“Has anyone ever seen one of these pictures?” he asked.
She laughed. “No. Which is why most of us think this is total BS. Especially because a mountain lion is notorious for sensing when it’s being tracked, and turning the game around.”
“Damn. Well, how about that, then? Any incidents of people getting torn up by a big cat recently?”
She went over to check the coffee and poured out a cup, even though it wasn’t quite finished perking. The smell of charred coffee immediately filled the air from the metal burner. “Well,” she said, “not exactly. There have been some disappearances in the Smokies over the past ten years. Sometimes it’s a hiker who just doesn’t come back from some of the more remote wilderness areas. I’ve got some flyers over there next to the hat rack. We had two rangers get killed by some meth freaks, and we had that one unsolved rape and murder up on the Appalachian Trail five years ago. College girl, and they never caught anyone. Either way, none of that was tied to a big cat.”
“But if there are people doing this stuff with mountain lions, it would figure that somebody would get hurt.”
“If they’re alone-and that supposedly is the game-they wouldn’t just get ‘hurt,’” she said with a meaningful smile.
Cam thought about that for a moment and then nodded. Right, he thought. They’d get eaten. It was happening out west with increasing frequency-urban bicyclers, children straying from camp, pets, hikers.
“But then you’d have a disappearance. People coming around asking if anyone had seen Joe.”
She shrugged, nodded at the board with the flyers on it, poured herself a cup of coffee, and joined him back at the counter. “We get that, although the Park Service people are who you need to talk to. They handle disappearances in the park. But I’ll bet they don’t get folks coming up here asking after guys who said they were going to chase a mountain lion.”
“If there even are mountain lions up here,” he said. “You know a part-Indian guy named Mitchell?”
“White Eye? Sure. I’m not convinced he’s really part Indian, at least not Cherokee like me. But he seems harmless enough. Does some guiding. Supposedly a good tracker. Comes and goes. Doesn’t say much. The people who use him seem to know about him in advance.”
“What kind of people would that be?”
“White guys, your age. Come into places like this and say they need to get ahold of White Eye. I assume he finds them. But look, you should go over to the Twenty Mile Ranger Station for this part of the Smokies. It’s on Route Twenty-eight. You single?”
He was surprised by her question but said yes.
“Great. Ask for Mary Ellen Goode. She’s the official naturalist, and she’s a also quite a looker.”
“Well, that clinches it,” he said with a grin. Then he frowned and asked if Mary Ellen Goode had a large boyfriend or, worse, a husband. She shook her head. “Not anymore,” she said, a strange look on her face.
38
Cam had been shown back to Ranger Goode’s office after he checked in with the lobby desk, and Mary Ellen Goode was indeed a looker, as pretty as his previous interlocutor had been anything but. Five six or seven, bouncy short black hair, bright blue eyes, a figure that challenged the official severity of her Park Service uniform, and a roombrightening smile. She was obviously a woman who knew she was good-looking and had long since grown comfortable in her skin. He noticed that she also had a Dr. in front of her name on her Park Service name tag, which he’d discovered while making other observations. Her title was park ecologist. He introduced himself, showed ID, and then asked about mountain lions in the Smokies.
“Officially?” she said. “No gotchee. Panthers are considered to have been extirpated from the ecosystem in the Smokies. No confirmed sightings since 1920.”
“‘Extirpated’?” he asked.
“Polite word for hunted out of existence. There was one study done by a researcher named Culbertson in 1977 that suggests there were three to six mountain lions living in the park. They were probably descendants of the original nineteenth-century population. But nowadays we think that what people are seeing, if not a bobcat, might be escaped captive-bred western cats.”
“Is captive breeding legal?” Cam asked.
“Not in North Carolina, but it’s legal to own western cougars in Tennessee. The cats that have been caught or found along the East Coast states are usually defanged or declawed, which would indicate captive breeding.”
“But you do get sightings up here?”
“Sure, every year, a half-dozen or so. But no pictures and no sign whenever we investigate the area of the sightings. And some of the people doing the reporting wouldn’t know a mountain lion from a mountain goat.”
“How big could one get?”
“A hundred and twenty to two hundred and twenty pounds. Six, seven feet long. A rear pad print ought to be eight to ten inches across, or larger.”
He thought about the mark in the frost on the hood of his truck. “Big enough to take down a man.”
“Oh, heck yes,” she said. “Think about playing with your house cat on the sofa until it gets annoyed and starts working those hind legs. Now scale that up twenty times and visualize a two-hundred-pounder landing on you from a tree, knocking you flat on your back on the ground, hard enough to take your breath away, seizing your whole face in its mouth, clamping its fangs through your cheeks and into your sinuses, its front claws stripping all the meat off your baby back ribs while its hind claws spread your intestines all over the trail. All in about five seconds, with the appropriate sound effects.”
“I think I need a bathroom,” Cam said.
“Exactly. And they can do all that from the ground or from a run, too, as cyclists are discovering in not-so-remote parts of California. Ever seen the films of a cheetah overtaking a gazelle? A mountain lion can do that, too, just for not quite as long a distance. They mainly feed on deer, which are not slow animals.”
“And if this happened to a human, what would the cat do with the, um, remains?”
“Consume all the soft and squishy bits first, then drag the corpse to a hiding place, stash it under a pile of brush or up in a tree, and come back for seconds and thirds until everything was gone. Arms and legs would get carried back to cubs in the den if it was a female. Major bones crunched for marrow. Skulls emptied.”
Cam tried to push away the grisly images she was conjuring up. “Would they be easy to track?”
She gave him an appraising look. “Track? I think it’s your turn, Lieutenant. What’s this all about?”
He told her about the stories of cat dancers, reiterating most of what the large lady at Carter’s Trading Post had told him.
She started shaking her head about two-thirds of the way through his summation. “Very, very unlikely,” she said. “These are highly secretive nocturnal animals. You’d almost have to know where it was denning up and then work back around its hunting range. And even then
…”
“Then-what?”
“Well, these cats are interesting. They’re first-class hunters and even better ambushers. Highly tuned senses-hearing, smell, night vision, footfall vibrations, and just cat sense. You tried tracking a mountain lion without specially trained dogs? The cat would turn that game around right about sunset and you’d probably end up as dinner.”
“How about a really good tracker? Indian-good?”
She shrugged. “It’s possible, I guess. But I wouldn’t try anything remotely like it. Following a bear would be less dangerous than following a panther. And all this just for a picture? No way.”
He’d run out of questions, and as much as he’d have liked to have spent some more time with the beautiful Dr. Goode, he knew he should cut it off. He thanked her very much and asked how he could find some of the better guides in the area.
“Yellow Pages?” she suggested with a smile.
“I knew that,” he said.