Somewhat unexpectedly they didn’t leave. The grievers, that is. Not in the collective, anyway. One shift arrived just as another shift left. By some mysterious intuitive alchemy and resolve the women of the village seemed to know when to arrive, and what to bring, so that Faith and her remaining child and limping brother were never without provisions, and never quite alone.
Even as the hunting men disbursed that morning Faith was led ashen-faced from the kitchen sink over which she aimlessly fiddled to a sofa in the living room where sundry comforting efforts flowed.
“Everything happens for a reason,” one among the mourners said.
“A room has been prepared for him,” someone added.
“God does work in mysterious ways, after all.”
And so on.
Yes, … but ..., Faith thought to herself. Why did I survive, she said, or rather thought about saying, but without actually saying it, knowing as she did the futility of rhetorical inquiry on such occasions.
Of course a genuine game warden from the North Platte office had made an appearance by then. Driving a state-owned Toyota Tundra pick-up truck, resplendent in his blue-gray official game warden shirt complete with the moniker “Dave” stitched handsomely over a shirt pocket. He stopped in town long enough to pay respects to our Sheriff, who was a Hampton even then. The Sheriff, that is. He stood maybe six feet four, maybe two hundred forty pounds, boasting two meaty chins and both a sidearm pistol and a Smokey the Bear hat. The game warden, that is.
“We aim to trap the critter,” he explained to our Sheriff and the half dozen locals who happened to be lounging around the Sheriff’s office at the time, eager for some diversion from crushing farm ennui. “Me and a couple boys from the station in St. Paul come to set the snares. If it was a cat, and if she ain’t hightailed it away already, we’ll stay ‘til we’ve caught her.”
“What do you mean ‘if’?” our Sheriff said, leaning back in his chair at his desk in our county jail across from the county courthouse.
The game warden shrugged.
“Not sayin’ one way or t’other. Could be anythin’. Nobody seen it direct. Damn unusual, a big cat like that findin’ its way this far south. Then agin, we had reports of a critter near Thedford just last fall, stalkin’ a family’s schnauzer. And that ain’t but two hundred miles from here as the crow flies. It’s the deer that bring ‘em.”
“You find it?” our Sheriff asked.
“Nope, never did,” the warden responded.
“Uh huh,” the Sheriff grunted. “I see.”
The warden piloted his truck pregnant with trapping gear to the Sinclair station at the edge of town where he went inside with his deputies to take a piss. Not all at the same time. The truck pregnant with gear, not the warden.
When the trio returned to the truck they found the it’s right rear tire was flat.
The warden lifted his cap from his head and scratched it, the head.
“I’m damned,” he said. “Thought I’d checked the pressure just t’other day.”
A deputy kneeling at the side of the deflated tire shook his head.
“Don’t do no good when a knife cut has been made in the tread,” he said.
Sure enough, the tire was well and truly slashed. A jagged tear of the kind a whetted hunting knife makes when assigned the task of emptying air from the tire it has targeted.
They changed the tire, not without effort, before heading out on the gravel lanes north of town, making a fix for the river. The scene of the animal attack. Figuring the beast likely lurked where last seen.
They would have made it, too, but for the radiator going bad.
Not five miles out of town the radiator spouted steam like a Yellowstone geyser gleefully on display. Victim of an unexpected hole the size a b.b. gun makes.
Not a half minute after the state-owned truck slid to a gravel-spitting stop Arch’s third cousin Roger Tunnicliff happened by. Piloting his truck, which just happened to be a genuine wrecker.
Following several minutes of tire kicking Roger winched the steaming state-owned truck for hauling to Lester Gallagher’s garage. Promising to send another truck to haul the warden and his deputies back to town, unless of course they got there first by walking.
The promised ferry never arrived. The three fish and game boys instead traversed the five miles, give or take, back into town by lifting one weary foot in front of another.
They arrived just in time to find that disaster again had struck.
While making its way to Lester’s garage the state-owned truck had somewhat inopportunely, and mysteriously, slipped off Roger’s winch. It fell into a ditch and down a slight slope where it rolled at least twice before coming to a shuddering halt.
They found the trapping gear hopelessly intermixed with the mangled steel wreckage the state-owned truck had become.
Accidents will happen.
A quick call to the insurance man and the fish and game boys loaded up in our Sheriff’s squad car for delivery back to their offices in St. Paul.
They came back later that very day. In a different truck, with a fresh complement of big cat trapping gear.
This time they didn’t bother stopping for coffee.
Or to piss.
Whilst traversing to the river the truck slid to a stop, arrested by a man standing at the side of the road waving his arms while jumping up and down. At least to the extent a boot-wearing farmer can jump.
The warden and his deputies piled from the truck to drink in the clodhopper’s tale, accompanied by much pointing and abundant swearing. The warden grabbed his trusty rifle from the rack in the back of the truck. The deputies unlatched the safeties on their sidearms. Together the men slipped off the gravel road across a field of seedling soybeans through a lonely pine shelter belt to a stand of winter wheat near the juncture of the Platte and Loup Rivers where the big cat had been spied lounging in the thickets not an hour before.
At least according to the leaping local man.
Treading lightly the trio canvassed the area, hunched to the ground, senses on full alert.
They didn’t find the cat. Or any sign of the cat. By the time they trudged back to their second state-owned truck parked by the side of the road an hour or so later, their local guide had up and gone. Disappeared without a trace. Which, unluckily, meant the warden had no one on hand to help him find a nearby phone to place the emergency call on account of the truck being on fire.
A true conflagration. The truck engulfed from stem to stern. Flames leapt from the truck’s every nook and cranny, assuming a state-owned four-by-four with club cab has crannies and nooks.
As the astonished warden and equally astonished deputies lifted their hats from their heads like marionettes on a string to scratch their respective heads, again, mouths ingloriously agape, the ravenous inferno consumed each and every belt, hose, point, plug, knob, dial and associated naugahyde finery, right down to the four tires belching thick black smoke the way burning rubber does.
After watching the truck burn a spell the trio made their way the three miles give or take o’er the Old Chicago Highway to the tavern at Lone Star where they placed first a call to the insurance man and secondly to the St. Paul office before patiently awaiting rescue while sipping the iced tea the proprietor graciously sold them.
The three state lion trappers, would-be, somewhat unbelievably returned a third time, the very next morning. Demonstrating again the seemingly ubiquitous symbolic potency of that prime digit. Or, perhaps, mere maddening perverse rigidity.
This time they didn’t stop