Bittersweet (6 page)

Startled, the caracara gave a hollow, rattling call, lifted its wide black and white wings—at least a four-foot span—and flapped into the air. Mack shifted her scope to the deer camp on the side of the creek nearest the road and saw that two pup tents were pitched there. A small fire burned in a cleared spot on the creek bank, a low metal grill propped on
rocks over the flames, a cast-iron pot on the grill. A thickset man was adding a couple of sticks to the fire. In contrast to the previous camp, this one was primitive.

She started the truck again and drove thirty yards up the road, to the head of the faint trail that led down to Six-Mile Creek and the camp. Parked at the trailhead was a rusty red GMC pickup with Texas plates and an empty rifle rack in the back window of the cab. Mack called in her 10-20 to Dispatch (a precaution she always took when she was leaving her vehicle in an isolated area), locked Molly in the truck, and hiked a hundred yards down the steep hillside to the creek at the bottom. She felt the hair on the back of her neck prickle with apprehension as she approached the camp. These encounters were a test of alertness, experience, and judgment, for you never knew what you were going to walk into. All you could be sure of was that every man on the site would be fully armed, might be drunk as a skunk (like the man who had killed her father), and was ready to shoot at anything that moved. She loosened her Glock in its holster.

“Hello the camp,” she called as she stepped out of the woods and into the clearing along the creek. “Game warden.” Some wardens didn't announce themselves. She did. She'd hate to get shot because of mistaken identity.

The man at the fire straightened up and turned around. Short and hefty, he was wearing a Harley cap and a baggy camo vest. He hadn't shaved in a couple of days. A second man—tall, rail thin, and bearded—crawled out of one of the tents, a heavy throwing knife in one hand.

“Morning, guys,” she said pleasantly. “I'm Warden Chambers. I need to see your hunting licenses, please.”

“Got mine on me,” Short-and-Hefty said, and produced it out of a pocket. Tall-and-Thin crawled back into the tent and came out with his
wallet and license—and without the knife. They even had a much folded and creased copy of their signed hunting lease agreement, something that many hunters failed to carry.

Mack handed back the papers back. “Had any luck yet?”

“We just got here last night,” Tall-and-Thin said, scratching his chin. “We was out still-hunting early this morning but didn't get anything.”

“You know how that goes, I reckon.” Short-and-Hefty chuckled wryly. “Still-hunting ain't the quickest way to get your venison.”

“There are easier ways to punch a tag,” Mack agreed. Her father had been a still hunter, tracking Indian-style through the woods, rather than crouching in a blind waiting for the deer to come to a feeding station. She had begun still-hunting with him the winter before he was killed, on another warden's ranch in Lampasas County, miles from anywhere.

“Fair and square hunting,” he had called it. “You're on the deer's home turf, and he knows the landscape infinitely better than you do. He can see and hear and smell better than you can, too. He has all the advantages, so you have to be smarter. You have to be a
real
hunter.” She didn't have time to hunt these days and she didn't need the meat. But if she did, that's how she'd do it.

“We was out lookin' for the eight-pointer we saw last time we was here,” Tall-and-Thin offered with a grin that showed stained, crooked teeth.

“Worth lookin' for,” Short-and-Hefty put in. “But if we don't get him tonight or tomorrow morning, it's okay. We got a spike buck last week for the freezer, and we'll be back.”

Mack nodded. She respected hunters who hunted for their tables. In fact, she felt that, for those who could, hunting was better than buying factory-farmed beef and pork in cellophane packages at the supermarket.
She thought people who ate meat should be aware of the fact that an animal had died to feed them. Vegetarians and vegans she understood and respected as well—principle was important, after all—but she could only shake her head at the hypocrisy of those who insisted that killing a deer for food was wrong and then went around the corner and chowed down on a double bacon burger.

“After all,” Short-and-Hefty added with a knowing look at Mack, “it's
our
deer. Ever durn one of them deer out there belongs to the people of Texas, don't it?” He aimed a squirt of tobacco juice off to one side. “If one of them Frankenbucks goes rogue and hops over his fence onto our lease, we can take him. Ain't that right?” Frankenbuck was the term some people used to describe the genetically modified deer with massive antlers that were bred on the game ranches.

“The deer are a natural resource, yes.” Mack chose her words carefully. “They belong to the people of Texas.”

She was avoiding the man's specific question about the escaped buck, which was at the heart of a huge argument brewing in the state legislature. By Texas law, all wild animals belonged to the people of Texas. This did not make the deer breeders happy, since they had a massive capital investment in fences, buildings, and animals—especially in the animals. As far as they were concerned, the deer they bred and raised inside their high fences didn't belong to the state. They were private property, like cows or sheep. The breeders were pushing a slate of bills in the legislature that would essentially change the status of the animals on their game ranches from wildlife to privately owned livestock and move jurisdiction over deer ranching from Parks and Wildlife to the Texas Animal Health Commission. Mack hated this idea with a fierce passion, but she had the bad feeling that the breeders were going to prevail.

Her generic answer seemed to satisfy Short-and-Hefty. “Thought so,” he said with satisfaction. “Anyway, we'll be here through the weekend, stalking that buck, if you want to drop in again.” He gestured toward the fire. “Or maybe you'd pull up a rock and join us now. We got us a good pot of chili goin'—last year's venison, taken right over there across the creek.”

“Thanks for the offer,” Mack said, “but I've got a sandwich in the truck—if my dog hasn't helped herself to it.” She touched two fingers to the bill of her tan cap. “Y'all have a good one, guys. Hope you get what you came for.”

On her way back to her truck, she noted the GMC's license place and jotted it and a couple of other details about the encounter in her log. She checked in with Dispatch again, then got her lunch pack and hot chocolate out of the rear cab and ate the baloney and cheese sandwich, listening idly to the radio traffic and sharing the crusts with Molly but keeping the granola bar for herself. She poured a cup of chocolate from the thermos, then splashed some water into the plastic bowl she kept under the seat for Molly. When they were both finished, she let the dog out to do her business, watching her and calling her back quickly when she was finished. Molly was obedient, but a heeler who spotted a squirrel was a gone heeler, and she didn't want the dog disturbing the hunters in the camp below. Still hunters, in her view, deserved all the breaks they could get.

The rest of the day was uneventful, the stops at the camps routine. When she crossed Highway 83 and headed west toward Reagan Wells, she checked for messages on her cell phone and found one from Derek. Returning his call, she heard him say that the Panhandle weather looked bad for the weekend—an ice storm was predicted. He and his daughters had decided not to drive to Abilene to visit the girls' grandmother for Thanksgiving, as they had planned.

“We're having Thanksgiving at home instead,” he said, in that husky, intimate voice—a bedroom voice—that gave Mack a momentary shiver.

They'd made love twice, the first time the night of the gourmet dinner at Derek's place, the second time a week later, at her place. Neither time had been all that great, for her at least. It hadn't been Derek's fault, certainly. He was experienced and skillful and had all the right moves, from start to finish. But she'd been ambushed by her lack of . . . well, passion. She'd wound up putting on an act, which made her feel uncomfortable, even dishonest, especially since she'd never had to do that before. It definitely hadn't been that way with Lanny—she'd felt plenty of passionate desire, right up to the last time they'd made love, a couple of days before she found out about the other woman in her husband's life.

So what was the problem? She wasn't still carrying a torch for Lanny, was she? She didn't think so, but she supposed it might be possible, somewhere deep down in her subconscious. But it had been a long while since she'd made love. Maybe she was just out of practice, although you'd think it would go the other way. The longer the abstinence, the greater the desire.

“It would be great if you'd join us for dinner,” he went on. “I'm sure the girls would love it. Please say you will, Mackenzie.”
Mackenzie
. She liked it that he used her full name. He seemed to say it with a special, soft intonation.

Mack hesitated. “I'd like to,” she said, “but I've already promised to have dinner with Sam and Leatha Richards. We're eating at four.” Derek knew the Richardses through the local ranchers' association, to which nearly everybody belonged. “Leatha's daughter will be there, too, from Pecan Springs,” she added. She and China stayed in touch by email, but she hadn't seen her for months. She was looking forward to spending some time with her.

And just as importantly, she was pretty sure that Derek's daughters, Elise and Margaret, wouldn't be enthusiastic about her butting into their family Thanksgiving. The previous time they'd all been together, she'd gotten the idea that they viewed her as an interloper. She had been a girl herself once, and although that seemed like a distant country, she remembered her girlfriends expressing disdain and dislike through eye rolling, smirking, and shoulder shrugs. She'd seen Elise and Margaret sending several of those signals to each other—when they weren't engrossed in their smartphones, that is.

“Sam Richards?” Derek paused, his voice sober. “I heard at the general store this morning that he's in the hospital over in Kerrville. Heart attack.”

“Uh-oh,” Mack said softly, suddenly concerned. Sam reminded her of her father. “I wonder if—” She hesitated. “I'd better call Leatha and see if the dinner is still on.”

But Derek wasn't going to let her off the hook. “Even if it is, would it kill you to have two Thanksgiving meals?” He sounded amused, and she imagined one dark eyebrow quirking. “Tell you what. We'll move ours up a couple of hours and call it a Thanksgiving brunch. How's that?”

Mack considered. “Well, okay,” she said. “But remember I'm on call. Want me to bring anything?” Quickly she amended, “And I'm on patrol tomorrow night, so it'll have to be something I can pick up at the store, like a can of cranberry sauce or a box of instant rice. I won't have time to cook.” That had been another of Lanny's complaints during their marriage.

“Just bring yourself. The girls and I will do the rest.” He chuckled. “Well, more likely me. I can't seem to interest them in the fine art of cooking. They'd rather be on Facebook, or wherever it is that kids hang out these days.” He paused. “How about ten thirty?”

“Works for me,” she said. “See you then.”

He paused again and his voice seemed to change. “Where are you?”

“West of 83, north of Garner State Park,” she replied. “Why?”

“No reason,” he said lightly. But when he added, “I guess I just worry about you, out there on patrol all by yourself,” she heard the concern in his voice. “I mean, you might run into something unexpected. So I worry.”

“That's why I put in all those hours at the Academy,” she countered lightly. “Training for the unexpected. Don't worry, Derek.” She bit her lip, thinking of Lanny, who'd fretted when she was on night patrol.
Please, please don't worry, Derek,
she said silently.
You'll spoil it.

“If you say so,” Derek said, dragging it out. “I know you're trained and all that. And you've got a gun. But be careful.”

“Always am,” she replied briskly. “See you on Thursday.”

“Thursday, ten thirty,” he echoed. “Looking forward to it.”

But as it turned out, she would be seeing him sooner than that. And it wouldn't be Mack who couldn't handle an unexpected situation. It would be
Derek.

Carolina buckthorn (
Rhamnus caroliniana
, also
Frangula caroliniana
) is an attractive, drought-tolerant plant that deserves to be used more widely in landscapes in Zones 5–9. The foliage of this small, shrubby tree is a glossy green, turning in autumn to a bright yellow gold and a deeper bronze. The quarter-inch berries that appear in clusters ripen from pink to red to a dark blue purple—beautiful in a Thanksgiving display. The Delaware Indians of Oklahoma used a decoction of the bark as a treatment for jaundice and as an emetic or strong laxative. The fruits of most species of buckthorn contain a yellow dye, and the seeds are high in protein. In China, oils from buckthorn seeds have been used to make soap, printing ink, and lubricant. The leaves and bark are browsed by deer.

Yaupon holly (
Ilex vomitoria
), is the only native North American plant (Zones 7–9) that contains caffeine. It also contains antioxidants and theobromine, the plant chemical found in chocolate. Yaupon tea was brewed by the indigenous people of the Southeast as a stimulant beverage, medicine, and ritual drink. The dried leaves and twigs were roasted and boiled into a rich, dark tea known to European explorers and colonists as “black drink.” Medicinally, a stronger decoction was drunk as a laxative and purgative, while a weak tea made from the bark was used as an eyewash. During tribal ceremonies, high-status males drank a much stronger brew as an intoxicant and purgative. Yaupon is a popular landscape shrub, and its bright red berries are attractive to birds and wildlife. It has another important asset, too. Deer don't seem to like it.

China Bayles
“Native Plants for Wildlife Gardens”
Pecan Springs Enterprise

I had promised Leatha that Caitie and I would be at the ranch by midafternoon on Wednesday, but we got a late start. It was past one by the time we'd loaded Big Red Mama with plants for Jennie Seale's garden and set out on our way. When we reached Wildseed Farms on 290 outside of Fredericksburg, I stopped to check on a bulk order of wildflower seed for the shop. (If you've never been to Wildseed Farms, do put it on your bucket list. But plan your visit for April and early May—wildflower season in the Hill Country. Wildseed's fields are acres of scrumptious blooms, depending on the season: bluebonnets, gaillardia, poppies, cosmos, black-eyed Susans, monarda, and more. Much more.)

Back in the van, we headed down toward Uvalde County. The hills—the people who live here call them mountains—were draped with dense growths of dark green cedar, with softer traces of color folded into the canyons. In the road cuts, layers of sedimentary rocks, the relics of ancient seas, piled one on another high into the sky. And on the heights, we could look out over a rolling landscape, brightened by the afternoon sun, with playful puffs of white clouds chasing their own shadows across the distant view.

I'd been looking forward to the drive because it would give me some quiet, mom-and-kid time with Caitlin. Dark haired, pixielike, and small for her age, Caitie is still recovering from the twin tragedies of her mother's accidental drowning and her father's murder, at a time when most girls are playing with My Little Ponies. She isn't nearly as withdrawn as she was when she first joined our family, and her aptitude for the violin has given her a new and delightful confidence in herself. Last week, for her intermediate recital, she played Bohm's Sarabande in G Minor. I'm no
music aficionado, but I was moved to tears by what seemed to me to be an extraordinary performance. She didn't just get the notes right, she
felt
the music, and in feeling it herself, made her audience feel it, too. Even Sandra Trevor, her teacher, was impressed. And that takes some doing.

Caitie is a good passenger, but her cat, Mr. P, is not. Heaven only knows how many miles that scruffy old orange tomcat traveled to get to our house, where he showed up one evening, sore-pawed and starved, and purred his way into Caitie's compassionate heart. At the time, I tried to convince her that a cuddly kitten would be a more appropriate pet for a little girl, but no dice. “He's just like me when I first came to live here,” she'd said, defiantly clutching the crafty, battle-scarred reprobate in her arms. “He doesn't have any family. He needs somebody to adopt him. He needs
me
.”

And that was that. Mr. P (his full name is Mr. Pumpkin) yowled from his crate behind our seats for nearly an hour before he gave it up as a bad job and went sulkily to sleep. After that, I kept Caitie entertained by pointing out the sights along the way and—as we drove down into Uvalde County—telling her some of the history of the area. “Travel is educational” is my motto.

“All this land,” I said, pointing to the hills that thrust abruptly against the horizon to the west and south, “was once hunted by Indians—Comanche, Tonkawa, and Apache.”

“Really?” Caitie sat up straight and looked out the window as if she expected to see a hunting party picking its way through the shrubby cedars and shinnery oak, on the trail of a deer for dinner.

“Yes, really,” I said. “The Spanish got here first, in the 1600s, but the Indians chased them out. When Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821, more settlers began to move in, which seriously annoyed the
Indians and led to raids and killings and such. Meanwhile, a little farther that way”—I pointed to the east—“in San Antonio, the Mexican army under a general named Santa Anna was taking the garrison at—”

“I know!” Caitie exclaimed eagerly. “At the Alamo! The Texans lost and everybody was afraid of Santa Anna, because he gave no quarter. That means,” she added in an explanatory tone, “that he killed everybody, whether they were waving a white flag or not.”

“Bloodthirsty,” I remarked.

“Yes,” she said seriously. “Soldiers aren't supposed to do that. But Sam Houston had the Twin Sisters, so he beat Santa Anna at San Jacinto. That was in 1836. We learned about it in fourth grade,” she added, “but I still remember.”

“Good for you,” I said admiringly, slowing to pilot Mama around a pair of tractors mowing the roadsides. “But who are the Twin Sisters? I don't think I know about them.”

“They're two big cannons that were made in Ohio and shipped down the Mississippi to help the Texans,” Caitie replied. “But the Texas soldiers didn't have any cannonballs, so they loaded them with handfuls of musket balls and broken glass and horseshoes.”

“No kidding?” I said, widening my eyes. “Horseshoes? That's amazing!”

Caitie nodded. “But the thing is, nobody knows what happened to the Sisters. They totally disappeared. Poof.” She waved her hand to illustrate a cannon vanishing. “It's a mystery, where they went.”

“Sounds like.” I shifted down so Mama could climb the hill up ahead with greater confidence. “So what happened to Texas after Sam Houston beat Santa Anna?”

“Well, after that it was a republic, with a president and an army and everything, until people decided it should be a state. That was in 1845. It
was a slave state,” she added darkly. “Mostly, the slaves were in East Texas, where people grew a lot of cotton and some sugar, too. But some slaves worked on ranches. I guess they were cowboys.”

“Uh-oh,” I said. “Not good at all. What happened after Texas became a state?”

“I don't know,” she confessed. “We stopped there. My teacher said we'll do the rest in seventh grade.”

“Well,
I
know,” I said, “since I'm past seventh grade.” That got a giggle out of her, and I went on. “When the Civil War broke out, Texas seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy. But some Texans supported the North, and after the fighting was over and people came back home, there was a lot of fighting between the Confederates and Unionists. Down here in Uvalde County, violence was such an everyday event that the county tax assessor had to hire armed guards, and there were a couple of years when they couldn't find anybody brave enough to pin on the sheriff's star.”

“The Wild West,” Caitie put in. “Awesome.”

“Really wild,” I agreed. “Desperadoes, smugglers, horse thieves, cattle rustlers. They liked to hide out in places like that canyon over there.” I pointed to the steep-sided canyon we were passing, opening out into a meadow along the road. “They would wait until the stagecoach came along and rob the passengers. And there were cattle rustlers, too. They were after the maverick long-horned cattle that had been abandoned by the first Spanish settlers back in the 1600s. When they gave up and went back to Mexico, they left their cows behind.”

Now it was Caitie's turn to widen her eyes. “They just
left
them? Poor things! They had nobody to feed and water them.”

“Oh, but these cows were tough, Caitie. With those long horns, they
could defend themselves and their calves against the mountain lions, so they got along just fine all by themselves. And since the range was pretty much open, if you wanted a couple of hundred cows to sell, you and your cowboys would round them up and head out for New Orleans or Kansas City. If rustlers showed up to take them away from you . . . well, there'd be a shoot-out.”

“That's when there were cowboys and trail drives on the Chisholm Trail.” Caitie leaned forward. “I saw it on television. The cowboys would drive the Longhorns up to the railroad in Kansas City, where they'd be shipped east.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Although the people back east weren't real crazy about eating Longhorns. No matter how you cooked it, the meat was as tough as shoe leather, especially after the cow had walked all the way from Texas to Kansas City. And that's where Sam's ranch comes into the story. And Sam's great-grandfather, Ezekiel Richards. Want to hear it?”

“Sure,” Caitie said, settling back into her seat. “Sam is a really neat guy. But I've never heard about his great-grandfather before.”

“Here we go, then. In 1872, Ezekiel moved to Uvalde County from Dallas and started a ranch on the Sabinal River—the place that Sam and your grandmother call the Bittersweet Nature Sanctuary. But just about the time Ezekiel got started in ranching, something big happened that changed everything.”

“What?” Caitie was paying serious attention.

“Barbed wire.”

Caitie turned to stare at me. “Barbed wire? You mean, like in a fence?”

I nodded. “Barbed wire came to South Texas in 1875, when a guy named Bet-a-Million Gates convinced the San Antonio city council to let him build
a barbed-wire corral on the plaza in front of the Alamo. He drove some long-horned cows into the corral to demonstrate that barbed wire could contain animals as big and tough as the wild cattle. He bragged that the new fence was ‘light as air, stronger than whiskey, and cheap as dirt.'” I chuckled. “Old Bet-a-Million was pretty much right. And that was the end of the open range. The end of the wild Longhorns, too, as it turned out.”

Caitie frowned. “I guess I don't see—”

“Sam's great-grandfather bought enough of the new barbed wire to fence his entire ranch. Once he did that, he could put his own brand on the best of the Longhorns he rounded up and keep them
inside
the fence. Then he bought some cows from up north and added them to his herd, to improve it by selective breeding.”

“Oh, like breeding chickens!” Caitie exclaimed.

In her spare time—that is, when she's not playing her violin—my daughter is a chicken fancier. She started with three Rhode Island Red chicks and three white leghorn chicks who grew into six highly productive laying hens, blessing us with more eggs than a small family can eat. (At Caitie's insistence, we were bringing two dozen to share with her grandmother.) Then came Rooster Boy, a handsome red-feathered fellow with an iridescent ruff and a sweep of colorful tail. Rooster Boy's first seven offspring are just beginning to display their curiously mixed red and white heritage, and Caitie has had fun speculating which babies came from which moms. Chicken Breeding 101.

“Yes,” I said, pleased that she saw the analogy. “Like breeding chickens, except that the process takes a little longer. Ezekiel's northern cows had more meat and fat on their bones, and the fat made the beef taste better. Breeding them with the wild long-horned animals, he got cows that were
strong and adaptable and tasted better. And that was the beginning of the ranch.”

“Wow,” Caitie said with satisfaction. “That's a great story. Maybe Sam knows more.”

Sam. I bit my lip, and the apprehension that had been hovering at the back of my mind all during the drive suddenly flooded through me. His surgery, followed by “complications.” I wished I had pressed Leatha for more information. What was his prognosis? Was he going to be okay? If there was more trouble, how would Leatha handle it? Would she—

“I'll ask him,” Caitie said, unburdened by any of these worries. She knew that Sam was in the hospital, but she had no idea how serious it was. She began digging in her pink nylon backpack and pulled out a book. “I brought
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
It's a great story, too. Is it okay if I read for a while now?”