But so far in this three-day jaunt she’d given herself, she’d yet to track the cat.
She’d heard its call the night before. Its scream had ripped through the darkness, through the stars and the moonlight.
I’m here.
She studied the brush as the sturdy mare climbed, listened to the birdcalls that danced through the sheltering pine. A red squirrel burst out of a thicket of chokecherry, darted across the ground and up the trunk of a pine, and looking up, up, she spotted a hawk circle on his morning rounds.
This, as much as the majestic views from the clifftops, as much as the towering falls tumbling down canyons, was why, she believed, the Black Hills were sacred ground.
If you felt no magic here, to her mind, you would find it nowhere.
It was enough to be here, to have this time, to scout, to study. She’d be in the classroom soon, a college freshman (God!), away from everything she knew. And though she was hungry to learn, nothing could replace the sights, the sounds, the smells of home.
She’d seen cougar from time to time over the years. Not the same one, she thought. Very unlikely the same cougar she and Coop had spotted that summer eight years ago. She’d seen him camouflaged in the branches of a tree, leaping up a rock face, and once, while riding herd with her father, she’d spotted one through her field glasses as he took down a young elk.
In all of her life she’d never seen anything more powerful, more real.
She made note of the vegetation as well. The starry forget-me-nots, the delicate Rocky Mountain iris, the sunlight of yellow sweet clover. It was, after all, part of the environment, a link of the food chain. The rabbit, deer, elk ate the grasses, leaves, berries, and buds-and the gray wolf and her cats ate the rabbits, deer, and elk.
The red squirrel might end up lunch for the circling hawk.
The trail leveled off, and opened into grassland, already lush and green and spearing with wildflowers. A small herd of buffalo grazed there, so she added the bull, the four cows, and the two calves to her tally.