“Mr. Sturm?” Chuck sounded like he might burst into tears any minute. “I…I don’t think I can walk. Can’t see real good, either.”

“Goddamnit.” Sturm stood motionless for a moment, hands on hips, staring at the horizon. “This is most inconvenient, Chuck. You do understand that we have hunters arriving today.” Sturm acted like an overworked parent scolding a toddler in the midst of throwing a fit. “Goddamnit.”

“I’m sorry. I really tried—”

Sturm snapped his fingers. “Frank! Take him on back to the vet hospital. Fix him up. If it’s real bad, then we’ll figure out how to get him over to the hospital in Alturas.”

Frank came around the backhoe and found a handkerchief in Sturm’s pickup. “Here. Hold this to your head there,” he held it out to Chuck. “Scalp wounds bleed like a bitch. You keep bleeding like that, you’re gonna pass out.” Frank thought all this was funny as hell, and he struggled to keep the laugh out of his voice.

As Frank pulled Chuck up and helped him limp across the highway to Chuck’s pickup, he realized that it probably would have been a lot less painful to simply bring the pickup over to Chuck, instead of making him lurch at his own pickup as if they were being chased by that tiger. But hell, watching Chuck try to move was more entertaining.

* * * * *

The steady chugging of a diesel engine reached them A square box grew out of the heat waves down the highway, coming into focus as a beige Winnebago.

The RV was so old they could hear the driver manually shifting down as it rolled up to the scene of the accident. It was towing an even older horse trailer, one that had been modified recently. Heavy bars had been haphazardly welded across any open space more than a foot wide.

Frank wondered what the hell kind of horse was inside.

The driver got out. He looked like a primitive voodoo doll made from horsehair; long and flowing in some places, short tufts of black bristles in others. Long, curly gray hair hung along the ears, brutally parted straight down the middle, as if it was a forest break, seared into the landscape by smoke jumpers. A black beard hung down past his ribcage. Apart from the sun blasted forehead and the wrinkles surrounding his eyes, the only other skin Frank could see was the palms of the man. And the soles of his feet.

The driver was barefoot. The pavement was hot enough to sear pork chops, yet he acted like he was walking on cool evening grass. He wore black leather pants. A safari shirt. A safari jacket the color of an egg gone bad in the sun. With fringes.

“Y’all have an accident?” He had an accent, maybe Texas or some other southern state, all of the words smeared together in an easy drawl.

“Nah. We were just tickling this Caterpillar to hear it laugh,” Sturm said. He faced the man from the other side of the highway crack, black boots wide, Carhart jeans tucked into the boots, held up by red suspenders, hands on his hips, shoulders square, black Cowboy hat secure.

“Looking fer a Mr. Horace Sturm,” the man said.

“You’re talking to him.”

The man smiled. “Name’s Girdler. Talked to you a while back. Believe you mentioned something about a hunt.”

“Believe I did, yessir.”

“Well then, I’m ready for some shooting.”

* * * * *

Sturm and Girdler drove the RV back up the highway to the locked gate, going the long way into town, while Frank drove Chuck back to the vet office. Chuck whimpered with every jolt and bump, barking out at one point, “Are you fucking trying to hit every goddamn hole?”

Frank hoped it wasn’t obvious. “Hell no. Sorry.”

Frank half-dragged Chuck into the hospital and left him on one of the waiting room chairs. He prepared a syringe of morphine and sunk it deep into the vein in the crook of Chuck’s elbow, just to shut him up for a while. Frank thought about breaking the needle off in Chuck’s arm, but figured that might be pushing things too far. Chuck gave a long, satisfied sigh, “Ah fuck yes…” and limply slid off the chair onto the floor.

Sturm and Girdler came in the back door, laughing and shouting as if they’d been pals for years. Sturm immediately grabbed a couple of beers from the fridge. Frank met them in the back examining room.

Sturm grabbed Frank by the shoulders, hugging him close, beaming, saying, “Like you to meet one of my most valuable employees. This is Frank, our vet. He’s taking care of all our animals; hell, he knows these cats inside and out.”

“Hi.” Frank stuck his hand out.

“Howdy,” Girdler extended his own paw; it felt like grabbing a leather glove wrapped in badger hair bristles. Up close, Frank could see that hair covered nearly every inch of Girdler’s skin. The man had hair down to his cracked, yellow toenails; actually the hair surrounded the toenail, growing right down to the callused bottoms of the toes. Girdler’s mother must have been raped by Bigfoot.

“Let’s go meet my girls,” Sturm said.

Frank held the door to the middle section open for Sturm and Girdler. Sturm strode briskly past the first four cats, simply saying, “These here will be available to hunt very soon. We’re getting ’em healthy. Later, if you wish, you can have your pick. But these two, back here, these are my girls—Princess and Lady.” Frank blinked, unaware that Sturm had already named his pets.

All of the lionesses lay in the far corners, but where the other lionesses seemed bored, if not downright sleepy, Princess and Lady were alert, anxious, as if a hot, vibrating wire had been laced through their spines. Sturm explained, “They haven’t eaten in two days. Saving ’em for something special tonight. The evening’s entertainment, you could say.”

Frank expected Sturm to launch into the usual bullshit about his magnificent predators and the pure essence of nature and all that, and was surprised when Sturm asked Girdler, “Will this facility adequately address your needs?”

Girdler shook the corner post of the cages, noting how it was set into the concrete. The cats recoiled, folded into themselves, flat against the concrete. They didn’t seem to like looking at the hairy man. Maybe it was his scent.

Girdler’s tongue came out and found an errant lock of beard at the corner of his mouth, pulled it back in and sucked on it for a while. “Don’t know rightly. Gonna be tight, that’s for sure.” He bit down on the lock of hair, chewed on it for a while, and spit out the pieces, like dark flecks of tobacco. “Maybe…if it was just a night. But hell. I may just be here a while. A week, maybe more. Providing you got plenty else to hunt.”

“Oh we got plenty to hunt, that’s for damn sure,” Sturm said. “Your barrel’ll melt ‘fore you run out of things to shoot. If this place won’t hold it, then hell, we’ll just have to find something that will. And if we can’t find something, then we’ll just have to build something. That simple.” He glanced at Frank. “Mr. Girdler’s got his own animal to hunt.” His voice got proud, awed. “Wait until you see it. Big as a goddamn mountain. A genuine grizzly bear. In my town.”

“Kodiak, technically. Same damn thing as a grizzly really, just a tad bigger, from an island off the coast of Alaska,” Girdler clarified.

Frank’s hoped the bear wasn’t a relative of Girdler’s. “Is it out in the trailer?”

“Yup. Got him doped up so he’ll be asleep for a day or two.”

“When he does wake up, we’re gonna need some more tranquilizers. No question. How big is this animal?”

“Around eleven hundred pounds,” Girdler said, pride coating his voice like warm syrup. “And over ten feet long.”

“Then yeah, we’ll have to figure some other place to keep it. No way it can stay here. It’ll go through this chain-link fence in a heartbeat,” Frank said. “We’re taking a hell of a chance with keeping the cats here as it is.”

“He’s not dangerous, not really,” Girdler said. “I’ve had him since a cub. I call him Bo-Bo,” he said sheepishly, then got defensive. “Well, he was just the cutest damn thing. Bought him off a zoo in Kansas. They couldn’t afford to feed him. Hell, I can barely afford to feed him. He eats 80 pounds a day in the summer, mostly blueberries and squash. He loves salmon. Thank the good Lord he sleeps most of the winter.”