She popped the last bite of her granola bar into her mouth, telling herself that the woods were just as pretty when she was alone as they would have been with someone seated beside her. She dwelled on the thought with as much conviction as she could muster, though she couldn’t quite manage to believe it.
Jake had offered to accompany her on the hike this morning, but Annie had declined. Jake was a golden retriever, and being lovable and chatty were acceptable attributes for an officer who thrived on the sidewalks of Lake Lumin or parked himself on the bench in front of the station, but she needed absolute silence in the woods if she was to have any chance at all of tracking the cougar, and absolute silence seemed about as foreign to Jake Proudy’s nature as his nonstop rambling was to hers. And beyond that, while Jake was a casual outdoorsman, fishing and hiking on the weekends, he didn’t have the first clue about what her job entailed. When she’d told him yesterday that back in Bend she had once used dogs to track a cougar, Jake had offered up his buddy’s yellow Lab,as though that would have done her any good at all. A trained dog, she explained, would know how to scent a cougar and tree it, although tranquilizing the cat from the ground generally resulted in a fall through the branches and was often deadly for the animal, so all things considered, she was probably better off alone.
Annie tucked the empty wrapper back into her pack and stood, shaking her legs out one at a time. With the sun high above the treetops as a guide, she hiked forward into the pines. Here in the valley, the damp earth was fresh and dark. The heart-shaped tracks of rabbits and the slender indent of deer hooves crisscrossed the trail here and there, but nothing larger. Yet.
The bark of a nearby tree trunk was marred in gashes, and Annie left the trail to inspect it. Cougars often sharpened their claws this way, but so did bears. Up close, the mark was high and deep, the bark peeled away to show the yellowed skin beneath it, and Annie lifted away a short dark hair from the trunk with her fingertips. Black bear. It had peeled back the bark to get at the sweet sap underneath. Though it wasn’t the sign she was looking for, it still felt like progress. A piece locking into place in the picture puzzle of these woods that was forming in her mind.
As Annie walked back toward the trail through the undergrowth, the toe of her boot caught on an unseen limb and she stumbled forward, snapping the branch beneath her as she regained her footing.
Sudden movement in the trees caught her eye, and Annie watched two deer, startled by the sound, as they darted in leaping bounds deeper into the forest. Annie stared after them, unnerved. She hadn’t even known they were there. It wasn’t often that she was surprised by wildlife, but this was the sort of woods that hid anything that did not want to be seen.
The forests of Bend gave up their secrets easily. They were drier than these woods, airy and more spacious, and it wasn’t difficult to spot animals far off through pines that were sparse and thin, but here, with dense, wide trunks, and firs whose lower boughs scraped theground, she could be mere feet from a bear or cougar and not know it until it was too late.
Annie straightened and scanned the trees around her, muscles tensing. There was an awareness tainting the edges of her mind with fear, the dawning realization that it was entirely possible for any creature out here who thought of itself as the hunter to easily become the hunted.
Keep quiet, Annie girl, and the woods will come alive around you. Threats always show themselves if you’re silent for long enough.
It was her father’s voice in her head, drawn forth from memory in the only place she ever heard him anymore—out in the woods.
For long minutes, Annie stood in the forest, warmed by the light of a sunray falling through the canopy. Only her eyes moved as they jumped from trunk to trunk until, at last, satisfied that nothing else was hiding in the trees, she stepped back onto the trail and moved deeper into the woods.
The vast majority of cougar attacks came from behind. Cougars were a predatory species that thrived on stalking slowly and silently, with patience and persistence. They caught their meals by surprise, and surprised was the one thing that a game warden, or anyone else who dared to walk into these woods alone, could not afford to be.
Dead ahead was the sound of flowing water, and Annie came upon a wide stream that split the forest floor. She dropped her pack, knelt down, and plunged her water filter into the cold current, filling her hydration bladder with her eyes on the woods. She drank her fill, then tucked the mouthpiece away.
Folded into the front pocket of her pack was the map of the mountain she’d borrowed from the station, and Annie lifted it out, unfolding it and running a finger down from Lewis Ridge to where she now stood. The designated trail continued on the other side of the stream, but she wouldn’t be taking it. From here to Lake Lumin, roughly a mile if the map’s key was accurate, she would be bushwhacking northwest through the forest in the hopes of crossing the cougar’s tracks.
For several minutes, Annie walked with the current, stooping often to inspect marks on the soft bank, but the week’s rainfall had swollen the creek and muddied the dirt, and though it was evident that animals had visited the stream, the prints were nondescript.
As soon as the land started to slope upward again, she left the stream and hiked back into the forest, stepping high over ferns and the barbed coils of rambling wild blackberries. When something on the ground caught her eye, she stopped.
A sizable pile of scat lay half hidden under an arching bracken fern, and Annie knelt beside it, lifting the plant with a finger. She stared at the waste, a thrill of discovery running through her, then grabbed a stick from the ground and poked at it, breaking it apart to inspect the contents.
Fur. A good bit of it, too, inch-long hairs that were tawny at the root and black at the tip. Annie remembered that Jake had said the campers up near Warner Lake had lost a dog to the cougar. A blue heeler.
She sat back on her heels, inspecting the scat with her head tilted. No flies buzzed around the pile, and no moisture gleamed in the sunlight. It was at least twelve hours old, but not much older than that, or the rain from yesterday would have partially washed it away. Annie poked at it for another minute as a memory ran through her mind.
Lion sign, the instructor of her tracking course had called it, gesturing with his wooden pointer to the pull-down screen that projected a pile of scat magnified to twenty times its original size on the wall.
A couple of guys in the back of the class had snickered, and Annie herself had barely managed to hide her giggle. The instructor was a distinguished conservation officer who often wore bow ties clipped to his pocketed shirts. Annie suspected that he considered it well beneath his dignity to speak to a group of twentysomethings on the subject of poop.
Still, it had been an informative lesson, and by the end of the course, Annie could match just about any droppings to the animal that hadproduced them, as well as identify how long they had been on the ground and what the animal’s last meal had been.
Annie pushed back and rose to her feet, scanning the ground. Here, the forest floor was carpeted in a thick layer of sweet-smelling pine needles, and any tracks would be mere indents, telling her nothing, but just ahead the pines gave way to a patch of slender deciduous trees, and Annie moved toward them, her heart racing.
At first, she saw nothing. The dark ground between the trees was clean and slightly pocked from the rain. But a few feet farther in, her breath caught at the sight of a print, perfectly preserved in the soft dirt.
Eyes bright, Annie crouched over it.
The four toes were shaped like teardrops, with the lead mark that belied the symmetry of a canid. There was a gentle divot at the top, ever so slightly asymmetrical, as though the animal had been limping, but just barely. There was no doubt about it. This was a cougar. And unless there were two cats stalking these woods on the same day, this was the male she was looking for.
Annie stayed crouched for a minute, gazing at the print. It was a thing of beauty. The biggest she’d ever seen at nearly four inches across. She placed a fingertip into the leading toe mark. Due northwest, right toward Lake Lumin.
There were no marks above the toes, the sharp, slender gashes that indicated a cat in a hurry, gathering speed by using its retractable claws. This cougar was walking, not running. Annie searched the forest floor around the print and found another partial, the pad well-defined in the mud, the toes lost on the upraised root of a tree. A few feet farther in, another. She began tracking in earnest, walking through the woods with her eyes glued to the ground.
The cougar had left quite a trail of breadcrumbs for her to follow, soft piles of scat and fresh prints that weaved a lazy path through the forest as the land climbed west toward the lake. He was roaming, skirting the valley in an ambling circle, taking his time and getting to knowthe terrain. Twice Annie caught the telltale scent of urine and found thin streaks staining the lower feet of tree trunks. That was it, then. He was assessing the valley as new potential territory. Marking it out and exploring the different nooks and crannies. He was settling in.
The thrill of the hunt propelled her forward, though the growing sense of fear that accompanied it tainted her eagerness, and when the tracks deviated, angling sharply uphill, she paused.
