The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [17]
He began carrying the rifle with him—on horseback, on foot, in his bed. I asked him why he thought he’d run into the cat in broad daylight or asleep in the cabin, and he asked me when it was I had gotten so smart, and I let him be. But I could tell that he was beyond cautious or even superstitious of the cat’s presence. He was somehow thrown off, as though he hadn’t expected such an adversary to encroach on his mountain pastoral. Or worse, that her presence meant she had come to the end of a long game of stalking and the hunt was about to be finished.
One morning before first light we heard the hard bleating of a ewe in distress and my father was outside and moving fast through the flock before Zlee and I even knew what was happening. I heard a shot as I came out of the door of the cabin, and another as I broke into a run. When I reached my father, he was holding the barrel high and staring off into the light rising in the east.
There was barely enough dawn to see, but if my father had pulled a trigger—and twice—I believed there was reason, and so I asked breathlessly, “Did you get her?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Let’s follow the blood. Which direction did she run in?”
“I don’t know,” he said again, scaring me a little.
“You don’t know?” I asked, more out of disbelief than anything.
“For Christ’s sake, Jozef. I said I don’t know.”
We were silent for some time, and I listened to the mauled ewe suck air (she had fought in what way she could, big and strong as she was) and kick at the hard ground with her hooves, until she stopped kicking and breathing altogether and lay in her bed of grass and gore.
Two days later, we buried Sawatch in a shade of pines to the back of the cabin and went inside without a word. My father began packing food (what looked like enough for three days) into a rucksack, threw four rounds into a side pocket, took the Krag down from the wall and handed it to Zlee, then gave me the rucksack and a leather case with the field glasses inside.
“I was up all night figuring this, even while that thing was killing my dog,” he said. “She’s hunting from the top of Krí• ik Ridge. Has to be. I want you boys to come back with most of those rounds and enough food for a guest. I don’t even want to see that cat.”
Zlee and I took a lame ram we were going to have to put down anyway, hiked the whole day up to the ridge—the highest point just above the tree line there in that part of the mountains, Krí•ik was named for the crosslike shape it resembled, with a long horizontal cave that rested on the top of a towering shaft of granite—left the ram on the trail and found a thick stand of birch about 250 yards away and upwind, where we sat hidden, waiting.
The ram brayed, tried to run, grazed on some lowgrowing thistle, and then slept. We spent the night listening and resting in shifts. I glassed the ridge at sunrise but didn’t see a thing. We watched all morning and into the afternoon, then left our cover and walked the ram back down into a meadow, clearing the air before we tried again the next night. Nothing. Three days we spent observing that ridge, until I woke up the next morning and saw Zlee standing to take in the view of the valley behind us and a slice of the distant range visible from our blind.
“Your father’s wrong,” he said. “That lion’s not here. And if she was, she’s not coming back here, at least not to hunt anything tied down.”
We had run out of food, so, disappointed as I was that we wouldn’t get the cat, I was glad we’d be heading back to our camp, and I said to Zlee, “Do you mean in the mountains, or not here on this ridge?”
“I mean not where we are,” he said. “If this lion’s hunting, why do we believe that we can leave some old animal in her path and expect her to show up for us? We’re not tracking a creature