Part 2
Tom photographed the camera where it hung, then moved out of its field of view. Taking it down would preserve the memory card, but it could not retrieve the image already transmitted—or hide the fact that he had found the cats.
He cut the strap, bagged the camera, and called dispatch again.
This time Dr. Leah Avery broke into the channel before the dispatcher finished answering.
“Have you touched the cable?”
Tom shut his eyes briefly. “Hello, Leah.”
“Have you touched it?”
“No.”
His daughter’s voice held no room for family. She was the Arizona Game and Fish wildlife veterinarian leading the response, and Tom was a field officer who might complicate her work if he needed to prove he was still useful.
Leah asked him to count the female’s respirations and describe the exposed tissue, the position of the paw, and whether the loop tightened when the cat shifted. Tom returned to the ledge, watched for thirty seconds, and answered each question.
>“The restraint may be limiting blood loss,” Leah said. “Releasing it before she’s immobilized could cause hemorrhage or other complications. Leave it exactly where it is.”
“I know what a tourniquet does.”
The radio remained quiet for half a beat.
“Then you know why I’m saying it aloud. Build a windbreak if she tolerates it. Don’t feed the cub. Don’t attempt a capture.”
“How far out are you?”
“The north road is drifted. We’re bringing the tracked rig from Patagonia. An hour, maybe more.”
“You’re coming yourself?”
“I’m the veterinary lead.”
Eight months earlier, Leah had crossed a marked safety boundary during a mountain lion capture when the sedated cat stopped breathing. She restored its airway. Tasha Reed, the technician who followed her, fell on loose rock and broke her wrist.
Tom’s after-action report had been factual until its final paragraph. There, he recommended removing Leah from backcountry command until she demonstrated what he called a more disciplined threshold for risk.
He had not shown her the recommendation. She learned about it when her supervisor restricted her duties.
Leah came to his house with the report folded into quarters. She told him he had taken an agency badge into a family argument because he could not bear to hear her make decisions he could not control. Tom replied that a leader was responsible for the people who followed her. Both had continued after there was nothing left to say.
Since then, they had exchanged weather alerts, agency notices, and one stiff text on his birthday.
“Bring enough oxygen for the descent,” Tom said. “The east face is loose beneath the snow.”
“It’s loaded. If the camera owner comes back, move away from the cats. They are not cover.”
“Understood.”
“That wasn’t a promise.”
“No.”
Leah exhaled over the radio. “Call if her breathing changes.”
Tom extended the windbreak with an emergency blanket, turning the reflective side inward so it would not flash. The cub had curled into the crook of his coat sleeve. Every few minutes, it raised its head, touched its nose to the female’s jaw, and settled again.
The engine came from the east forty minutes later.
No rescue team had been told to use the abandoned road. Tom stood, cleared his holster, and pressed the emergency button on his radio. The silent signal gave dispatch his location and told them an officer needed help.
The cub heard the engine and crawled beneath its mother’s chin.
An olive-green utility vehicle appeared between the oaks. Tire chains bit into the snow. A winch was mounted to the front, and an aluminum transport crate had been bolted into the bed.
Miles Gentry was driving.
Tom had known him for twenty years. Before the state revoked his guiding license, Miles had been the man deputies called when a hiker disappeared beyond the marked trails. He could read a partial heel print in gravel and lead a frightened horse down shale without breaking its legs.
When Leah was sixteen and her mare threw her in a wash, Miles found her before the search helicopter arrived. He sat beside her for two hours, keeping her still with a fractured pelvis, and later taught her how to tie a bowline with one hand because she hated being treated like glass.
Then clients began talking about untagged game. Investigators matched photographs, payments, and remote camps. Tom supplied the map that connected three illegal kills to Miles’s permit area.
Miles blamed dishonest clients, federal restrictions, drought, and finally Tom. His skill had not vanished when his license did. It had simply lost lawful work.
He stepped from the vehicle in a waxed coat and clean leather gloves. Tom noticed the gloves because Miles had never worn them when there was honest work to be done.
“You’re a long way from the cut gate,” Tom said.
Miles looked beyond him. When he saw the female, something unguarded crossed his face.
“She wasn’t supposed to get her leg through.”
The admission settled into the snow between them.
“Hands where I can see them,” Tom said.
Miles raised both hands. “You want her alive. So do I.”
“You anchored that cable.”
“I set it to hold, not cut. She twisted until it buried.”
“The second restraint?”
Miles glanced toward the ledge. “Empty.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
The cub shifted against its mother. Sunlight touched its shoulder, and the hidden rosettes appeared.
Miles’s breath left him slowly. “There he is.”
Not What is that? Not I don’t believe it.
There he is.
Tom moved until his body blocked the view. “You knew about him.”
“I had one picture from October. Black shape, wrong proportions. I spent two months proving I wasn’t chasing a shadow.”
“For a buyer?”
Miles looked at him. “For enough money to keep my land.”
The old Gentry acreage bordered a narrow wildlife corridor proposed by federal biologists. Drought and debt had emptied Miles’s guiding calendar long before the state took his license. A conservation group had offered to buy an easement. Miles refused, saying the amount would not cover what he owed.
“You drew your corridor over my house,” he said. “People in clean offices decided my place mattered more without me on it. Now you’ll collar this animal, put his picture in fundraising mail, and tell me money becomes dirty only when I need it.”
Tom had sat through meetings where a jaguar became a budget request, a colored polygon, or an argument between agencies. Miles’s anger had something solid inside it. The cable around the female’s leg remained solid too.
“Move away from the vehicle,” Tom said.
“I brought a crate and a winch. What did you bring?”
“A veterinary team.”
“How soon?”
Tom did not answer.
The female shifted. The cable tightened, and her paw jerked without moving the leg. Miles flinched.
“Let me rig the winch to a litter,” he said. “You can’t carry her up that slope.”
“You’re not approaching either animal.”
“Still making everybody’s choices, Tom? Maybe ask Leah how well that works.”
Tom felt the blow land and let it stay there. “Sit against the boulder. Hands on your knees.”
Miles obeyed, though his attention never left the cub. Tom did not close the distance for a solo handcuffing on ice. Backup was coming, and the cats were safer while Miles remained in sight.
Darkness gathered in the canyon. Tom watched the female’s breathing, Miles’s hands, and the northern trail.
At last, pale headlights moved between the trees above them.
Miles stood. “Sit down,” Tom ordered. “They’ll separate him from her if she dies.” “Hands where I can see them.” Miles looked at the cub, then took one step toward the ledge…
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