“Where are my dogs?” Cam asked.
“They run off when they got a whiff of Night-Night. They’s smart dogs. They’ll be back. Leave ’em some chow out front. And bring that coffeepot.”
43
Two hours later, they were grinding their way up a narrow mountain road in White Eye’s ancient Bronco, and Cam was thinking that road was probably not the right word. Track, maybe. Mountain-goat trail. Trace? The vehicle’s four-wheel drive worked just fine, but even with that, they were making no more than five miles an hour, if that, and often much less. White Eye had produced the vehicle from behind the cabin park’s office, where he’d also restored the electricity. Night-Night loped along behind the Bronco with seemingly endless ease, and Cam was grateful that she was outside and not riding in the backseat, two feet from his neck.
He had no idea of where they were. Mitchell had driven about a hundred feet down the county road toward town, abruptly turned right into what had looked to Cam like an empty meadow, and then pointed the Bronco toward higher ground. The snow wasn’t that deep, but it was crusted with ice, which made a crunching sound as they plowed through it, the nose of the Bronco permanently tilted up as they climbed.
About a half hour into the trip, White Eye had taken off his jacket and draped it over the center console as the heater began to kick in. Cam had done the same, piling his outer coat on top of White Eye’s. And then surreptitiously, using his left hand, he had picked Mitchell’s jacket pocket to retrieve three rounds. He’d quietly slipped these into his pants pocket. He’d have to figure out how to get the rounds back into the. 45 once he got his coat back on. He was pretty sure that White Eye meant him no harm.
And yet, he thought. Cam hadn’t forgotten the mysterious caller and the feline night visitor that little call had produced. Had that been White Eye’s work? How many trained mountain lions were running around out here anyway? He topped off their coffee mugs with the last of the coffee and put the pot into the backseat, which was piled high with gear.
“Where we going?” he asked finally.
“Catlett’s Bald,” White Eye responded. “Be there directly, long as we don’t hit no big drifts and the river ain’t full of melt.”
“What’s a bald?” Cam asked.
“Yonder’s some balds,” Mitchell replied. Cam looked through the windshield as the Bronco topped a rise, and the sight almost took his breath away. The entire Smoky Mountain range lay before them, wave after wave of moonlit humped granite ascending into the night sky as far as he could see from southwest to northeast. The nearest mountains rose up on either side of the track, thick with bare trees on the lower slopes but thinning out just below the individual summits, to be replaced with snow-covered domes. He knew from his maps that there were some six-thousand-foot-high mountains out here, but they all looked much higher than that from the vantage point of the twisting track.
“Bald refers to the tops, then,” Cam said. White Eye shot him a patient sideways look, as if to say, Yeah, dummy, that’s why they call them balds. Cam kept looking as they started down the back side of the pass, checking the side mirror to see if that big cat was still out there. He didn’t see it for a moment, but then he did. It was trotting along as if it did this every night of the week, and he would have sworn that it was watching him via the side mirror, too.
“So tell me about cat dancers,” he said, settling back into his seat as the Bronco nosed down into some bumpy snow. The moonlight outside was bright enough to create glare from all the snow.
“They’s seven of ’em,” White Eye said. “No more’n that. Don’t know who they are. They call themselves Bob, Frank, Jim, and the like, but the way they look when they say them names? Them ain’t their real names.”
“Young men? Old men?”
“A mix; thirties, fifties, ain’t no kids, if that’s what you’re askin’.”
“And what do they do, exactly?”
“First one come to see me fifteen, maybe sixteen years ago now, said he wanted me to find him a mountain lion. Called himself Carl. Early thirties. Big guy, hard, but not pushy about it. Guy you wouldn’t mess with in a bar. Had that look about him. That’s Carl. Didn’t give no last name, and I wasn’t askin’, seein’s he was showin’ cash money. Anyways, I told him they wasn’t any panthers left. He allowed as to how he knew I had one. That there surprised me some.”
“That was a secret?”
“Oh hell yeah. Illegal in C’lina. Legal over in Tennessee, but you gotta pay high for licenses and such. They get ’em from out west somewheres.” He looked sideways at Cam again. “I don’t b’lieve in payin’-taxes, fees, licenses, any of it-you understand.”
“Nice if you can work it,” Cam said. “How’d he know you had a cat?”
“Damned if I know, but he surely did. Knew she was tame and that she went with me time to time. Knew her goddamned name even. Said what he really wanted to learn was how to track a big cat. Asked him what he’d do if’n he ever caught up with one. You know what he says? Take its picture, he says. Surprised the shit out of me. I told him the notion was crazy and dangerous. He pulls out this envelope with five thousand greenback dollars in it. Asked if I’d reconsider.” White Eye chuckled at the memory. “Yeah, that was the word. Reeconsider his proposition. Shit. Took me about two seconds.”
“So there are wild mountain lions out here?” Cam asked.
White Eye didn’t answer for a minute as he maneuvered the Bronco across a frozen creek, shifting down into grandma when the ice crust broke and the vehicle lurched alarmingly. Cam found himself reaching for a handhold.
“Here? Uh-uh. Not here. Out yonder,” he said, gesturing with his head at the distant mountains. “ Way out yonder. Told him that. No vee-hicles. Shank’s mare all the way. Twenty, thirty mile in and some more straight up. Expensive damn hike. Said he understood. Said there was more money where that came from. He had time, years if need be. Said he was in shape for it and okay in the mountains, even in winter. I told him that was good, ’cause the best time to track a big cat was in the winter. Summertime, fall? You need kills and scrapes. And even in winter, you playin’ with fire.”
“Tell me why.”
“Big cats got seven lives and six senses. They know when someone’s fuckin’ with them, specially a human, specially on they own ground. ’Bout the time you get a good track goin’ on one, they like to have one goin’ on you. Trick is to know when that shit’s started, ’cause if you don’t, cat’s gonna take your picture, you get my meanin’.”
“How the hell do you know where to even start? This park is what, fifty miles square?”
“Not that big; it’s more like eight hunnert square miles. Somethin’ like that.”
“That’s still a lot of territory.”
“I got me an advantage, comes to scarin’ up a panther,” White Eye said with a sly grin.
Cam looked at him and then understood. “Night-Night.”
White Eye nodded. “Night-Night. Big ole tom up there in them far hills see a human, he’s gonna lie down and watch, but he ain’t never gonna show his face less’n you piss him off. But a female panther? Tom’s gonna sniff that stuff out from miles away and he’s gonna talk about it.”
“Then what?”
“Once I find one, we get the hell out of there. Cat won’t usually leave its territory, so when it quits followin’, I know where its home ground starts. After that, we’d come back in, Carl’n me, and I show him how to cut sign, track, and stay alive doin’ all that, so’s he can get his damned picture. Then I get my second surprise. I figger he has hisself one of them telephoto jobs, you know?”
“He doesn’t?”
“Uh-uh. Shows me this little damned thing, fit in your coat pocket. One a them throwaway things from Wal-Mart.”
“Not much range with one of them,” Cam said.
“‘That’s the whole point,’ he says. ‘I have to get close to use this. Real close.’”
“This is the crazy part.”
“Damned straight. I tell him, ‘You go right the hell ahead.’”