Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (romantic books to read .TXT) 📗

who die from physical trauma do so principally as a result of their own actions or those of other people, not the actions of animals. In 1994, the year in which two women in the state were killed by mountain lions, there were 3,821 homicides and 4,212 traffic fatalities in California.

Nevertheless, after the 1994 killings, an angry "eye for an eye" sentiment prevailed among conservatives in the state legislature. Several bills to reinstate sport hunting of lions with dogs were introduced, supported and sponsored by the huntsmen's clubs. An initiative statute was prepared for the March 1996 primary election to repeal the protection mountain lions had enjoyed from hunting and to assign Fish and Game to manage and control the cougar population. The voters roundly defeated it. Urban and suburban people in California like their wildlife. Most of them have never even seen a lion, and many would like to see one, under the right circumstances.

I have seen only three cougars in my life, twenty-one years of which I spent working as a ranger in lion habitat. One of them ran across Foresthill Road in front of my Jeep about two miles as the crow flies from where Barbara Schoener was killed. I patrolled these roads in Jeeps, the trails on foot, and the rivers in boats for eight more years without seeing another. But I'd wager they've seen me, often. Remaining concealed is what mountain lions do for a living: They hunt as housecats do, hiding or quietly stalking until they pounce.

How many lions are there in California? No one really knows. Because they are hard to see, cougars are hard to count. And because they are hard to count, it would be difficult to manage their populations in any precise way. In 1988, the last official study of the state's lion population resulted in an estimate of 5,100. Official figures show that well over 2,000 of them have been killed under permit in the state since 1972, and the pace is quickening: More cougars were killed in the last decade than in the preceding two decades, and by early 2004, one hundred more had been shot in the first four years of the new millennium than had been killed in all of the 1980s. There is no assurance, say experts, that lion populations can sustain such losses in the long run. In the meantime, those that survive exist in the spaces between thirty-six million people and countless domestic animals who are actively invading the wilds.

When I came to the American River, I thought a ranger's job was to save something, or someone. Sometimes it is, when you hear about a bad situation early enough to stop it before it happens. But so often—as in the case of Ricky Marks and Mary Murphy—the whole story unfolds one step ahead of you. Or it's all over and done with before you even hear about it, as it was in the matter of Barbara Schoener. Then all you can do is to try to memorize the details and give a good account of them in your report. As time went on, it became clear to me that this was an important part of my job, too. A ranger is privileged to be intimate with things few other people spend much time with, and your job is to witness and remember.

What my memory had distilled from eight years of witnessing in the American River canyons by the time of Barbara Schoener's death was a glimpse of the general direction of things there: the return of a cool ponderosa pine and Douglas fir forest, pushing up through live oaks and black oaks; the profusion of wildflowers in the meadows after cattle were removed; and the growing frequency of sightings and tracks of mountain lions and black bears. After a century and a half of condemnation to usefulness there was a great longing back toward wildness in these canyons, and they had begun to go that way with an energy like continental drift, like roots heaving pavement. It was desire; it was the force behind everything that happens without human permission or design. It is present in the heartbeats of tiny birds who roost in trees on nights when we would quickly perish from exposure, if not for our houses and warm clothes. When this energy brings the missing parts back to a place, it can be uneven and unpredictable or, as it was for Barbara Schoener, even dangerous.

I will never forget how she looked, surrounded by the way things are at that time of the spring on a north-facing slope: young Douglas firs, green ferns, and moss in the dappled light.

At five o'clock in the evening on April 24, as the low sun turned the tops of the conifers orange, four of us walked down into the forest below Ball Bearing Trail and knelt in the ferns around the neat mound of duff and sticks that covered the body, except for the top of the scalp and the neatly tied running shoes. The evidence technician and I began to remove the pile of twigs one at a time, inspecting them for animal or human hairs, which we collected by touching the twigs with pieces of adhesive tape and then sticking the tape to white evidence cards. The two sheriff-coroner's deputies presided, taking notes and labeling, and packaging the evidence in brown paper shopping bags.

The little glade seemed strangely peaceful.

When we finished, for a moment the glistening internal wilds of spine, ribs, and intercostal muscles looked like food, like the inside of some deer. We gently rolled her over. Her face was gone. From below us through the deepening shadow of the forest, the roar of the rapids along the Middle Fork rose and fell on a breeze. That sound is behind everything I remember in those canyons, like the sound, or a name I know but cannot pronounce, of some larger turning of things into other things. We photographed her, and