More Than A Cowboy

“Something urgent’s come up. If you can’t speak freely from there, then go where you can and call me back. My usual cell phone number.”

“But—”

“I’ll be waiting for your call.” He hung up.

Natwig stood, his hand clenched on the buzzing receiver. Bastard! Think you own me, just because you pay me?

“Who was it?” Karen demanded behind him. “Joe?”

He blew out a breath and his shoulders sagged. Till he paid off their debts to the hospital, laid up some cash against the rehab bills that kept on coming, Larson as good as owned him. There was no other way out but sell the ranch. And if he lost his land, lost his pack animals, then how was he to earn a living?

“That was…” Lying to Karen didn’t come naturally to him, but he was learning. He’d had more practice in the past six months than he’d had in the first twenty years of their marriage. “That was Cody, over at some bar in Cortez. Says he came out to his truck and he’s got a flat and damned if his spare isn’t flat, too. Wants me to come bail him out.”

“He can’t call his wife?”

“Suzie’s not answering her phone,” he mumbled. “Anyway, I was feeling restless. Drive’ll do me good.”

Karen’s third blasted cat, the tabby, thumped up onto the counter beside him. He grabbed the animal with a snarl and deposited it on his wife’s lap. “Damned cat! Tell a dog once not to do something and it’ll learn, but a cat?”

Beast and woman stared back at him in wide-eyed, wounded astonishment. Then Karen turned her head aside and wheeled toward the living room. “Come on, Posy, let’s go watch the news.”

He took a minute to cool down, then followed, to set the bowl of ice cream and a spoon on the coffee table at her elbow. Stood, shifting from foot to foot, yearning to touch her. “I won’t be gone long.”

Her hands smoothed the cat’s fur, her eyes stayed fixed on a beer commercial, where a pack of drunken college kids cavorted on an endless, sunny beach. Not a care in their world. “Take all the time you please.”

HE MET Larson halfway to Durango, at a roadside rest stop. “What’s your problem?” he growled, as he fitted himself into the Porsche’s low seat.

“Our problem.” Larson corrected him with a chilly smile. “It shouldn’t be a problem, if you move fast. We’ve learned that a female lynx has finally bred and she’s about to give birth. One of the DOW tracking planes spotted her. Four kittens, they’re estimating. That works out to roughly three hundred thousand apiece they’ve spent to achieve that. The taxpayers are out of their minds to put up with this nonsense!”

Natwig nodded grim agreement, though he seemed to recall that the lynx restoration program was financed by a voluntary check-off on the state income tax. Still, that kind of money. He felt a tickle of fear, like a cold breeze on his cheek. No way the damned bureaucrats at the DOW could afford to let all their cats vanish. Sooner or later, somebody would figure out that this wasn’t Mother Nature winnowing the weak. Once they did, somebody was bound to come after him.

Let him come. He’d almost welcome a flesh-and-blood enemy for a change. Better somebody he could face—somebody he could pound into the ground—than this formless fear and frustration that came creeping every night to crouch on his pillow.

“—be the Division’s media darlings, if we don’t watch out,” Larson was saying. “Before that happens, before somebody gets photos of the kittens and posts them on the DOW Web site, they need to disappear. Dead. Gone. Eaten by a bear or a coyote or a porcupine or whatever they care to imagine. But out of sight, out of the public’s mind— ASAP.”

Larson’s chubby fingers drummed on the steering wheel as he glared through the windshield. “We’re just starting to see the first complaints in the papers and on talk shows that this program is a waste of time and taxpayers’ money. Momentum is building. But let the bleeding hearts and the tree huggers have a litter of fuzzy, adorable kittens to rally around and…” He shook the awful image out of his head and briskly turned. “So, get on this immediately.”

“I will, but—” Natwig paused. He had a client scheduled, the day after tomorrow. A long-time client, who’d booked a week of fly-fishing and wildflower photography with him every summer for ten years now. No way would he let the man down. An outfitter’s reputation was built on dependability, as well as on delivering whatever the client wanted, from a trophy buck to a rare bird sighting.

But try to tell that to Larson, who saw him only as a tool for his own purposes.

“But what? This is crucial. Time is of the essence here.”

“Well, it may take a while, running the queen down. If she has a litter, she won’t be straying far from her den. And she won’t let the kittens out to play for weeks, not till their eyes open and she thinks they’re old enough.”

“She’s not a—a soccer mom, she’s a dumb animal!”

Dumb? I’d like to see you up there, with nothing but your claws and teeth and wits to feed your family. You and yours would starve in a week! Natwig dwelt on that comforting image for a minute, then said, “Once she’s down in her hole, my equipment won’t pick her up. It’s line of sight, remember? So if she isn’t moving around much, it’ll take longer. I may have to circle in till I cross her prints, then track her to her den.”

“Whatever it takes. Just do it. My…friends have authorized a bonus. An extra five thousand per kitten, on top of your usual ten.”

Natwig gulped, did the math. Five times ten, plus four times five—seventy thousand dollars, all in one den? That would put him past the halfway mark on his debt. No way could he take this assignment and shove it, much as he’d love to.

“But there’s one stipulation to that bonus.” Larson gave him an odd look—a twitch of guilty pleasure, instantly buried. “Since the kittens won’t be wearing a DOW collar, my clients will need some other sort of proof that you took them.”

No way. Natwig let his face relax, the way he did at poker. Not a chance. That would go against everything he was doing. “Like a scalp, you mean?”

Larson pursed his lips. “Or a tail, if that’s easier.”

What would be easy would be to grab this creep by the back of his greasy neck, then slam his head against his fancy steering wheel—half a dozen times. But how to say “no,” without giving his game away? “That would spoil the pelt,” Natwig said at last. It wouldn’t, but he could trust this city slicker not to know that.

Larson gave a little crow of delight. “With all we’re paying you, you’re selling their furs on the side?” Greed, now that was something he could understand.

“Why waste a good pelt? I’m tanning ’em and keeping ’em, for now. I’ll sell them next year, once the fuss dies down,” Natwig added, to head off any objections.

“So suppose I take a picture of the kittens when I catch them. As proof.”

“You could get a photo at the nearest zoo,” Larson noted dryly.

“A photo taken in the wild, not in a cage. Brought to you at the same time as their mother’s collar, with its Division of Wildlife number? It’d be more trouble to fake that, than to bring you the real thing. But if you don’t trust me…” Natwig reached for his door handle.

“No, no, I’m sure that will do,” Larson said hastily. He drew a folded paper from the pocket of his suit. “Here’s her latest coordinates. It’s Collar AK00F6.”

“That Alaskan hussy? Wasn’t she hunting over near Silverton?” Natwig had spent a week on snowshoes, looking for her in February. He’d crossed her tracks a dozen times, without once sighting the sly boots. Finally he’d concluded that she was holed up in one of the mines. The mountains up there were riddled with old shafts, and it would have taken half a lifetime to find her. So he’d gone on to easier prey.

“Yes, but she’s moved. You told me they do that.”

“Yeah.” But why would she abandon a perfect territory for nesting? He shrugged. Maybe she’d hunted it thin this winter and so had to move on. Whatever. “Where is this location?”

“Practically your own backyard. She’s in the peaks north of Trueheart.”

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