Track of the Cat by Nevada Barr

jumped down.
    "Be that way," Anna said peevishly. She dropped the next slide into the viewer and held it up to her eye. One of the last shots on the roll: a picture of the paw prints she'd found behind Sheila in the mud. If Anna remembered correctly the two sets had been about a yard apart. It was hard to tell from the picture and she wished she'd had the presence of mind to put a pen or a dime in the shot at the time; something to give a size reference. The prints themselves were cookie-cutter perfect in the smooth surface of the fine-grained silt.
    Anna put the second slide of the prints in and stared at it unthinkingly.
    With an uncluttered mind, the obvious became obvious. The difference between front and hind paw prints was minimal but she had spent a lot of hours with her eyes on the ground studying lion sign. The hind paw's central pad was more heart-shaped, the sides convex rather than concave.
    In these pictures both sets, front and back, were identical- even to the crease marks on the pads themselves.
    Both sets of prints, the front and the hind, were forepaws.
    "That can't be right..." she whispered, pushing her eye closer to the light source. She changed slides; studied the first one again. There were no prints from hind paws.
    A lion with four front paws.

    A lion that walked on its hands.
    A lion eleven feet long that kept its hind paws on the stone.
    A lion with its ass in a sling.
    Anna listed the absurdities. "When is a Lion not a Lion?" she said aloud, putting her confusion into riddle formula.
    When it's dead, she thought, and that's what this lion- or some lion-will be if the hunt's not stopped.
    Again she looked at the slides. She was not mistaken. Proof.
    Proof of what, she wasn't exactly sure. Proof there was something fishy about the Drury Lion Kill.

    "Proof we should look at this whole situation a little more closely before we go bashing around in the wilderness with dogs and guns killing off the wildlife." Anna sat in the Chief Ranger's office. She'd been waiting at the door when Corinne Mathers arrived for work at eight a.m.
    Chief Ranger Mathers was a small woman but big breasted and big hipped, with short, iron-gray hair that curled naturally around her ears. Her face was round, suggesting both plumpness and softness. Neither was accurate. Corinne Mathers had come up the hard way. There were only a handful of women Chief Rangers in the National Park Service. She'd started when "girl" rangers wore mini-skirts and were allowed badges exactly half the size of those the men wore. Mathers was smart. And she was harder than flint.
    "Though I may not agree with your conclusions, you've been thorough, Anna. Good attention to detail, I'll give you that." The Chief Ranger tossed the slides down onto a yellow legal pad covered top to bottom with notes too small to be read upside down. Anna resisted the urge to rescue her fragile evidence.
    "Then you'll stop the hunt."
    Mathers took off her glasses-aviator style with gold rims-and pinched the bridge of her nose as if the little red marks there pained her. "It's not as simple as that, Anna."
    "It's as simple as that. Just call off the dogs."
    The Chief Ranger replaced the glasses and leaned across the desk. Her hands were folded on the legal pad, on the two ignored slides. "No. It's not." Deliberately, as if she wanted Anna to commit each word to memory, she said: "The cougar that we know to have killed Ranger Drury has already been dispatched."

    6

    Up on the Permian Ridge two miles north of Middle McKittrick Canyon a lioness had been shot and killed. Harland Roberts, Corinne Mathers, and two men from the New Mexico State Department of Fish and Wildlife had brought the body back to the park.
    Anna's first lion had flies crawling from its mouth and blood, black as tar, matting the fur of its neck. The animal was five to seven years of age, weighed seventy-five pounds and was nursing at least one, possibly two kittens. The park's Public Information Officer