Cat's Claw (A Pecan Springs Mystery)

Country. A couple of miles east of us, back toward town, a gated community of half-million-dollar homes is under construction behind an outpost palisade, the houses thrusting into the sky like medieval stone castles. To the west, the wilderness begins: rocky, thin-soiled uplands thickly blanketed with nearly impenetrable brakes of cedar, elbow bush, and catbrier; grassy clearings studded with spiny prickly pear; and swaths of open valleys braided with clear creeks. That’s what you can see, andit’s beautiful. But there’s more that you can’t, and it’s beautiful, too. Underground, the folded hills are honeycombed with labyrinthine limestone caves, carved by eons of seeping, dripping, trickling water.
    This wilderness is home to whitetail deer and armadillos, rangy coyotes and feral pigs, wild turkeys, turkey vultures, the endangered golden-cheeked warblers, and—in the underground caves and the open night skies—the Mexican free-tail bats. For over a century, cattle ranchers scrabbled a hard living from these hills and valleys. That era has come to an end, for in the past decade, factory-farmed cattle have swamped the market. Range-fed cattle are no longer profitable. Now, few people have the know-how and the stamina it takes to live off the land.
    It was warm for early November, and it had been looking like rain all afternoon, a thunderstorm to the north offering a brief, glittering show of lightning. It had been full dark when I left Ruby’s house, and the rain was just beginning to fall. I was heading home down Limekiln Road, not far from the turnoff to our house, when I caught a quick movement out of the corner of my eye. Before I knew what was happening, a ghostly apparition sprinted out of the thick underbrush and across the road at the moving edge of my headlights. A mountain lion—a splendid wild cat, lithe and lean, its tail more than half the length of its body, its gray fur glistening like liquid silver in the rain.
    I jammed on the brakes, clenching the steering wheel, my heart pounding. This was the first big cat I had ever seen, and I couldn’t help wishing he had stopped so I could get a better look. Of course, I was safely in the car—I’m sure I would have felt differently if I’d been on foot. But the sight was a reminder that I live at the edge of the wild lands, and this glimpse of real wildness left me as breathless as if I’d been within reach of those razor-sharp claws.
    I took a deep breath and drove on, still enthralled by the magic of what I had seen. But it was frightening, too, and as I made the left turn off the highway and onto our narrow gravel lane, I was glad to be coming home.
    We live in a large two-story Victorian, painted white with green shutters, a porch on three sides, a turret in the front corner. It was built in the interval between the world wars, when Central Texas State was still a teachers’ college and Pecan Springs was still a very small town. When our house was new, there were no near neighbors and the land all around was largely unsettled.
    Our closest neighbors are the Banners, who have a maroon mailbox shaped like a Texas A&M football helmet bearing the words banners for aggies! in large gold letters. Tom and Sylvia are both employed in Pecan Springs, Tom at the university, Sylvia at Ranchers State Bank. In addition to their town jobs, they share the work of a big vegetable garden, Tom maintains a small peach orchard, and Sylvia tends a flock of ten Gulf Coast native sheep, brought to Texas in the late 1500s by the Spanish and bred over the centuries for their fine wool. The best thing about the breed, Sylvia says, is their tolerance for our Texas heat and humidity. She is a talented spinner and weaver and dyes her own fiber from plants she grows or gathers: goldenrod, madder, burdock, clematis, coreopsis, and yarrow—even bark from the osage orange trees and the cochineal bugs she picks off the prickly pear. She’s raised her sheep from lambs and loves them as if they were her children.
    I parked my Toyota on the gravel area beside the fence and ducked through the drizzle to the porch. The house was dark, which meant that McQuaid and the kids weren’t yet back from Seguin. However, our elderly basset—Howard Cosell—was on guard as usual, stationed justinside the kitchen door to make sure that his house was not invaded by burglars, skunks, rats, or other unapproved intruders from the wilderness beyond the stone fence. (I’m sure he would also