Theft (25 page)

Across a clearing in the forest, I saw scratch marks left by a mountain lion after urinating. They were fresh enough that the scent of the urine lingered. It was the musty but frequent smell that day-hikers usually turned up their noses at without ever knowing how close they were to a lion.

I sensed I was onto a mountain lion now. And some instinct told me the lion and Zeb were connected. I thought about the horse I'd seen, the story it had told me of Zeb. This was the heart of tracking, a game of connect-the-dots that became so intense that it felt as if the constellations of the night sky had fallen onto the earth. Only the constellations on earth were not stars outlining the stories of ancient gods. They were the tracks of animals and people, an undiscovered mythology waiting to be told. If I could keep connecting the dots, they would complete the story I needed now.

I kept walking, following the tracks of the rabbit and the lion, and they began to frighten me. Shortly after the tracks of the hare ended, the tracks of a human started up. There were no other tracks in the area except those of the mountain lion and those of a man. The man, I had to presume, was my brother. But that alone wasn't what scared me. It was that the tracks crisscrossed and circled one another in this sort of chaotic pattern. It was as if the mountain lion knew the man was there, and the man knew the lion was there—and they were both conscious enough of each other's presence to tease, lure, and then avoid. It was as if they were entangled.

I was into the deepest part of the night now. It was no longer snowing, but balls of snow tipped the branches of trees, leaving the trunks inky, barely distinguishable from the darkness. The moon dipped behind the mountains. In that light, everything was black and white, and the tracks themselves, like the boulders and trees, seemed to move. There was a dizzying feel to it. But everything stilled when I saw the outline of a handgun lying in the snow. It had been dropped there recently. I could tell because the snow had stopped falling only ten minutes earlier. No new snow had fallen on the black handle of the gun.

Zeb was nearby. My chest heaved—with excitement, fear, joy—I couldn't tell. But when I bent to pick up the gun, my legs turned to rubber. I felt twelve years old again. I felt tricked. The gun was so out in the open, so blatantly placed that it had to be a set up. My brother would never drop a weapon like this. I opened the clip of the gun and saw bullets lined up there. It didn't make sense. Zeb was arming his trackers. His mind had always been a weave of contradictions. But this seemed beyond even his usual extremes. I knew him, not just in my memory but in my blood. I heard the warnings again. “He may be dangerous, even to you.”

About another hundred yards from the gun, a pocketknife lay in the snow. Like the gun, it had been dropped recently. It sent a chill through me when I ran my fingers across the engraved initials: ZPR. Zeb was setting up his trackers. He didn't know I was among them. Whatever plan he had for them would be the same plan he had for me.

I wanted to turn back, to tell Polo I quit. I craved my safe home on the mesa, the loved I shared with Magda and Cario and Christina. I wanted my life back. But I had not seen or heard from anyone in my blood family for so long. And my brother was
here
. As far as I could tell, he was entangled with the mountain lion. And I was entangled with him.

I
T HAD BEEN A kind of meditation, the mulch of the hut wrapped around him, the warmth in there, the smells of the earth, the complete quiet. It felt like home to him, like his body was already becoming earth. It felt good to him, and he knew he was ready. This had been the time he needed to solidify his choice. He knew it was the right decision, but he had not let it sink into his body—not all the way. Now he let it consume his muscles, his heart.

At twilight, he left the shelter he'd built. He destroyed it, scattered the rubble around, even strewed some into the trees, and
then he left. He had with him the handgun he'd tossed to himself as he fled his cabin, his wallet, a pocketknife, the clothes he wore, nothing more that he could name.

What he felt first was harder than he imagined it would be: the letting go. If life had ever made sense, it would have been a slow and steady letting go from beginning to end. But it was the opposite of that. It was a constant piling on, a weave of love that knitted its way more permanently into him daily. The absurdity of it had drained him and confused him—this intense love he'd been born with living side by side with the fact that no connection ever satisfied him. If he'd sometimes avoided connection, it had been because he craved it so much, and it was never enough.

He walked deeper into the forest and farther from the place where he had spent so many years with a woman he cared for, living on a patch of earth that had grown to feed and hold his tangled roots. As he walked away from it, he could feel the roots snapping, his life falling away from him. It was as if the mountains folded around him like huge hands, and as he stepped, the hands clasped around him and cut off any access to where he'd been. There was no turning back. Everything behind him grew dark, and what was in front of him grew more visible. Eventually, and for the first time since he was a kid, he had only the present in front of him, no past. To get there, he had to let go of the cabin; he had to let go of Brenda; he had to let go of his life.

With the twilight wrung from the horizon now and the inky night saturating the frayed edges between land and sky, he began to feel his life as his own. Like springing a lock on his ribcage, his entire body felt open, and it felt right. He could hear better, see better, smell better. His senses were so keen it felt as if he could smell and even taste the mountain lion every time he inhaled. It was the one connection he could never sever.

He kept on toward the rocky outcropping just below the cliffs where he knew the cougar had claimed a cave as her own. In the past, she had waited for him at his cabin. Now he would do the same: meet her where she lived. If she was out, this is where he would wait
for her when she returned. If she was in the cave now, he could track her from there. Either way, he would find her.

Anything that had comforted him in the past felt heavy now. First, there was the weight of the gun he'd taken with him. He tried but could not remember when or if he had ever set foot in the wilderness without a weapon of some kind. He didn't think about the men tracking him. He had not forgotten they were there, but they didn't matter now. He took his gun from the deerskin pouch he'd made and he let it fall. When it hit the ground, his body felt different. Not better or worse. But new and deeply familiar all at once. He kept on, and he felt himself craving the lightness he'd felt when he'd let his gun fall. He took out his pocketknife, the one Brenda had given him long ago, engraved with his initials: ZPR. He let it fall, too.

Without his knife and gun, he had to pay more attention to things moving around him. His naked awareness was his only protection now. It made him a better follower of the cougar, he thought, the attention he had to pay to every sound. He spotted three snowshoe hares, one right after the other, weaving so fast through the trees, white on white and barely a shadow cast by the waning moon. In the new snowfall, any scat was easy to see and identify. The place was alive with what had been left behind, even if no animals were visible at the moment. He saw the prints of the lion in the snow. They crossed with the snowshoe hare prints, and his heart thrummed. His mind blurred with desire, and he crossed the tracks of the hares, and he traced step for step the prints of the cougar. She was nearby and she was silent, watching him. He could feel her, but he couldn't see her; not yet.

His bad hip caught on the craggy spur in his bones, and he made his way to the nearest fallen tree and rested for a second on the trunk. Then he stood back up again, began walking. He was about five hundred yards from the base of the cave where his mountain lion wintered. Recent traces of her encircled him now. Every one of his senses piqued. He would make his way up to the mouth of the cave. In his mind, he had an appointment with the lion, a mutual agreement to settle something with her once and for all. He could not see her. But he would wait.

S
HE DROVE TIRED AND exhilarated through the sunrise-colored sandy hills of the Painted Desert. It was a beauty she felt she'd never seen before, though she'd seen it several times when she'd passed through, driving with Zeb. But there was a difference in her now, something settling even as it swelled in her. She didn't know what was happening with Zeb, but she knew he had always wiggled his way out of trouble, and she knew her time with him up till then had made all the difference in them both. Whatever they shared—call it love, call it understanding, call it history—it had made a difference in their lives. Without the whiskey soaking her mind, she knew this. She wanted to see Zeb soon. She wanted him to see her now, to introduce him to her father, to Raymond; maybe she even wanted to start over.

She looked at the outline of her route, saw addresses of about a dozen hospitals and private plastic surgeons where she needed to pick up wasted body parts and haul them back to the desert where they'd swelter in the sun and seep into the earth while the people where she lived worried about how to best recycle things like yogurt cups and toilet paper rolls. She noticed that the absurdity of it didn't piss her off like it usually would. It even made her laugh a little.

When her cell phone rang, she looked at the caller ID, saw the area code, and smiled. Raymond calling already. She hit the answer button. She didn't even give him a chance to speak before she said, “Damn, I miss you already, too. I can't wait to get back to see you again.”

“Can you make that sooner rather than later,” Raymond said. “The coming back part?”

“Love to. Soon as I finish this route,” she said.

“Understand,” Raymond said. “But I have a situation. I need your help.”

“I don't know, man. Best I can do is make it an overnight,” she said. “I have—”

Raymond's voice grew uncharacteristically forceful. “I understand,” he said, again. “But this is not something I'm asking for me, Bren. It's something I'm asking for the wolf.”

She stopped and listened now. He explained the situation to her, how he'd been taken in and she was his one phone call. “There's no telling when or if someone will get to that wolf,” he said.

There were no words between them for a while. She knew Raymond had been here before. It was the reason she'd left long ago, and he knew that. She heard him sigh on the other end of the line. “Brenda, call Simon. Please. He'll tell you everything you need to know,” he said, “He'll tell you he doesn't know shit about animals, but he knows a helluva lot, actually. He knows that wolf—Ciela—has got to be in a cool place, not sitting in my truck in the middle of the damn desert. He knows what to feed her. Tell him you can help. Tell him there's no other choice right now. Because there is no other choice right now, Brenda.”

She listened to him explain that she needed to go back, find his truck and Ciela parked along the side of the road, get Simon to help her take Ciela to the
Snack-n-Pump
, and then release her into the store. “Just till I get back,” he said.

When she told him it sounded crazy and like a jacked-up idea that only he could dream up, he said. “I know what you think of me, Brenda. But you gotta believe me this time. You have to help that wolf, just till we can get her some medical attention.”

“How about I take her to Wilderness and Water? She's a part of their reintroduction project. They'll know what to do with her.”

“Good idea, Brenda. Take her to the place that's arguing in favor of shooting her. Take an injured wolf to them. See what happens.”

She heard her own sarcasm in her father's voice, familiar and direct and comforting.

“Look, W WA is technically not supposed to be managing these specific wolves anyway. These are outside their territory. These are
our
wolves. Can you do it? Can you go back and help her?” he said.

The possibilities of what could happen if she went back and did what her father was asking her to do played in her head. There
was nothing legal about it, she was pretty sure of that. And she was saddled with this new obsession she had with doing the right thing. She wanted to get back to Colorado, collect an honest paycheck from that asshole, Mike, to figure out what the hell was happening with Zeb, and then make her way back to the reservation, to spend some time with her father again, really get to know him this time. She was ready for it.

She held the phone to her ear in a kind of stupor of emotion. There was no figuring it out logically, no answer that was right or wrong. She had only her instincts to guide her. “Okay,” she said, finally. “I'll go back. I'll help the wolf.”

This time she made that twelve-point U-turn in less than ten. She headed back to the reservation, and by afternoon, she was on the road where she'd left Raymond earlier that morning. She was praying, as Raymond had taught her to do when she was younger, which meant she was singing softly to herself as she drove. Prayer like that makes things possible, Raymond had told her. She needed to believe that everything was possible right now. She needed to believe that Mike would pay her, that the wolf would still be there when she got there, that the sun would not have gotten to Ciela, that Simon would meet her and help her. She needed to believe she had the confidence and the craziness required to get this job done.

She dialed the number Raymond had given her, introduced herself.

“Brenda?” Simon said on the other end of the line. “You're back? I had no idea that's why Raymond was taking the day off. That's good. That's a damn good reason.”