'Sit down,' Paul returned reasonably. 'Obviously it's bothering you. That makes it important.'
Anna sat.
'Maybe Sheila was hiking up from Pratt instead of down from Dog Canyon -on a day hike,' Paul suggested.
Pratt Cabin was an historic stone house built at the confluence of North McKittrick and McKittrick creeks about two and a half miles in from the Visitors Center. It was a favored stop of visitors to the park and a logical jumping off place for backcountry hikers.
Anna shook her head. 'Carrying a full pack? And that wouldn't change the fact that she had to pass through dense saw grass. No cuts.' As she argued, she wondered what exactly it was that she was trying to prove.
Paul looked a little pained. 'I don't know why she didn't have any cuts, Anna. I wish I did.'
She believed him. He'd like to answer her questions, not because they were important or even particularly valid, but because she felt strongly about them and, to Paul, feelings needed to be dealt with.
Shaking off his kindness with a shrugging motion, she tried another tack. 'There've been no incidents of lions attacking humans in West Texas for the last one hundred years. Not one. Zilch. Nada.'
'Statistics,' Paul said.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics, Anna thought. She nodded, stood up feeling angry and defeated and heartily tired of both emotions. 'Now Sheila Drury is a statistic.'
'Anna, this is a federal matter. There'll be an autopsy as a matter of course. If they're not satisfied, the FBI will follow it up.'
'Can I see the autopsy report?' Anna demanded.
There was a silence. There'd never been a death-accidental or otherwise-in the park's twenty-year history. Nobody knew precisely what to do or who should do it. As crime in the parks had grown, law enforcement had become increasingly important. Enforcement rangers were sent to ten weeks of training, were fingerprinted, drug tested, and had to carry handcuffs and side arms. But in the smaller, more remote parks there was little in the way of hardcore crime.
Paul jotted something down in the little yellow notebook he carried in his shirt pocket. 'I'll ask about the autopsy. I can't see why there'd be a problem since you were the first officer on the scene, but you never know.'
'It's governmental,' Anna said and Paul laughed. Anna didn't. The bureaucratic delays so slowed work that government agencies had become a laughingstock. One day the bureaucrats would succeed in choking the parks to death. Already they'd so bound them with red tape that by the time there was permission and funding to save an area, an animal, it was usually too late. Death had its own timetable.
Paul tucked the notebook back in his pocket and Anna edged toward the door. 'Thanks, Paul,' she said, though she was unsure of what she was thanking him for. Everybody always said 'Thanks, Paul.' Maybe, she thought as she banged out the screen door feeling anything but grateful, one just felt obliged to him for caring.
Paul Decker cared that his people were happy.
Unfortunately there usually wasn't a damn thing he could do to ensure that they were.
'Be fair,' Anna said half aloud, trying to temper her anger with words. Leave it alone, she told herself.
Mind racing too fast for her feet to follow, she found herself stopped under the pecan trees on the flagstone walk outside the ranch house. Overhead, the leaves made a pleasant clacking. Beyond the stone fence, where the overflow from the spring spilled out into the field, was a line of bright green. Grass following the moisture till it disappeared into the earth a hundred yards out. To the right were the small hay barn and roofed shed for the stock animals. Two big brown rumps were visible near the manger.
On impulse, Anna canceled her plans to spend the afternoon trying to make order out of the chaos in the Emergency Medical Supply cabinet. She vaulted the stone wall and let herself into the paddock from the side gate.
Karl Johnson, a currycomb lost in his enormous hand, was grooming Gideon, a big chocolate-colored quarter horse with one white foot. Karl looked like an almost classic ogre from out of a children's fairy tale. Six-foot-six inches tall, he weighed nearly two hundred and fifty pounds. Wiry reddish-brown hair curled out from nose, ears, the top of his uniform shirt, and sprang from his massive skull. His nose was pug to the point of absurdity, as if a button had been sewn on the square lumpy face when the real nose had been lost.
Anna guessed Karl to be thirty-one or -two at most but he'd been with Guadalupe forever. He'd worked trails, fought fire-he was even a clerk-typist for a couple of years. Up until eighteen months before, he'd held Anna's job. Then he'd been Acting Dog Canyon Ranger until Sheila had been hired on. After that Karl had transferred to Roads and Trails. The gossip was he was sulking because they'd not given him the Dog Canyon position.
Now he took care of the stock. Broad shoulders obscuring half the length of Gideon's back, he carefully curried the animal's hide. The huge man was whistling 'If I only had a brain…'
Anna laughed, her impotent anger momentarily lost.
Karl jumped as if she'd poked him with a cattle prod and Gideon shied in sympathy.
'Sorry,' Anna apologized, 'I thought you'd heard me come up.'
'I was thinking,' Karl said as if that explained things. 'You going riding?'
'I thought I would. Are you taking Gideon out?' She was just asking to be polite. Karl wouldn't ride. And he wouldn't say why. It was that that had probably cost him the Dog Canyon job. Like everyone else, Anna assumed he was afraid to get on the horses.
Karl shook his head. 'Just combing him. They're still nervous. That lightning a few nights ago got ' em jumpy. It scared me too,' he addressed the horse and Gideon rotated one ear back to listen. 'It's nothing to be embarrassed about. Lookie here,' he said to Anna and picked up Gideon's right front hoof. In Karl's hand it looked delicate, almost like a deer's hoof. A crack ran up from the bottom to half an inch below the quick. 'It's been so dry. I'm putting hoof-flex on but all the same you oughtn't be working him till it heals. You can ride him all right, but no packing.'
Anna nodded. If the crack broke into the quick, Gideon would be bound for the glue factory, for Piedmont 's catfood tin.
'I'll take Pesky,' Anna said. Running a hand down Gideon's flat forehead, she shooed flies from his eyes and the corners of his mouth. The black cloud resettled behind her fingers and the horse blinked with what seemed to Anna, in her foul mood, a tired hopelessness. 'You're a good old boy, Gideon,' she said. 'Yes, you are.' From the corner of her eye Anna thought she saw Karl smile. An event rare enough to focus her attention on him.
Maybe he's just passing gas, she thought and startled herself by laughing. There was something about Karl that was oddly innocent, baby-like. It was why Anna liked him. And possibly why she didn't understand him at all.
'Pesky needs to get out, air himself off,' Karl said.
Pesky and two of the pack mules were milling around the small paddock, fussing at each other and snatching mouthfuls of hay from between the pipe bars on the manger.
Affecting nonchalance, Anna walked toward the gate. The mules, Jack and Jill, caught on immediately and, amid rolling eyes and halfhearted kicks, ran out into the pasture beyond. Pesky was so torn between freedom and food, he stood too long dithering.
'Gotcha!' Anna gloated as she swung the gate shut. It was amazing how soothing it was to exert power over one's fellow creatures.
She haltered Pesky and tied him to the hitching rail. Karl had moved back and was painstakingly combing the tangles from Gideon's tail.
'You look like you heard already,' he said as Anna wrestled with the cinch, trying to get it tight enough the saddle wouldn't slip. Pesky was blowing up so he could loosen the strap with one mighty exhalation as soon as she got on. Pesky was the horse's earned name. His given name was Pasquale.
'Probably not,' Anna grunted. 'I never hear anything.'
'About the hunt.' The Norwegian's voice was bland, the careful neutrality of a cautious man.
Anna stopped what she was doing. The anger of minutes before was back, rising in her throat like indigestion. 'Don't tell me,' she said, but it was a question all the same.
'They're putting together a hunt. Paul and the Chief Ranger. Superintendent's orders.'
'How can they know which one to kill?' Anna asked, knowing the answer, knowing the question was intentionally naive.
Karl just looked at her, then back to Gideon's tail.
