Rifle season, p.4
Rifle Season, page 4
Mace drove across Horsefly Creek then turned uphill on a track so clogged by brush their passage sounded like fingernails on a blackboard. After gaining a thousand feet in altitude, he stopped and took three dayglow-orange vests and caps from the bed. He put one set on, clipped bear spray to his belt and set the rest of the orange gear on the tailgate. “One size fits all,” he said.
“Wait a sec,” said Clay. “Won’t that stuff make it easier for the mountain lions to see us?”
“They don’t see color the way we do,” said Mace. “They’re looking for shape and movement.”
“Then what’s the point?” asked Vanessa.
“Muzzle-loading season just ended and rifle season starts Saturday. Some hunters don’t pay attention to dates. So the last thing you want to do is look like an elk in sunglasses.”
“Shit,” said Clay, getting into his safety gear in a hurry.
“You mean muzzle loading like those goofy Civil War reenactor clubs?” asked Vanessa.
“Kinda,” said Mace. “Gun has to be unrifled and use black powder. Cuts down on velocity and range and accuracy. So placing a knockdown round is harder.”
Vanessa tossed her Nebraska Cornhuskers hat in the bed, put the orange one on, checked her reflection in the side mirror then slipped into her vest. “Just to make it all more fake sporting?”
Mace was surprised by the casual animosity. “Probably. Never guided any muzzle loaders.”
“Why not?”
“Hunting is hard enough on these animals,” said Mace. “If you can’t kill ’em clean and quick don’t take the shot.” Then he spread a topo map and tapped a narrow escarpment three miles away at an elevation of nine thousand feet. “That’s where we’re headed.”
“What’s there?” asked Clay.
“View of this saddle to the south where we might find a fresh kill. Watch where I step and keep your head down. And no talk unless I start it. You got a question give me a hand signal.”
Then he put the map away, shouldered his pack and took off feeling a buzz from being back in charge. Clay and Vanessa pulled their gear on watching his speed and gait like coaches at a tryout. After he disappeared around a bend in the trail they trotted after him. Half a mile later Mace was huffing like a dying steam engine and his clients were bunched up on his heels, Clay in the lead.
“Yo, bro,” he said. “What’s the hand signal for CPR?”
Mace glanced back at him, too gassed to come up with a retort.
Clay kept poking. “How about where’s my oxygen and wheelchair and drool-proof blanky?”
Vanessa slapped the orange cap off his head. “Shut the fuck up.”
After another mile, they hit a flat stretch pocked with scrub oak and Mace saw coyotes loping away with no more noise than socks on carpet. He veered over to the carcass splayed in the tall grass and watched the realtors circle the mess. The doe’s front legs were wrenched off and its stomach torn open. The rump had been violently devoured. “That’s how coyotes feed,” he said.
“Poor thing,” whispered Vanessa, picturing the deer’s final moments of numb horror.
“They get the animal down and have a tug-o’-war,” said Mace. “Then eat ass-first.”
Clay squinted at the shiny mangle of organs, steroidal vocabulary stalling out. “Dang.”
* * *
The couple started snapping pictures but Mace kept moving. He reached a shady band of spruce, puked his scrambled egg breakfast and planted his butt on a log. His quads were on fire and his heart was about to claw out his chest and run off. He pulled the eighty-proof pink Nalgene bottle, took a gulp and replaced the cap just as Vanessa and Clay jogged up, perky and oblivious to the altitude.
She jerked a thumb back down the trail. “Why not stake out that kill?”
“Lions are picky,” wheezed Mace. “They don’t eat off other people’s plates.”
Clay gobbled a protein bar and appraised their guide. “Tell you what. This might not fly.”
Mace licked his lips thinking about the joint in his pocket. “What might not fly?”
“You,” said Vanessa.
Mace lurched to his feet, face slick with sweat. “Just knocking off a little rust.”
“Rust my ass,” said Clay. “You’re decrepit and enfeebled.”
Vanessa winced. “Bought him a thesaurus to enhance his agent-speak. Big mistake obviously.”
But what he said was true as hell, thought Mace. He pulled out the blunt, took two massive hits and lapsed into a coughing fit that made his eyes bug and water. Then tucked the roach away like it was made of gold leaf. “Called a sabbatical.”
The couple exchanged a look. Mace thought it had meaning beyond finding a cat but his O2 deficit clouded any conclusion. He did wonder why they weren’t mad. Maybe eight hundred dollars a day was pocket change. Or they were about to fire him. “Ready to cut me loose?” he asked.
“Not yet,” said Vanessa. “Just don’t stroke out on us.” Then she pointed at the nick in the ridge above and to their right. “That has to be the notch we’re headed for.”
“That’s it,” said Mace, thinking she could sure read a map. Then he saw the dark-legged front nosing in from the northwest. Looked like monsoon weather but it was too late in the year. On the other hand, best believe your eyes not the calendar. Few inches of July-like rain would translate into two feet of October snow. Mace knew that was his father talking but figured it didn’t matter. The front seemed to be moving east. And he was on a tourist lark, not a three-day bighorn hunt.
“How about we wait for you up there?” said Vanessa.
Mace dug out a Red Bull and drank it pondering his customers. The vomiting and booze and weed had cleared his head. “How ’bout you two fall in behind me and keep your mouths shut.”
* * *
They reached the ridgeline in an hour. Mace was wobbly enough to call it quits right there but didn’t have the wind to say so. He shed his pack, flopped prone behind the sandstone fin and snugged the Leicas into his sockets. Then glassed the topography below thinking the odds of finding the proverbial fresh lion kill were still crap to none. Talk the talk, take the money and go home.
The ground he scoured was slung between two promontories, dropped off sharply on either side and resembled a five-hundred-acre saddle covered with pinion and manzanita. Clay slid up next to Mace and followed the slow weave of his binoculars with impatient disinterest. Vanessa rolled onto her back and followed a pair of red-tail hawks riding the thermals directly overhead. They were commiserating in soft shrieks and banking in tight spirals, wingtips almost touching. Long ago she read they mated for life and never forgot. Her eyes softened as she admired the perfect predator romance borne on thin air. Then she rolled over and watched her guide ply his trade.
Mace combed the saddle for another chunk of time then started over again without a word. Twenty minutes after that he froze and made an adjustment to the ocular. Clay broke out his Bushnell 10×42 binos and studied the ground holding Mace’s attention but saw no dead deer.
“What are you looking at?” he whispered.
“Haven’t decided yet,” said Mace.
Vanessa got prone beside him, thighs sliding along his. “But it could be a lion kill.”
“Could be,” said Mace. “Could be a black bear kill. They take deer when they get a chance. If it’s too much meat they cache it. But if I was dumb enough to bet, I’d put money on it being a cat.”
Vanessa snagged the binos from Mace’s hands. He let her because her touch felt good.
“Where am I looking?” she asked.
Mace pointed at the northern rim where the snow held longer and the vegetation was thicker. On the lip was a clearing littered with deadfall and bramble. A heavy stand of pine shaded it from casual discovery. “Left side. Just inside the trees.”
Vanessa aimed the glass accordingly and adjusted the focus. “You mean that little mound with the branch sticking up with the pine cone at the end?”
“Yea. Except that’s a foreleg and the cone is a hoof.”
Her knuckles tensed and she exhaled sharply. “Holy shit. He’s right.”
Mace felt a drug-like surge of vindication but kept his mouth shut.
Clay put his glasses on the spot beneath the stand of pine he’d swept before and suddenly saw the deer leg clear as day. “Superlatives fail me,” he murmured.
Mace took his binos from Vanessa and stowed them away. “Now comes the hard part.”
He moved to the notch in the ridge and cased the eighty yards of twenty-degree grade salted with loose rock running down to the saddle then motioned the couple over and pointed at the slope.
“When you see me hit those trees at the bottom, wait ten minutes then come on down one at a time. Nice and easy. No rush and no damn noise. Then find cover, stay put, stay low and do not move. I’ll come back and find you. Understood?”
Vanessa nodded. Clay just stared, rubbed wrong by orders from a boozehound. Then Mace slid though the notch and down the incline. The couple watched his progress. His footwork wasn’t bad.
“Might still have it,” she said.
Clay shrugged. “Might at that.”
After their guide disappeared, they waited ten minutes and slipped through the notch and down the grade with a liquid stealth not learned from showing open houses.
* * *
Mace was deep in the saddle when he stopped to check the treetops. Once he had the wind direction nailed, he started a wide, head-down recon. When he reached the western flank of the saddle he doubled back on a different course. In the heart of the brush, a small pine-needle-covered mound caught his eye. He leaned close but didn’t touch what he saw and moved on.
After returning to where he started, he spotted Clay and Vanessa under a big pinion. He caught their eyes and they came over quick and quiet with excited expressions. Like kids on a field trip. Then he took off with them at his heels until he reached the same needle-covered mound.
“Cats are into delicacies,” said Mace in a voice that didn’t carry past their ears. He scraped the needles away to reveal a six-inch brown turd cut with hair and bone fragments. “They shave off the fur with their teeth and dissect out the stomach so the acid doesn’t ruin the heart and liver. And they cover their scat. This one isn’t that old. He might not get hungry again for days. We’ll see.”
“How do you know it’s a male?” asked Vanessa, lips brushing his ear.
Mace pointed at a robust print in the dirt a yard away. “Paw size.”
“What else?” she said with a grin.
Mace led them to a granite mound the size of a boxcar. It was downwind of the kill and covered with juniper. He made them wait while he scrambled up through branches to the far side of the rocks where he found a good blind with a clear view of the cache fifty yards away. Then he crawled back to where he left the couple and stopped in disbelief. They were gone.
He saw movement and rose to his knees. The two of them were on their feet, walking backward. Clay’s right arm was extended. There was a Glock 45 in his hand. Mace followed the barrel and saw a black bear cub ambling toward them, flipping rocks and licking up ants. A yearling weighing about seventy pounds. Then the cub got a whiff of sweat and sunblock, saw the two humans and bawled for help. Then mom came crashing through the oak like an ursine cannonball.
* * *
Clay hauled Vanessa behind him and drew down on the bear seeing all the sketchy places he should have died and didn’t pass before his eyes. Made being mauled to death in nowhere Colorado kinda quaint. He was deciding where to place the first round, head or chest, when a dayglow orange vest slid into his gunsights and stopped. Then the back of Mace’s skull and his spread arms.
The 320-pound sow halted her charge eight paces from Mace, huffed explosively and slammed her forelegs into the ground. The cub wheeled and vanished. Mace had the bear spray in his right hand. His left was raised in casual greeting. His voice was soothing but firm. “It’s all good darling. All good. Go get your baby and ignore the clown with the gun because he’s not gonna shoot.”
Clay glared down his right arm, weapon locked on Mace’s back. Pissed at the stoner hayseed messing up his shot and telling him what he was or wasn’t gonna do. “Why not?” he asked.
“She’s bluffing,” said Mace quietly. “She just wants the cub safe. Do not fire that weapon.”
The bear made one more huge raging huff and galloped after her kid. Mace listened to her foliage-crashing passage thinking of all her kind he got killed or killed himself. “Sorry, momma.”
“Talking to yourself now or that bear?” said Clay.
Mace turned around. Lightheaded with relief until he saw Clay’s sidearm was still aimed in his direction. His stance was rock steady. “Lower that goddamn gun,” snapped Mace.
Clay didn’t. Just lowered the barrel slightly. Putting it on Mace’s gut. “You got a death wish?”
Mace froze. Thumb easing the safety off on the bear spray. “I knew she didn’t mean it.”
“Fuck the bear. You looking to get shot is what I’m asking.”
“If I’d known you were dumb enough to pack a pistol on a nature hike I wouldn’t be here.”
“But you saw it and ran downrange anyway. Put your spine in my sights. That’s a death wish.”
Vanessa stood beside her man and studied Mace with newfound appreciation. “Or maybe he was actually ready to die for that bear.”
Clay smiled. “You mean for all the ones he made into rugs?”
“Yea.”
“Still aberrant suicidal shit if you ask me.”
Vanessa watched Mace another second. “But in a good way. Stow the pistol.”
Clay holstered the piece under his jacket and zipped it up. Then Mace rolled into his face.
“What are you doing with a concealed weapon out here?”
“None of your business,” said Clay.
“I can guarantee you it’s my business to know when a client’s carrying a sidearm.”
“So now you know. Got an Arizona concealed carry in the Beamer.”
“Fuck Arizona,” said Mace. “This is my world.”
“Maybe your world’s a little safer than mine.”
“That why you’re pointing a semiautomatic at my back?”
Clay got nose to nose with Mace, eyes lit and ready. “You ran directly in front of my weapon.”
Mace blinked. The asshole was right. Clay lived in a concrete shithole with a stupid crime rate. Where pistols were as common as cell phones and he’d never been charged by a bear before. His reaction was moronic but not crazy. He put the bear spray away and stepped back.
“I’m not an NRA nutjob,” said Vanessa. “But tripping out over a handgun seems a little extreme for a guy who made his living with big bad rifles.”
Mace looked at her, heart grinding, sweat trickling under his clothes. “Meaning what?”
“If you need an excuse to call it a day let’s wrap it up right now and head home. Don’t drag us into your sad-boy quitter bullshit for nothing.”
Mace looked off. She’d read his mind. A perfect stranger. Hell yea he needed excuses. He was addicted to excuses. Had been for a year. They were the sucking white noise in his head and she’d handed him a beauty. Screw this doomed goose chase. Go home and get mummified on the porch. But then what. The deep end beckoned. The one with no bottom. The one where he burns the whole house down with him in it. He turned to Clay and stuck his hand out. “Give me the Glock.”
Clay backed up a step, stance widening. “Why?”
“Simple. Safety first. Give me the gun or we’re done. Up to you.”
Clay glanced at Vanessa for guidance but she was watching the same two hawks with a dreamy expression because she already knew how this hormonal face-off would end. Sure enough, Clay opened his coat and surrendered the weapon butt-first. Mace released the magazine, ejected the chambered round, caught it on the fly and stuffed the gun and ammo in his coat. His brisk familiarity with a pistol wasn’t lost on Clay.
“Know your way around a sidearm.”
“Not exactly particle physics,” said Mace.
Then he laid a finger across his lips and walked past them toward the granite mound with the view of the kill. They fell in behind him, quiet as mice. When they got situated in the juniper on the far end of the rock he motioned them to flatten out and get their cameras ready. Then he pointed at the verge of the saddle where the vegetation was a solid wall and spoke in the barest whisper.
“If I were him, I’d come through there.”
When they were settled, Mace backed into the juniper until his silhouette was obliterated. Then time bled out and the sun dropped into the clouds piling up over Utah. The light got purple and brassy and the shadow of higher ground crept over their perch. The temp fell like an axe.
* * *
The aspen glow was down to a smudge when Mace shifted his gaze from the kill to the thicket for the hundredth time and felt a jolt of amazement. A man wearing face paint and camo was kneeling just inside the trees. His compound bow was raised, arrow at full draw, aimed at something off to the right. Even under the paint he seemed vaguely familiar. Mace looked at Vanessa thinking her hyperacuity would spot the guy right away but her expression was blank. As if entranced. He put the Leicas on the hunter and his heart stopped. It was Robert Martinez.
Mace lowered the binos and mashed his face into his hands. When he looked up again, Robert had set the bow aside and was down on hands and knees. His camo sloughed off like snakeskin and he grew huge paws, tan flanks and a lush, black-tipped tail. Then he became the biggest, finest mountain lion Mace had ever seen. After a vigilant pause, the puma glided into the open, lantern gaze freezing Clay and Vanessa in abject wonder. They almost had their cameras up when Mace rose to his feet, jaw hung, head shaking slowly in disbelief. The great cat saw him and vanished without seeming to move. The entire animal dissolving in a blink. A genuine act of magic.
* * *
It was 10 p.m. when the Tundra rolled into the yard and Mace got out. Vince mauled him with joy but he didn’t notice. The house was lit up but Jamie’s Rubicon was gone. A yawning numbness entered his body and left his legs and arms leaden. Then the truck’s doors creaked and the couple was coming at him, gear slung over their shoulders. Vince lowered his head and snarled and they stopped in unison. Mace was about to reprimand the dog when his gut started humming like a wire in the wind. Somehow the Arizona realtors were no longer harmless visitors on a photo safari.
