Biting the Moon (35 page)

And for an awful moment, Mary thought he'd turned to look across the road and had seen the two of them and was about to advance. He was addressing one of the guides. “. . . shit-fer-brains,
you
!” The rest of it was lost on the wind, even though he was yelling. Then she saw him pluck a shotgun from the Jeep and swagger over to the cage where the tiger had retreated into his shelter.

Beside her, Andi was so silent and motionless Mary almost wondered if she'd stopped breathing. The binoculars Reuel had loaned her were fixed on the hunting party. In a voice so flat it was little more than a monotone, Andi said, “That son-of-a-bitch is going to shoot the tiger where it lies.” She lowered the binoculars but didn't turn her head to look at Mary. Her face was chalk white, and it was as if she were looking not at the party of people but farther off, toward a frontier of light that retreated as she watched. “He's going to shoot it,” she said again, and again brought up the binoculars.

Mary couldn't believe any of this: couldn't believe this was really happening and was thankful at least for whatever part of her mind allowed her to see it as if she were looking through a scrim, a dream veil.
How can you watch?
she wanted to scream at Andi but could only give a desolate whisper.

Whatever Andi might have answered was lost in the explosion of gunfire that split the air and turned it black. Across the road there was a great howling, and Mary would almost have thought it was the tiger's howl that rent the air, but the tiger, of course, was dead. It was only the raucous voice of the shooter, who was joined by the other celebrants. They high-fived him and pounded him on the back. One of the women—there were two of them—gave him a hug and a kiss.

•   •   •

“Let's get out of here, Andi. Please, let's just get out.”

Andi looked at her, held her with the gaze of someone who had just crossed a line. “No. We can't leave. We've got to stay now because—I mean”—she made a small gesture with her hand—“I mean, I've got to.”

Mary felt desperate and perhaps because of this grew furious, although she wasn't even sure what at. “Oh, stop being dramatic, damn it. You can too leave! You're being ridiculous.” All the time knowing it was useless, utterly useless, to try to change Andi's mind. She was like a compass point that had found true north and intended to hold it.

Mary was almost afraid of her. Now she knew what it was about Andi that made her so—well,
mesmerizing.
It was her single-mindedness, her purpose, and everything that detracted from it was burned away, flying off into ashes, turned to dust. Nothing beyond what Andi was doing now held any meaning for her. Mary feared she had stepped across a border into an alien country that she could not understand but from which she would not be coming back.

•   •   •

The fat man went inside the cage then, raised his pistol, and shot the tiger twice in the head. There was no doubt the tiger was already dead or the shooter wouldn't have gone in. The final shots were for show only.

As for show, the fat man put his foot on the tiger's side and waited for his friends in the adventure to start snapping pictures. They all had cameras and went inside the enclosure before taking their pictures. They wouldn't want to show the fence.

Mary wondered if they really thought that this would present the illusion the animal had been killed in the open, on some great African safari, a plain like the Serengeti or the red dunes of the Kalahari. The Double Q's customers wanted the experience to look like a bona fide hunt, with its commensurate dangers and frustrations, for now one of the other men was handing the shooter a rifle to use in his pose. The fat man had at least enough consciousness of the absurdity of his position to figure out that it might not look sporting if he were holding a
pistol. Finally, they finished with their little white-hunter tableau and dispersed, going to one or the other of the remaining cages.

Mary lowered her head, afraid they might be going to kill the cougar or the panther. When she heard nothing to signal another killing, she looked up and saw, in the middle distance, two more vehicles moving down the road. One was a pickup truck with a large bamboo cage on its bed; the other was a Range Rover with two men in it, driver and passenger.

Beside her, Andi had raised the binoculars. When the Range Rover stopped and the driver got out, she said, “Harry Wine.” She lowered the binoculars and looked at Mary. “Harry Wine,” she said again, and handed the field glasses to Mary.

Reuel had said Harry Wine was a supplier. When the other man got out from the passenger's side, Mary raised the glasses again. She lowered them slowly, said, “It's Sergei.”

Andi grabbed the binoculars. It was Sergei, all right, standing among the others, whose voices came to them like cracking whips on currents of air. The words were not distinguishable.

“What are they doing?” Mary asked, in a barely audible voice.

“Getting the cage from the truck.” She was silent for a few moments, watching. “It's hard to tell what—”

“It's what Reuel said: they're going to take the cougar or the panther somewhere out in the open; then they're going to let it out.”

“Come on,” said Andi, who was up to a crouching position, as if she were at any moment going to break into a run.

“To where?”

“Farther down the road. They have to follow the roads. We don't.”

But they stood for a while, screened by the hedge and the overhanging branches of an oak tree, and Andi was looking through the field glasses again. A lot of laughing, a lot of noise.

There was even more noise, now, coming from the enclosures: shouted commands, clubs and sticks drumming on the fence while the guides maneuvered the panther into the new cage.

“They've got the cage back onto the truck.” Andi grabbed Mary's arm, pulling them deeper into the wood but still keeping the pickup in sight. The truck hadn't started yet. “How do you know they're going this way?”

“I don't. I'm guessing.”

They walked and turned, turned and walked, always keeping the truck within view. It was headed in their direction, going slowly. The two of them could keep pace with it by running in spurts, or as well as they could run, hunkered down as they were. But the hunting party was too self-absorbed, having too good a time, happy-drunk, to bother with any movement in the woods the road skirted, and certainly too loud to hear any noise Mary and Andi might make.

The truck took a turning ahead of them and dropped out of sight.

“It's gone. Look, let's get out of here. It's gone, and anyway I'd just as soon not see what happens to that black panther. We've got to leave, Andi. Look”—Mary searched for any reason at all that might persuade her—“we've got to get back to Santa Fe before Rosella does, and she'll be back in a couple of days.” Mary stopped pleading because she was talking to empty space; certainly Andi wasn't listening. She had trained the binoculars on some distant sight and was moving them slowly around to their left. Where they were, under cover of thick oaks and pines, it was cool and dark. But the dry and empty plain in front of them was exposed to the midday sun.

“There they are,” said Andi, pointing.

The sun hung in a cloudless sky over the empty clearing. There was no wind; even the air felt dead. The huge orange sun looked to Mary as if it would turn the earth to ashes. On the far side of the plain, the ground swelled and formed a ridge, and across it the road ran. They could see the truck, the Jeeps, and the Range Rover moving slowly along the rim of the hill, a black caravan of cars as solemn as a funeral cortege. The cars snaked toward the center of the plain and stopped. The hunting party tumbled out of the Jeeps, along with the guides, and Harry leapt down from the cab of the truck. Mary could see the gestures, hear the distant voices, the barked commands, as they pulled the cage from the truck bed. Mary couldn't make out the black panther or what they were doing once the cage was on the ground. “Can you see what's going on?”

“Yes.” Andi made an adjustment to the focus, took the binoculars from her eyes, offered them to Mary.

When she balked at taking them, Andi kept holding them out, saying, “Look, Mary.”

It was more of a plea than a command. But Mary knew there was no use in backing away or refusing; if she did, she'd feel wrong, for Andi seemed to regard it as a mission from which they couldn't turn back. Perhaps it was. Only Mary didn't feel like a missionary; she didn't want to be here, and she didn't want to see this, and she didn't want to know. Nevertheless, she accepted the glasses and looked. Several acres of clearing were roughly fenced in with post-and-wire. The hunting party (including the fat man) was dispersing, moving away from the center of the plain, leaving the enclosure and forming a ragged line at the edge of the wood.

They had come to watch the kill. The shooter this time was a tall craggy man who at least had bowed to the ritual of the hunt enough to use a shotgun instead of a pistol. In that open field, he was simply waiting for the panther to walk out of the cage. Mary tried to put herself in his place, but she simply could not enter into a state of mind that would permit her to raise the gun. Where, in this version of the hunt, was the thrill? Where was it? Not the feel of the stock braced against a shoulder, not the shot itself, for a person could do that shooting cans off rocks. Where was it? It was killing.

The “guides” had opened the cage. But the black panther wouldn't move, just crouched back in a corner. They started beating on the cage with sticks and clubs. “God,” Mary all but wailed over the angry shouting, the tattoo of clubs against metal. Mary tensed as Sergei pushed the two beaters away and shoved into the cage—as much of himself as could fit. She couldn't see what he did, but in a moment the panther came out.

“What're they doing?”

Mary handed the binoculars to Andi, as she said, “Sergei just got the panther to leave the cage. There it—” She heard a volley of shots and whirled. She could make out the tall man bringing his shotgun up fast and heard the burst of the shot. Smoke momentarily obscured the distant scene, but then she could see the panther, racing across the clearing.

Even without the glasses, Mary could follow the movements of the shooter, who was clearly rattled and furious, and who chambered more shot into his gun, raised it, lowered it, raised it. The panther, a streak of black, shot toward the edge of the woods. She heard the shot explode, two shots. Mary's heart was in her mouth. The panther was stopped by the fence and had to turn in another direction. The entire clearing was fenced.

They could hear the hunting party shouting, the shooter loudest of all, yelling at Harry Wine, who'd started to send the guides, with guns, off after the panther. But the shooter apparently wasn't having this; he grabbed up what Mary thought must have been some kind of semiautomatic and, rushing as close as he dared toward the fence, fired off a volley of shot that was so violent, loud, and frenzied, the panther seemed to explode against the fence and drop.

She felt the air bleed. A guaranteed kill, as certain as damnation.

Except in hell you couldn't get your money back; at the Double Q, you could.

Andi slowly lowered the field glasses, rested her forehead against them, then sank down in the grass and scrub. Mary had lowered herself to the ground. She lay on her back, looking up, as if all they'd come for was the sky.

The noises of the hunting party, the shouting and laughing, all came to Mary now as if from an enormous distance, as if they were no longer contained in her world. She would not look. And neither would Andi, who lay with her head on a rock. They must (Mary supposed) be doing something with the panther's body, probably loading it back onto the truck. In a few minutes she heard engines accelerating.

Andi rolled over. She looked pale, her expression grim. She said, “We'd better go.”

Mary got up, looked toward the darker horizon, the sun beginning to go down, the cars and truck making their way back along the same route. “Back through the woods?”

“The way we came, but we should probably stick to the deeper woods. We don't have to follow them.”

“Can we leave this place now?”

“It'll be dark soon.” Andi was some fifteen or twenty feet ahead.

What kind of answer was that? “It wasn't
dark
when we came. Why does it have to—” She gave up, shrugged. And then she wondered: why was she waiting for Andi to agree?

Because she wouldn't be here, would never have made this trip, would never have known there was a trip to make if it hadn't been for Andi. Would never have met Reuel or Mel, never have saved the coyote pups, never have eaten at the Roadrunner Restaurant or heard Darlene sing. Never have taken a raft down the Salmon River, never have known the baseness of some men. And she did not know why she was adding it all up now, sitting on this cold tree trunk, looking at the cold green tunnel down which Andi was walking.

She sensed danger, not from the hunting party or the Quicks but from a source she couldn't put a name to. Most of her fourteen years she had tried to attune herself to the natural world—the mountains, the desert—and now she realized she never had. Had never even come close. She rose and continued walking, dislodging dead and brittle branches along the way.

It was cold in the woods the deeper in she got, the trees, black in this little light, now almost as sheer as canyon walls. In the growing dark, she could have mistaken the trunks of the great ponderosas for columns of basalt. It was like going down that river a second time, faces blinded by spray, pulled toward a keeper.

Mary had been so deep into thought she hadn't realized Andi was no longer ahead. She looked around, panicky. She did not want to call out, but she whispered “
Andi
!” She walked a little farther and saw through a break in the vegetation that she was near the road.