Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/116174
ALONE Continued from 119 wonderful is unfolding. Clyde gestures with the clean line of his jaw. Between his boots there is the perfect, crisp imprint of a cat paw that I can just cover with my outstretched hand – the spoor of a mature tom cougar. Clyde releases a satisfied whistle. "They'll jump him right yonder. Yes sir," Clyde offers, using his chin again as reference. "Listen to it and you'll see." The hounds' cries are being quickly drowned by gathering wind, but Clyde makes no move, affixed, head-cocked and crooked-grinning, waiting to be proven correct. I am restless, every instinct I possess prodding for action, but I watch Clyde and listen so intensely I can nearly see it in my mind. Then there is something able to penetrate even devouring wind. A change in pitch, an extra bit of something indescribable but wholly evident and very real, something to be touched and walked around. Clyde's grin widens by the slightest margin. He shoots an imaginary finger pistol toward the receding howls. "Jumped 'em," he offers, flicking his cigarette spinning and turning toward his mule. My mule assumes new enthusiasm. He has played this game before and enjoys its drama. He plows ahead as unerringly as a ship on smooth seas. I slowly understand I am no longer at the helm in any real sense. He is not heeding instruction; he cuts corners to prove he is not following Clyde's lead. He is following the howls of the hounds – which have gone mad – surveying terrain and formulating a direct route of his own devising. Even so the cowboy appears ahead, looping reins around the lower branches of a cavern-like juniper, watching me arrive with impatient eyes as he cinches a large revolver to his waist. I toss reins into outstretched hands and slip off with my cased goods, falling to my knees to tear into the works. I've discovered the perfect tool for the job – a Fred Bear Takedown Supreme with slip-in limbs that snap into place nearly instantly. I admire the lovingly polished S sprinting over broken slab rock, drawn by the frenzied screams of crazed hounds, driven by adrenaline and primitive impulse. I run until I reach the hounds, seeing the cat perched in a tortured cedar at the head of a sudden cut dropping into wind-driven snow that spins from a dull, paling sky. The lion is just out of reach above the hounds that are setting up a clamor that cancels all senses. I wade into the hounds to get a closer look at this great cat, which is regarding us as calmly as a general weighing his options. My elbows on bent knees, I labor to draw oxygen into famished lungs and clear a spinning head. I wait until I sense Clyde will not come. I wait until it is impossible for him not to have come. A nauseating fear seeps into my being, slowly taking its grip. The cat stares serenely with yellow-green eyes, coldly unwavering, calculating. I cease to hear the hounds, waiting, alone. I am vaguely aware of the hounds' inexorable receding as I stare at a reclined Clyde, cold to touch, appearing merely to be catching his breath, eyes wide open but unseeing. I have seen dead men, mangled and unrecognizable following oil rig tragedies. This is something else entirely. I sit and watch him, the sun receding toward the horizon as surely as fire eventually exhausts itself, until I can no longer ignore the inevitable. rose- and zebra-wood and blush at the extravagance of such a work of art carried into this austere landscape. Clyde is laboring before me, working up the loose rock of a tight chute leading higher into the cliff, creating small slides behind his slick boots, seemingly troubled and suddenly impatient. I pause to catch my breath, the abrupt jump in altitude from a sea-level existence suddenly all too apparent. Clyde is shooting me hard looks, turning to peer upwards with palpable angst. We climb ever higher. He somehow knows. The hounds are screaming into a void of swirling snow at the edge of the world, swarming about broken rock and intent on an isolated plunge of open space. Clyde mutters, breathing raggedly, concern written on his face as plainly as printed words. "Bayed out there," he manages between gasps. His face is running sweat, but nothing coherent registers beyond the fact I am almost there. I have an arrow on the string and we creep to the falling ledge, finding the massive cat backed to the very edge of precipice, hounds in his face and blaring like foghorns through slobbering jowls. "I only ask you don't shoot a hound," Clyde manages between labored gasps, in a near pleading voice. I am breathing through a gaping mouth, but only later does it occur to me Clyde's breathing is coming with some difficulty. I shimmy closer to the edge while measuring the drop carefully. The cat rushes the hounds, too swiftly to record accurately. Somehow they are quicker, dodging like seasoned prize-fighters, staying just out of reach while also reluctant to give ground. I yank the string to my cheek and turn it loose too quickly in my overwhelming excitement. The arrow arches into the rocks below the tom and a shower of carbon splinters touch the great cat's belly. He explodes through hounds in a reckless rush to regain solid ground, Clyde's pistol exploding in my ear, a puff of pulverized sandstone swirling well behind the fluid bounding off the cougar's snaking tail. Then I am running without restraint, P O R T I N G C 176 L A S S I T he man proves surprisingly light over my shoulder, like a fireman rescuing the victim of a house fire. I clamor and slip down the chute we have earlier ascended, bolstering my agility and strength through a resolve not to subject Clyde to the indignity of being dropped like a sack of vegetables. The cold wind is sweeping away our tracks from earlier, making it even more difficult to reach the flat where the mules wait. I proceed on dead reckoning, soon relieved to find the animals parked as we left them, where I struggle to secure Clyde to his saddle atop a remarkably composed mule. It is not a thing life prepares one for, no matter how much meat has been secured in this fashion following a C S