This was what cougars did at the end of the night, when they were ready to bed down. They found high ground where they could see and not be seen, where they were safe and had the advantage over anything that came up the hill after them.
Annie unclipped the tranquilizer gun from her pack and loaded it, slipping a second dart into her back pocket before retrieving the canister of bear spray from a side pouch and tucking it into the empty firearm holster on her hip. The dart would do the trick if she caught sight of the cougar from a distance, but just in case, the bear spray was there as a more immediate resort. Her Ruger was locked in the Jeep’s glove compartment. She didn’t need it today. Usually, it rested on her hip as a method of persuasion against bullheaded hunters and fishermen, neither of which she anticipated out here.
With silent steps, Annie followed the cougar’s trail up the hill to a soft bed of dead pine beneath a rocky lip on the sharp hillside. A den. Empty.
The tracks came and went, leading both to and away from the crag. The cougar had slept here, and it was the one place in these woods that she absolutely should not linger. Later on, she could come set snares here if she had to, but for now, she’d keep tracking to learn the boundaries of the cat’s new territory. Annie walked back down the hillside, following the outgoing tracks into the forest. They led due west, where she caught her first glimpse of Lake Lumin, a far-off glint of blue-green water on the other side of the trees.
Annie’s stomach rumbled, and she glanced at her watch. She’d been out here almost three hours. She should probably call it quits for the day and get back to the Proudys’, but the last thing on earth she wantedto do was turn around and face the grueling, slick climb back up to the Jeep. It had been a hard enough descent, but with the slimy mud it would take twice as long to hike back up.
Annie contemplated the shimmering water just visible through the trees. She could save herself hours by making her way around the lake and walking back down Lake Lumin Road, where she could grab a bite to eat at the house, then ask Walt or Laura for a ride back up to the ridge to get the car.
Decision made, Annie moved forward into the trees, gaze snagging on an orangeNO TRESPASSINGsign nailed to the trunk of a hemlock ahead.
She had seen her fair share of private-property warnings: cracked signs hanging from rusted nails on fence posts, signs peppered with BB’s, even homemade signs scrawled in black permanent ink warning trespassers that if they could read the words, they were in range. She was used to marching right past such signs in pursuit of hunters and fishermen who thought they’d slip onto private property unnoticed. It was the same story every time.
Private property? Really? Gosh, I must have missed the sign.
This was often accompanied with a scrunched brow and an actual head scratch, at which point Annie would walk the offenders firmly out the way they had come and point to the obvious warnings they had stepped right past to get there. In all honesty, she was doing them a favor, being the one who arrived to escort them away. Most men preferred a polite redhead to a butt full of buckshot from an unseen rifle in the woods.
If there was one thing she’d learned in her years as a game warden, it was that she need not fear the men who ignored theNO TRESPASSINGsigns, but the men who posted them. Those were the ones who meant business, the men who strode out of their trailers and barns and shops with twelve-gauge shotguns pressed to their shoulders, locked and loaded.
Annie reached up to touch the sign, inspecting the thin layer of dirt that came away on her fingertips. It hadn’t been up for more than a few years.
She moved around the tree, taking another few steps forward, then saw the other signs.
The one on the hemlock had not been a lone warning, but the first soldier who appeared with his sword drawn atop a hill, followed a moment later by the rest of the army.
Two, three, five, a dozen. They were everywhere. Every third or fourth tree seemed to have one, growing denser as she moved toward the lake.
Who on earth is this guy?
Annie risked another thirty feet forward, but the closer she came to the water, the tighter her chest felt until she could not take a deep breath. Finally, she stopped altogether, scanning the forest ahead, her eyes jumping from sign to sign nailed on the thick trunks between her and the lake.
They were a statement. Unmissable. The man who had posted them was not just marking a boundary, but sending a message, loud and clear. Through her apprehension, resolve stiffened Annie’s spine.
Who do you think you are?
A great big part of her was tempted to stride right past the militia of warnings and keep moving toward the lake. There was a lethal-looking firearm in her hands, a badge pinned to her uniform, and she had a perfectly lawful reason to be here.
As Annie stood still, teeth working away at her lower lip, she heard it: a faint sound coming from beyond the trees.
Scrape… scrape… scrape…
Her heart lurched into her throat.
This was not a sound of these woods. Something was moving. Shifting. Dragging. And underneath the murmur of the firs and the birdsong floating high overhead in the boughs, the sound kept coming.
Scrape… scrape… scrape…
Annie held her breath, her eyes wide and unblinking and fixed on the trees as she turned possibilities like pages in her mind.
A boot sliding with every other step. A man with a limp. A bear scratching itself on the bark of a tree. A beaver pulling a limb towardthe water. Or maybe, just maybe, a cougar, dragging a large kill along the forest floor one foot at a time, back to its den to devour it in peace.
With deliberate slowness, Annie lifted the tranquilizer gun into fire-ready and took a deep breath. Then with equal, painstaking slowness, she positioned her boot over a dry, dead twig on the forest floor.
POP!
The stick snapped beneath her boot, and breath held, Annie whipped the gun left, then right, then left again.
