined risk threshold.
He had not shown the paragraph to her. She learned about it when her supervisor did exactly what Cal had asked.
Nora had come to his house with the report folded into quarters. She told him he had used his badge to make a decision about her body and her work because he could not bear to hear her make it herself. Cal said a leader was responsible for whoever followed her across a line. Both of them had kept talking after there was nothing left to say. Since then, their conversations had been weather alerts, agency notices, and one text on his birthday.
“Bring enough oxygen for the descent,” Cal said now. “East side is loose under the snow.”
“Already loaded. Call if her breathing changes. And Cal—” He waited.
“If the person behind that camera shows up, the cats are not your cover. Move away from them.”
“Understood.” It was not a promise, and she knew him too well to mistake it for one.
Cal went back down. He extended the windbreak with his emergency blanket, keeping the reflective side turned away so it would not flash at the female. The cub had curled into the crook of his coat sleeve. Every few minutes it lifted its head, touched its nose to the mother’s jaw, and settled again.
The female’s eyes followed Cal, but the warning growl did not return. He sat behind a granite shoulder twenty-five yards away, close enough to watch her breathing and far enough to give her one thing that still resembled control.
He heard the engine thirty-seven minutes later. It came from the east, where no rescue team had been told to approach. A single-cylinder motor climbed the abandoned fire road, stopped, then started again at lower speed. Cal stood and moved his holster clear of his coat. He pressed his emergency button once, silently sending dispatch his location and an officer-needs-assistance signal.
The cub heard the engine too. It rose on shaking legs and pushed itself beneath the female’s chin.
An olive-green utility vehicle appeared between the oaks. It had tire chains, a winch, and an aluminum dog box bolted into the bed. Rafe Danner was driving.
Cal had known Rafe for nearly twenty years. Before the state revoked his hunting-guide license, Rafe had been the man deputies called when a tourist vanished in rough country. He could read a heel mark in gravel and bring a frightened horse down a shale slope without breaking either of them. Then untagged game carcasses began turning up. A client talked. Investigators traced payments through accounts unrelated to his guiding business.
Rafe had blamed the agencies, his clients, the drought, and finally Cal, who had provided the map that tied three illegal kills to his camp.
He stepped out wearing a waxed coat and clean leather gloves. Cal noticed the gloves because Rafe had never believed in wearing them when there was honest work to do.
“You’re a long way from that cut gate,” Cal said.
Rafe looked past him to the ledge. The change in his face was small and real. His mouth opened. For a second, he looked not greedy but afraid.
“She wasn’t supposed to get that leg through,” he said. The admission settled between them.
“Put your hands where I can see them, Rafe.”
Rafe lifted them, palms out. “You want her alive, don’t you? So do I.”
“You anchored a restraint on federal land.”
“I put out something meant to hold, not cut. Look at the size of her. She twisted it.”
“And the other snare by the gate?”
“Empty.”
“Not the answer I asked for.”
Rafe’s gaze found the cub. Side light showed the hidden rosettes in its black shoulder. His breath left him in a slow stream.
“There he is,” he said.
Not what is that. Not I don’t believe it. There he is.
Cal shifted until his body blocked Rafe’s view. “You knew.”
“I knew what crossed my camera in October. I knew what a collector would pay for a live black jaguar. Enough to keep the bank off my place and give my sister a house that doesn’t leak every monsoon.” Rafe’s eyes returned to Cal. “You people will collar him, put his picture on a brochure, and spend ten years arguing about habitat while another highway cuts it in half. Don’t stand there like money only gets ugly when I need it.”
The criticism had enough truth in it to make the rest more poisonous. Cal had sat through meetings where a jaguar became a funding line, a lawsuit, a colored shape on a map. None of that made a cable around a living leg less cruel.
“Back away from the vehicle,” Cal said.
“I brought a crate. I brought blankets. You have what—a radio and that museum piece of a coat?”
“A veterinary team is coming.”
Rafe looked toward the northern ridge. “How long?” Cal did not answer.
The female shifted under the ledge. The cable drew tight, and her paw jerked once without moving the rest of the leg. Rafe flinched. He knew enough to understand what he was seeing.
“Let me rig the winch to the litter,” he said. “You can’t carry her up that grade with two people.”
“You’re not going near her.”
“Then your pride may kill her before your daughter gets here.”
Cal heard the deliberate choice of word. Rafe had heard Nora’s name on agency channels or had asked around after the report. He had come prepared to use Nora against Cal, too.
“Sit against that boulder,” Cal said, pointing twenty feet from the utility vehicle. “Hands on your knees.”
Rafe obeyed. With backup already coming, Cal was not going to close the distance for a solo handcuffing on ice. Rafe’s attention never left the cub. The animal crawled from beneath its mother’s chin and stood over the injured leg, its back bowed, its small teeth bare.
The light drained out of the canyon. For the next forty-five minutes, Cal watched three things: the female’s breathing, Rafe’s hands, and the place where the northern trail came through the trees.
At last, a low engine sounded beyond the ridge. Rafe rose before Cal told him to stay seated. As twin headlights moved between the trunks, he took one step toward the ledge. “They’ll separate him from her,” he said. “You know they will.” He took another step…
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇