The Ridge(9)

At that time, there’d been no cat shit on the grounds.

Her vision of the day had died with her husband in the rocks along the Marshall River six months earlier. He’d fallen forty-six feet while scouting the new home for the rescue center one evening, and although the police told her that David had died instantly, Audrey was still falling.

They’d gotten started at daybreak, the third day of moving cats and, with any luck, the last. At her side were four volunteers and the rescue center’s only two paid staff members: Dustin Hall, a former student of David’s, and Wesley Harrington, the preserve’s manager and cat guru. She had just one transport vehicle, a large panel truck that could hold as many as eight cages at once. Getting those eight cages filled, though, took time and effort. Cats, large or small, are not fond of doing anything that hasn’t been granted their express written consent. Transportation in a cage generally does not qualify.

So it became a battle of wills, with one caveat: the humans could cheat.

They started with simple coaxing. True to the cliché, the cats were curious, if nothing else. Sometimes that curiosity would be enough to lead them to inspect the transport cage. The moment they entered, Wes or Audrey would drop the guillotine gate behind them. If curiosity and coaxing didn’t work, they’d stoop to the first of the cheating tactics: food baiting. Many of the reluctant animals could be lured into the cage when the right treat was offered—Small children work well, Wes had told her dryly—and then the gate would drop.

If the first two techniques didn’t work, then they’d stoop to the ultimate cheat and use tranquilizers. Wes was adamantly opposed to that. He’d been involved in cat recoveries all over the country, and on two occasions he’d seen animals lost because of mishandled drugging. His stance on sedation was that it had to be the last measure.

After five years of working with these cats, Audrey hadn’t thought they’d need to sedate any of them for the relocation, but as the day wore on she found herself in favor of the idea with Kino, one of the male tigers, and not just because Kino sprayed her three times in the morning alone.

The big tiger was full of bad attitude on a good day, and this was not a good day. Watching all the chaos, watching his peers being loaded into cages and driven away, Kino was quite pissed off. Audrey had always made fun of the way he stalked the fence, giant shoulders rolling, giant ass swaying, a surly stare on everyone.

We need to get you a leather jacket, she’d told him once. You can wear it with the collar up.

He’d sprayed her almost immediately after that bit of mockery, and the plans for the leather jacket had swiftly become a promise for a tiger-skin rug for her living room.

Today he was playing the role of an antagonist, roaring and banging against the fences and trying to get the other cats worked up.

“There is no way we get his angry ass into a truck without sedation,” she said.

“We’ll get him, and we’re not sedating him,” Wes answered firmly. He loved all of the cats, but Audrey knew well that Kino was his favorite, simply because Kino was the most challenging.

So they worked around Kino all morning and afternoon, and it was on the last load of the day that they finally got the big tiger into the transport cage. Drug-free, as Wes had promised. In the end it came down to Wes’s ingenious suggestion of totally ignoring the animal. He circled around Kino’s enclosure, talking to the other tigers, reaching out here and there to scratch along their jaws or in some cases allowing them to nuzzle his face and lick his cheek. By the time he made his third pass, Kino was bellowing for attention. Wes ignored him completely. Ten minutes later, the tiger marched sullenly into his transport cage. When they dropped the gate behind him, Wes knelt beside the cage and leaned close. Kino growled. Wes said, “Yeah, I know,” and held his ground, and a few seconds later the tiger’s sound shifted to the chuffing noise that signified pleasure and Wes was scratching behind one of his ears.

“I can’t believe you got him in that cage without tranquilizers,” Audrey said, and she meant it. She was better around these cats than most people, and David had been far better than she, but Wes was something else entirely. The cats accepted him in a way that they wouldn’t anyone else, and his innate understanding of them was extraordinary.

You’re always worried about whether you can trust them, he told her once. If you worry more about making it clear that they can trust you, you’ll be amazed at the difference.

Those lines or variations of them were constant from Wes, who spoke little except to explain things about the cats to Audrey, or, more aptly, to explain what she was failing to grasp about them. She rode an emotional pendulum between appreciation and irritation. At one moment there would be recognition that without him she could not run the preserve; in the next, deep frustration that without him she could not run the preserve.