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Authors: Sandra Brannan

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BOOK: Noah's Rainy Day
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“Good girl, Beulah. You found your mark. Super. Come here now, Beulah. Come to me, baby.”

Beulah stood still, no longer howling.

“That’s it, Beulah,” I said, tugging on her lead.

Beulah backed up several steps, her nose still pointed up at the tree. The cat stared at Beulah, crouching lower on its haunches, twitching its tail in stuttered movements. What had I done? This wasn’t working right. Or I hadn’t thought this through carefully enough. Mountain lions hated the sound of dogs baying and howling. Evidently, it was one of the last introductions of civilization that mountain lions feared. And I had stopped Beulah from howling.

I had to get training kicked back into gear, hers and mine.

Gripping the lead, I wrapped it around my hips and yelled, “Find!”

Beulah stiffened and lunged forward, closing the distance to the cat by a few feet. I leaned back. Beulah strained on the lead, bobbing up and down on stiffened legs, sounding again. It worked. The cat cowered into the crook of the tree. I inched along the lead for what seemed like hours. The cat was intimidated by Beulah’s howl but looked a bit more perturbed by my closeness. It was studying me now. The only thing that stood between it and me was Beulah’s howling. And I wanted to keep it that way.

I resisted the urge to touch Beulah. That was our signal that training was over and Beulah could stand down. I thought about trying to back out of here but that would require Beulah to stay on her mark and howl, me to be strong enough to pull her back the entire time, and both of us to be far enough away to outrun the mountain lion. We needed to stand our ground and somehow finish this. Alive. I had to ready my knife but needed both hands to hold Beulah back. Without taking my eyes off the cat, I edged closer to the nearest tree and struggled to tie Beulah to it.

I pulled my knife from the sheath and eased closer to Beulah. I spotted a broken tree branch big enough to whack the cat and inched in that
direction. Just as I eased into a squat to pick up the branch, Beulah’s lead loosened and she bounded toward the tree where the cat crouched.

“No!” I yelled, snatching the branch and posturing myself in a menacing stance. “Beulah, here!”

The cat leapt from the tree.

Beulah had reared up, her front paws against the tree to get her nose as close as she could to the mark, not quite seeing what she had treed or knowing the danger we were in, driven only by animal instinct.

For a moment, I couldn’t move.

I know now everything happens in slow motion in a crisis like this, just as people claim. Every instant was in freeze-frame, not unlike my whole body during this split second of tragedy. The horror of imagining that cat flying through the air and landing on Beulah’s back was too much for me. My shock was only intensified when I saw the cat land on the ground behind Beulah, not on her.

That’s when I realized I’d had it all wrong. The cat was coming for me.

With the mountain lion between me and Beulah, sprinting toward me with tremendous speed and intent, I did what any sane person would do at that moment. I dropped the branch and the knife.

And ran like hell.

CHAPTER 3

 

FEAR TASTES FUNNY
.

The bile that rose in my throat as I turned to run burned in my mouth with the taste of iron. That knife and tree branch sure would have come in handy right about now. And what the hell was I thinking with the running? Sure as shit I was looking like prey to the cat. My legs were racing faster than I thought possible. I didn’t get very far before I felt the expected push from behind as the cat’s huge paws hammered against my shoulder blades.

This was it.

I heard Beulah’s growling howl and a loud crack. Run Beulah, was my last thought as my body slammed to the forest floor for the second time today. The whoosh of air from my body sounded unnatural. My world went dark for a moment, which I could only assume was from losing all my breath; oxygen rushed out of me as I struck frozen ground. I felt the weight of something rolling up the back of my legs and across my back as if I were laundry in a washerwoman’s ringer.

I assumed the lion was simply toying with me, claiming me as its spoils, until I felt its hot breath against the back of my neck. Any minute its teeth would sink into the base of my skull and sever my spine. I must have been
having another one of those slow-motion moments, which really didn’t sit well with me considering my predicament. I wanted this moment to be quick. And over. But it wasn’t. I lay there waiting for the moment to pass, waiting for the cat’s teeth to sink into the soft skin behind my neck, crunching through bone to leave me paralyzed. And dead. All I felt was its weight and movement.

“Liv?” The voice, breathless but familiar, pierced the gray that crowded my senses. “You okay?”

It sounded like Michael.

What in God’s name made him ask such a stupid question when clearly I was not okay? I had a huge mountain lion on my back about to eat me. Definitely not okay.

I tried to speak and realized I hadn’t recovered my breath yet. I started to cough and felt movement on my back. Am I supposed to fight mountain lions? Play dead? Or is that bears? The weight on my back shifted, moved off. Something was trying to reach beneath me—the cat’s paw!—to flip me over. I knew what would come next. It would slice me up the middle and eat my insides, leaving my carcass for later. I squeezed my eyes shut, pretending to be dead, just as the cat flipped me over onto my back.

Then I punched, clawed, and jabbed my thumbs toward its eyes, letting out a cry that echoed off the mountains around me.

“Liv! What the hell’s wrong with you?”

I felt a warm tongue lick my cheek. I opened my eyes. Beulah was standing over me and Michael was kneeling by my side, holding the side of his face. There was no mountain lion. Just Michael nearby and Beulah sitting beside me.

“Geez, that hurt,” Michael was saying, his hand pressed to his cheek.

He pulled his hand away from his face and I saw the scratches I had made, thinking he was the cat.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. My breath recovered.

Beulah wagged her tail and licked my face again. I coughed.

“Way to go, pooch,” Michael said to the dog. He stood up and tucked his pistol back into his holster. I followed his gaze off into the woods. “Come on. Before that mountain lion comes back.”

“So there
was
a cat.”

I remembered the loud crack, wondering if what I had heard was a gunshot. But I didn’t see any blood, other than from the scratch I’d made to Michael’s cheek. I assumed his shooting would have at least injured the mountain lion. I wondered if Michael had missed completely.

Looking a lot like a young, thin Wilford Brimley in an old cowboy flick, Michael stood over me, petting Beulah’s knobby head. Glancing at his pistol, he said, “Just scared him off. My granddaddy told me that when he was a boy, he used to walk to and from school five miles each way in the woods. His daddy gave him a small pistol. Not big enough to shoot at the mountain lions, but loud enough that when he shot into the air, the report would scare off any big cats that might be preying on him. He said it always worked.”

I stared at him, incredulously. My mouth dropped open. “And what if it hadn’t?”

Michael shrugged, a rascally grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. Then I realized he’d been messing with me. Michael knew what he was doing. In that split second when the cat had pounced, he had made a decision about leveling his sights on the beast. First, the large, young male likely outsized Michael’s ammunition. Second, the cat was moving, and so was I, which meant Michael would either miss altogether or possibly hit me or Beulah with the bullet.

I realized Michael had decided to aim his pistol in the air intentionally to scare off the cat, rather than taking aim at him. And I realized the mountain lion had probably changed its mind when it bowled me over and decided to run right past me when I hit the ground hard enough to lose my breath and injure my ribs. Beulah must have lunged for the cat and landed on top of me, her massive weight crushing my back. It hadn’t been the lion’s hot breath I had felt against my neck, but Beulah’s.

I suppose Beulah thought she was standing guard over me, protecting her master. But I could barely breathe with her eighty-five pound mass sitting on my back. She stuck so close to me, I could actually tell what flavor Dog Chow she’d had for breakfast.

“You saved my life.”

I sat dazed, assessing the damage. My palms stung and I felt a sharp pain in my lower chest.

Michael shrugged. “You saved mine.”

I plunged my hands in the snow for relief and wished Mom were here to lift me up onto the washing machine, spray my skinned palms with Bactine, and blow on them to take out the sting.

Michael was stroking the bloodhound’s ears. “Well, maybe not you. More like Beulah saved my life. That mountain lion was stalking me. In broad daylight.”

“I think I broke a rib.”

“Good girl.”

“How sensitive of you,” I said, shifting my weight to lessen the pain.

“I meant Beulah, not you. Don’t be stingy with those dog treats.”

As I offered Beulah a fistful, Michael spread his fingers over Beulah’s knobby skull again and added, “Don’t tell me—now that you have a taste for cats, you’re spoiled on humans?”

Beulah panted, enjoying his attention.

“Help me up,” I said.

Michael reached down and yanked me to my feet. Pain shot across my back and down my leg and I doubled over.

“Damn. I really think I broke a rib.”

Michael was rolling up the lead and removing Beulah’s harness for me. “Probably need to call this in to the Game, Fish, and Parks, Boots.”

I wasn’t too pleased with the idea, but Michael was right.

If I ever thought I had a chance to be called out on search and rescue, I needed local and federal support. Not reporting to GFP that I’d had an encounter with a mountain lion during a training session wasn’t exactly the way to win friends and influence people. Even if the cat had run away with no harm to any of the parties involved.

“I know.”

Then, something worse dawned on me.

“Don’t tell Elizabeth.”

Michael just laughed at me.

I had eight siblings: Elizabeth was fifth born. I was seventh. Frances is the closest in age to me at eighteen months older and my little brother Jens is two years younger. We all had our own personalities, but the same general value system. I was the neat freak growing up. Obnoxiously
impeccable, my oldest sister Agatha always called me. And practical. Lacking pizzazz, as Ida says. I’d like to think of myself as more of a minimalist. Barbara might call me cheap. She’d be right. I don’t like spending money if it isn’t necessary or spending time if it’s only to improve my looks. Everything I have must have a purpose and I like everything in its place. That’s me. My sister Catherine calls me “The Big O,” for organized. Eight siblings with strong opinions. Even stronger minds and backbones. And immense hearts.

“I’m serious.” I really didn’t want my sister Elizabeth calling me Critical Mass, or CM for short, again. She’d taken to calling me that this summer when my world had seemed to become a magnet for all things evil. Luckily, Frances defended me. I was staying with Frances and her family now, temporarily, while I found an apartment. I had leased out my house in Fort Collins when I went to Quantico and now I’m trying to sell the place. It’s too far to justify coming into Denver every day, now that I’m a special agent.

Frances would be the most sensitive, compassionate, and kindest soul among us. Ole calls her the iron marshmallow, soft and squishy like a favorite teddy bear, but tough as nails when circumstances call for it. Elizabeth says she’s the Bergen version of Mother Theresa, which particularly irks Catherine, considering she’s the only nun in the family.

We all agree, Frances is the glue.

I collect rocks with characteristics that best describe my family members. Frances is my gypsum. In its purest form, gypsum is transparent, like Frances. Frances doesn’t have a phony bone in her body; she’s always the same wonderful soul no matter who she’s with. She can conform within a crowd, making everyone feel at ease, yet she is the first to stand up against the injustices or the toughest of circumstances. Although gypsum from the quarries is normally quite pliable, sculptors prefer alabaster—a variety of gypsum—to nearly any other medium since it’s forgiving. Gypsum also is the ingredient that gives cement its compressive strength. The iron marshmallow of the rock world.

God knew what he was doing. Noah needed a mother like Frances.

“The whole CM thing?” Michael asked.

“Yeah, for starters.”

Michael pulled out his GPS and marked the location of the tree in which the mountain lion had been. I went back to retrieve the knife I’d dropped and noticed something lying under the scrub nearby. The brush was prickly and I earned further scrapes on my hands, arms, and cheeks going after the prize tucked deep beneath it. I pulled on the strap and came out with a backpack. A small, camouflage backpack.

“What’d you find?”

I lifted the pack and felt its weight.

“A hunter’s?” Michael asked, stepping up behind me.

I unzipped the bag and peered inside, finding schoolbooks and candy wrappers and a couple of Matchbox cars. “A child’s. A boy’s backpack.”

I slung the backpack over my shoulder and decided I’d see if I could find the owner to return it. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d misplaced my school bag when I was a kid and wished an adult would’ve returned it to me. Maybe I’d get Noah to help me. He likes these types of games, solving puzzles. Like last year when we found a girl’s sandal near the swing set. We talked for hours—well, more like I asked questions and he answered yes or no—about what might have happened, creating all sorts of ideas about the lost sandal before turning it over to the lost and found.

As we started heading toward the campground where we had parked, I imagined how Noah would smile when I told him about the mystery of the backpack when I got home. Beulah stayed close by my side. The exertion of the walk sent a searing pain through my rib cage, making my knees buckle. Michael steadied me. The situation hadn’t quite sunk in with either of us yet. We had both almost been killed by a mountain lion, a big, hungry male nearly as long as I was tall. After getting a good look at his paw prints in the snow, neither one of us wanted to talk about that yet.

BOOK: Noah's Rainy Day
11.92Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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