More Than A Cowboy. Peggy Nicholson

cousin’s brows drew together above a sticky red curve of sparerib. He set the bone aside to wipe sauce off his mouth. “I’m thinking maybe I was a bit hasty, suggesting that. Seems like you’re going to need a long, relaxing recuperation, and we’re racing the clock here.”

      “They’re disappearing that fast?”

      “Roughly four a month since January.”

      They gnawed for a while in meditative silence till Adam said, “You sure you’ve got a problem? I mean, one of outside interference. You had more than average snowfall this year, didn’t you? So maybe they froze to death. Or they couldn’t find game in all that snow. You’ll find their bodies come snowmelt.”

      Gabe shook his shaggy blond head. “They’re all wearing radio collars, which transmit to both satellites and planes, when we do flyovers. And each collar has a kill switch. If the animal stops moving for four hours or more, the collar sends out a death signal. Then we try to get somebody out there pronto, because sometimes not moving means the lynx is injured or trapped and we could help it.

      “But of the cats that have vanished since January, all of their collars simply stopped sending. No live signal, no dead signal. Just…silence.”

      Adam reached for the salt shaker. Reached an inch too far—a burst of sizzling fire streaked across his chest. He paused, blinking, then drew his hand back. Sat, testing each breath for a minute, then said casually, “Would you pick up the signal if the cat was down in a canyon, or holed up in a cave?”

      Gabe lifted the shaker, used it, then set it down six inches closer to Adam. “You wouldn’t. The signal’s strictly line of sight. But when he came out, the satellite should pick him up again.”

      “Well, maybe there was a cat convention at some point, in a cave. A St. Paddy’s Day blow-out or a Valentine howl-along? And an avalanche wiped out the whole tribe at once?”

      Gabe grinned. “’Fraid not. Lynx are notoriously antisocial. They hunt and live alone. In mating season, March through early April, they keep company for maybe a week, but that’s it.”

      “Except for mamas with kittens, I suppose.”

      “Right, but since we haven’t had a single female deliver a litter in four years of hoping and waiting and praying, that isn’t an issue, either.”

      “Hmm.” Adam served himself a second helping of potato salad. “What if they decided they missed Alaska or Canada or wherever they originally were snatched from and just started walking? ‘The cat came back,’ as the song goes.”

      “Yeah, that was our first theory. A few from every group we’ve imported have gone walkabout, ending up in Utah, or New Mexico or even Nebraska. The males in particular can get restless. It isn’t unheard of for a tom to travel fifty miles or more a day for a week, though generally they do that in mating season, looking for ladies. But the satellite searches a wide band. If one of ’em made it to Las Vegas or Laramie, the collar signal would still beam up their location.”

      “And it hasn’t,” Adam murmured to himself. “The case of the missing lynx. So…” He cocked a brow at his cousin. “Who’s got a grudge against these furballs?”

      “Try the Cattlemen’s Association and every sheep-herder in the state, for starters.”

      “Lynx kill cows? I didn’t think they were that big.”

      “A big one tips the scales at forty pounds, and they’d eat nothing but snowshoe hares, if they had their druthers. When hares are scarce on the ground, they take pine squirrels or mice or the occasional ptarmigan. I guess a real bruiser might jump a sheep or two a winter, if he were desperate. But this isn’t like the wolf packs up in Yellowstone. You could drop a thousand lynx into cow country and never know the difference. They’re shy and elusive and they hunt by night. Short of some caterwauling in mating season, you’d never know they were there.”

      “So why the fuss? I seem to remember some lawsuits, a few years back, trying to stop your program before it started.”

      “Politics. In 2000, lynx were finally listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. And that means, whether the feds want to or not, they’re compelled by law to protect lynx habitat. And that’s where the rubber meets the road.

      “The grazers fear that their grazing allotments will be taken away so the cats can hunt in peace. The loggers are scared that they won’t be able to cut trees in lynx territory. The Outfitters’ Association is worried they won’t be allowed to guide big-game hunters where the animals prowl.

      “And the ski resorts, well, you remember the rumpus between the environmentalists and Vail resorts when they wanted to expand their ski runs into the Super Bowl area—the last place where native lynx were spotted in Colorado? Remember the Earth Liberation Front burned down twelve million dollars’ worth of ski lodges to protest the plan?”

      Adam gave a lawman’s grunt of disgust.

      “Bringing lynx back to the state has pretty well stopped ski development cold. Till the DOW can determine just how much habitat lynx need, and where they need it, we can’t allow any more development in the high country.”

      “So they’re popular cats,” Adam said wryly. “No wonder they’re disappearing. Any cowboy with a rifle…”

      “Who’s willing to risk a one-hundred-thousand-dollar federal fine and a prison term for killing an endangered species,” Gabe reminded him. “And sooner or later, word always gets out. Very few people have the nerve.”

      “Yet your cats are vanishing, four a month. That sounds like something a little more…methodical than a trigger-happy cowboy. Got any theories who it might be?”

      “Nope, but I’ve got a theory how he’s doing it.” Gabe opened a second beer for each of them. “Somebody’s using our own radio collars to hunt them down.”

      “You can get the equipment to do that?”

      “Yep. Buy the tracking antennas and earphones right off the Internet.”

      Adam whistled softly. “Clever! And cold.”

      “It’s just a notion of mine, nothing the Division has officially considered. But that’s when I thought of you. Investigating is what you do. And you’ve got a cover you could use.”

      “Line-camp cowboy,” Adam mused. Three years ago, after Alice left him, he’d seriously considered quitting police work. While he’d searched his heart, he’d spent a summer cowboying in the high country north of True-heart, Colorado. “That would allow me to fit in up there, move around some. Are you losing lynx in that area?”

      “That’s just about Ground Zero, or close enough. But the herds head up the trail about seven weeks from now and…” Gabe glanced at the crutches leaning against the wall. “I hadn’t realized, when I first spoke, how badly you were…”

      A useful summer in the mountains, rather than stewing and fuming around here, till some doctor cleared him for duty? “Count me in, Gabe. Seven weeks from now I’ll be ready to sit a horse.”

      CHAPTER THREE

      LARSON NEVER chose the same place twice for their meetings, but he always picked the same kind of bar, Natwig noted grimly. Ferns and mirrors. Chrome and marble. Micro-brewery beers at eight bucks a pop, and watch the bartender smirk if you asked for a Budweiser on tap.

      The clients would be all ski and city types, glossy and blow-dried, with not a care in the world. Those with high-altitude tans had gotten them on the slopes at Telluride and Crested Butte, not packing mules into back-country canyons, or crouching still as a lichen-covered slab of granite, hour after hour, waiting for a line of elk to cross a ridge and step into range.

      Natwig’s restless gaze touched the mirror behind the bar, where a weathered, squint-eyed face stared blankly back at him. What’s wrong with this picture? It was he who was