supposed to be finishing my dissertation! Tess reminded herself with a grimace. For the past year, she’d studied beavers in a riverine habitat. This summer she needed to analyze her data and write up her conclusions, if she wanted to earn her doctorate, and be qualified for a field biology position with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service next fall, which she most certainly did.
“Now, you’re going to keep her caged for at least three days?” Liza fretted.
“As long as she and I can stand it.” Tess would have to camp near the cage till she freed the cat. It was spring after all, with the black bears awakening from their winter fasts. Though lynx weren’t part of their usual menu, bears were omnivorous, and they sure knew how to take apart any container with food inside. Tess wouldn’t dare leave Zelda trapped and defenseless.
Thinking of that, she went back to the pickup, unracked her rifle, then settled it into its saddle scabbard.
“What’s that for?”
Tess smiled at her friend’s note of alarm. Liza was from Massachusetts. She’d only come west after graduation from vet school. Apparently, like many easterners, she viewed firearms solely as lethal weapons. Instruments of heartbreak and destruction.
Tess took the view of the tough and capable Western men who’d raised her. A rifle was simply a tool that a responsible person used responsibly. No more or less dangerous than a car or a threshing machine. The only thing she’d ever killed with a gun was a tin can, but still… “I brought along some red-pepper spray in case of bears. But I’ve always wondered if that really works—or just turns ’em into furry buzzsaws. So this is for backup.” Which, please God, she wouldn’t need.
“O…kay.” Liza didn’t sound convinced, but then it wasn’t she who’d be sleeping alfresco forty miles from the nearest kindly policeman. “And you’ve got the chickens?”
“Right here.” Tess loaded the cooler that held four flash-frozen roasting chickens into the left basket hamper on Cannonball’s back. “And I’ve already stashed another fifty in the kerosene freezer at the cabin.”
She’d claimed the highest, tiniest, most tucked-away cabin on Suntop’s summer range for herself for the next three months. Her father and sisters were used to her jaunts into the wilderness, so they hadn’t been all that surprised when she’d announced that she intended to live in the mountains for the summer, rather than stay at the Big House on the ranch. No distractions or socializing wanted or needed while she hammered out her dissertation, was the excuse she’d given—and they’d bought it.
She’d driven up a few days ago to this trailhead and packed in everything she’d need at the cabin for the period, including a three-month supply of frozen birds. “Well. All we need now is the star of this show.”
Liza sighed, nodded, and turned toward the Jeep. Murmuring soothing endearments, she used a noose pole and a pair of elbow-length leather gloves to immobilize the growling lynx, then injected her with the sedative.
She brushed angrily at her lashes as Tess closed the basket lid over the curled-up sleeping cat. “You’ll tell me if she needs anything? Goes off her feed or…”
“She won’t run too far away,” Tess assured her, though she was by no means sure. “Zelda’s grown to love her chicken dinners. She’ll stick around till she knows she can feed herself.”
Or she wouldn’t.
But then, didn’t freedom always come with risk? Tess had always found the risks worth facing. Three days from now, when she opened the cage door, she figured Zelda would agree.
“SO, ZELDA, what do you think? Is it starting to feel like home?” On her way to the pool where she washed each morning, Tess had stopped to check out her charge.
The lynx lay in feline loaf-of-bread position at the front of her cage, fore paws tucked demurely under her breast, back paws folded beneath. With her yellow eyes half closed, she seemed relaxed as any tabbycat, although she was pointedly ignoring her visitor. The comical two-inch black tufts on her ears twitched at the sound of Tess’s voice, then her gaze returned to the massive fallen tree beside her cage…to the dark hole beneath its mossy trunk.
“You’re right. It would make an excellent den,” Tess assured her in a soft voice. “Location, location, location.” She’d chosen this site with care—an old-growth spruce forest, because lynx typically denned in such deep, dark places with their excellent cover. A hundred yards to the west stretched a wide swath of younger trees where, years before, an avalanche from the peaks above had scoured the slope. Time had patiently reseeded the scar, and now it was covered with wildflowers and twelve-foot saplings. Tess’s research over the past month had told her that lynx favored that sort of terrain for hunting. The smaller trees let in the sunshine, which nourished the flowers and grass, which drew the snowshoe hares. And the lynx who loved them.
“One of these days, if the DOW ever gets its act together and provides you with a boyfriend, this would make a perfect den for kittens,” Tess told the cat. “Which reminds me, Liza meant to check you again, to make sure you aren’t in a family way.” The vet had intended to palpate the lynx after she’d sedated her.
“I remember tucking you into your basket while we were jabbering away about rifles and bears. But I don’t remember Liza examining you. Did we just get distracted? Or did she do it while I was fussing with the pack mare?”
The lynx turned to give her a haughty stare over the wonderful double-points of her neck ruff, which resembled a Victorian gentleman’s gray-and-white-barred side whiskers, edged in formal black.
“Guess you wouldn’t remember, since you were asleep,” Tess reflected. “And I reckon you figure it’s none of my business anyway.”
The lynx stood to stretch magnificently, forelegs, then back. She stalked away on her oversize paws—furry snowshoes that were designed to let the cat run atop the fluffiest powder. Her black-tipped stub-tail stilled as a gray jay swooped low past the cage, then quivered with furious attention when the bird landed on a nearby branch.
“Soon,” Tess assured her, standing and stretching, too. She could have chatted happily for hours, but it was safest for Zelda if she lost her tolerance for people. Her best chance for a long, healthy life in these mountains was to shun all humans, friend and foe alike. For that reason, Tess had pitched her tent fifty feet to the west, within easy earshot if a bear came calling, but otherwise out of sight.
She shouldn’t linger now. She sighed as she collected her rifle and her kit. “Better get ready,” she advised the lynx. “Today’s the day.”
She’d wait till noon, when a lynx normally would be dozing. This time, instead of giving Zelda her chicken inside the cage, she’d show it to the lynx—then set it at the entrance to her proposed den. She’d open the cage door and walk away.
If all went as Tess hoped, Zelda would step out timidly into freedom. Then, overwhelmed by the sudden expansion of her world, made nervous by the too-bright light of noon, she’d snatch up the chicken and scuttle into cover beneath the fallen tree. She’d spend the rest of the day there, eating and gradually growing accustomed to a feeling of safety and rich possession. The den would begin to take on her scent.
Meantime, Tess would collapse Zelda’s cage and carry it away.
By twilight, when her instincts urged Zelda to come out and prowl, maybe the burrow beneath the tree would already feel like a haven, a home to return to.
