Audrey couldn’t agree to it. Canceling on the relocation would have been the ultimate failure to David, who’d been determined not to be chased away, although plenty of attempts had been made. There were multiple reasons for the move, but they all boiled down to one fundamental issue: proximity to people. Ironic, of course, because that problem was the reason all of these cats needed care to begin with. The age-old territory battle never stopped, and the cats would never win. When the preserve had first been built, the locals had regarded it with a mixture of curiosity and amusement, but there’d been hardly any objection. Over the following three years, though, development had overtaken the nearby fields. First came a seventy-home complex called Eden Estates, then talk of a golf course. The good people of Eden Estates moved into their homes, heard the occasional cougar scream or lion’s roar in the night, and began to fear for their children. Complaints began, alleging that the rescue preserve was too close to residential property and the cats presented a danger. True to form in the human-animal history, nobody seemed concerned with the idea that the cats had been there first.
Audrey’s legal background had a real use then, as she defended the preserve, pointing out that no cat had ever escaped from the property and no human had ever been bitten or clawed or hurt in any way, but even as she was making the arguments, David was eyeing new locations. He wanted space and he wanted distance from people. They found plenty of both at Blade Ridge.
Now all of his cats were there. Well, all except for Ira. He’d be moved alone.
There were dozens of cats on the preserve that nobody cared about, and then there was Ira, the subject of intense debate, his photographs and vital statistics being shipped back and forth from cat experts around the globe. The reason: he was living, breathing proof that the mountain lion of so many legends existed. While the term black panther was tossed about casually by the public, it was inaccurate. There were melanistic jaguars who exhibited a genetic quirk that turned their fur black—or, rather, black on black, since the cats were spotted—but no proof existed for a black North American cougar.
Until Ira.
And he’d come to the preserve of his own accord.
They’d been in operation for five weeks when he made his first appearance, and Wesley had been the only one to spot him. Even David had scoffed, sure that Wes was seeing things, but their manager was adamant: a cougar had come down out of the hills and surveyed the cages. A black cougar. The kind that didn’t exist.
For a time Audrey had believed Wes was enjoying a practical joke. But as the man spent more and more time in the woods around the preserve, leaving food bait behind and trying to rig a trap camera to obtain evidence of the creature, she realized he was serious, and she worried about what it meant. There was no such thing as what he’d claimed to have seen, and still he pursued it with absolute conviction. It was disturbing to watch.
And then, nine days after he’d first spotted the cat, Wesley wheeled it into the preserve in a transport cage. The cat had entered, he said, and then chosen to ignore the bait that was inside. The guillotine gate hadn’t been tripped by his entrance, though; he’d somehow gracefully avoided triggering it. Rather than retreat, he remained inside and watched Wesley as if daring him to come close enough to lower the gate himself.
“I had a moment of doubt,” Wes admitted.
He’d done it, though. Approached and lowered the gate, and for a moment the cat could have struck, but he did not. Then the gate was down and he was trapped and the Kentucky preserve had the only melanistic cougar in recorded captivity.
David considered that a stroke of luck unlike any other in his life—Thanks a lot, Audrey remembered telling him dryly when he’d informed her of that news. He believed the cougar had been drawn out of the deep woods by the presence of the other cats, by curiosity over his own kind. Wes never seemed convinced of that; cougars were not pack animals, they were isolated, territorial creatures. He would grant David the animal’s curiosity, but he didn’t believe the cat wanted anything to do with his peers, either—a belief that was rapidly borne out by Ira’s behavior. He was surprisingly docile around people, but he demanded solitary confinement. Many of the cats were happy to socialize with the others. Ira wanted his own space.
The chaos built quickly. David’s fellow experts disagreed at first, claiming that Ira was the product of crossbreeding, but DNA tests supported Audrey’s husband: Ira was a North American puma, or cougar, or mountain lion. Wes had disregarded the controversy—Told you from the start he was a mountain lion, he’d said, and then gone on about his business. The cat, everyone except Wesley agreed, could certainly not have been wild. He was too good with people, too comfortable. Clearly he’d escaped from some private owner, and clearly that person had been involved in something illegal, or he would have reported him missing. Would have reported him, period.