Black Hills

She’ll have a good life here, and may have it for over twenty years.”
    She watched the black cat belly through the grass, nosing it, nosing the air, then rising to stalk. Squatting to pee, marking her territory as the lion marked hers.
    She paced and circled, and even when she stopped to drink from her trough, Lil saw her muscles quivering.
    She continued to pace, to prowl, sending out that hoarse roar. When she rose on her hind legs to sharpen her front claws on her tree, Lil felt her own muscles quiver at the beauty of the cat’s lines, the power of her build.
    She watched, even when the others drifted away, she watched for nearly an hour. And smiled when Cleo leaped into the tree to spread her muscular body over a thick branch.
    “Welcome home, Cleo,” she said aloud.
    She left the new guest alone and went back to the office to check the paperwork.
    She looked in on Matt first to find him reading the new addition’s medical records. “Everything as advertised?”
    “Healthy female melanistic jaguar, who has not yet come into estrus. She’s had regular exams, the proper inoculations. Her diet has been somewhat suspect. Tansy brought blood samples, but I’ll want to examine her myself.”
    “Understood. Let’s give her a day or two to adjust to her new environment before we put any more stress on her. I can get you some scat and urine without too much trouble if you want to start sooner.”
    “Sooner the better.”
    “I’ll take care of it.”
    Lil walked to the office she shared with Tansy, and shut the door.
    Tansy looked up from the keyboard. “Everything okay?”
    “We’ll get into that in a minute. First, what’s up with you?”
    “Nothing. I don’t want to talk about it now. I want to talk about it later,” Tansy decided. “With alcohol.”
    “Okay, after tonight’s feeding. We’ll have some wine and a debriefing. But here’s what you have to know now.”
    Lil sat and filled Tansy in on what had happened during her trip.
    “My God, Lil. My God. You could’ve been seriously hurt. You could’ve been killed.” Tansy shut her eyes. “If one of the kids—”
    “Middle of the night. The kids aren’t here. We’re taking steps. Every step we can. With the new alarm system the animals, the staff, everyone will be protected. I should’ve dug into the coffers for an updated system before.”
    “It did the job, Lil. It did the job until some crazy person came around. You have to be crazy to open the enclosure that way. Whoever did it could’ve ended up as fresh meat just as easily as that elk. The cops can’t find him? Any trace of him?”
    “Not so far. Coop thinks he has a line on who it is. Tansy, Carolyn Roderick—you remember her?”
    “Sure. What does she have to do with this?”
    “She’s missing. She’s been missing for months, disappeared from a group working in Alaska.”
    “Missing? Oh, no. Her family. I talked to her mother a couple of times when Carolyn was here.”
    “She had a boyfriend—an ex. He came around here when she interned.”
    “The mountain-man type—Ed? No, not Ed.”
    “Ethan.”
    “Right, Ethan, of the I’m-descended-from-Crazy-Horse blather.”
    “You remembered that faster than I did,” Lil replied.
    “I had dinner with Carolyn and some of the other interns a few times, and he’d come along or show up. Full of himself and his proud heritage, which came off as bullshit to me. But she liked it, liked him. He brought her wildflowers, did some volunteering. Took her dancing. She was smitten.
    “It went bad between them. She broke it off, and people Coop contacted said they thought he was violent.” Lil got them both bottles of water. “I remembered, after I looked through her file, how he’d gone around claiming to be Sioux, and how he bragged about living in the wild for long stretches of time, like—well—Crazy Horse. Had a hard-on for the Park Service. Claimed this area was sacred ground.”
    “You think it’s him? The one who killed the cougar and wolf? Why would he come back here and harass you?”
    “I don’t know. But he’s vanished, too. Coop hasn’t been able to locate him. Yet. If there’s anything more you can remember about him, anything at all, you should tell Coop and Willy.”
    “I will. I’ll think about it. God, you think he did something to Carolyn?”
    “I wish I didn’t think that.” Thinking it made her feel sick and sad, and guilty. “I’m not sure if I’m actually remembering or if I just have