Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (best summer reads of all time txt) 📕

an automobile, a pickup truck, or a sport-utility vehicle. It is a way of life unprecedented in history, and one so freshly arrived in these hills that some of its attractiveness may be residual from the activities of previous occupants—such as the vigilant extermination of predators carried out by cattlemen and by government predator-control hunters in their stead.

***

On the morning of April 24, the second day of the search, four young men, long-distance runners and acquaintances of Barbara Schoener, went out to look for her. At about 7:15 A.M. they found her water bottle along Ball Bearing Trail. Nearby they saw signs of a struggle in the steep duff below the trail. They followed these marks just far enough to see Barbara Schoener's feet sticking out of a pile of sticks and forest litter farther into the draw. They ran back to the trailhead and reported that they had found her, dead.

I made arrangements with one of the sheriff-coroner's deputies to meet for a death scene investigation later in the day, upon the arrival of a forensics specialist from the Department of Justice. It was either a wildlife killing or a homicide, he said. Hard to say right now.

Around four in the afternoon I drove through Auburn Lake Trails to the edge of the canyon. There I met the sheriff's deputies and the forensic technician, a cheerful woman named Faye wearing a blue jumpsuit. Hands were shaken, introductions made, and outcomes of other recent investigations asked about as we loaded cameras, equipment, and body bag into backpacks.

We started up the trail at the opposite end from where Barbara Schoener had entered. We were at most about half a mile from the nearest house, a conventional tract home with a two-car garage on a neat asphalt cul-de-sac, sitting in the middle of the grass and trees as if it had dropped from the sky. The switchbacks we walked up in the first one hundred feet of the trail were brand-new work. Being killed by an animal on this trail would have been unlikely thirty years before. The trail hadn't existed then, and neither had the road to the trailhead, nor the house.

We came to a place where the path traversed a hillside, falling off steeply to the left in the shade of oaks and firs. Some horses with orange search and rescue equipment hanging from their saddles stood in the trail, tied up to trees. Just beyond them, we ducked under a barrier of police crime-scene ribbon. Three sheriff's search and rescue volunteers were setting up fixed ropes down the steep hillside to assist us in getting the body out. They spoke to one another in low, funereal tones. I nodded a greeting to each of them as we passed, and they nodded back grimly.

About three hundred feet farther, the trail curved out from under the trees onto a rocky ridge surrounded by manzanita bushes that provided cover close to the path for anything that would have wanted it. One of the sheriff-coroner's deputies pointed outa divot of moss loosened from the bank uphill of the trail.

As we reconstructed it, the cougar had been sitting in the brush, maybe hungry, lying in wait for the next animal to come along the path. That happened to be a runner, a woman. The animal sprang down the bank, leaving the divot as it launched. It hit Barbara Schoener from above and behind. She staggered into the soft duff downhill of the trail, where her feet left two unmistakably deep impressions; she was heavy with the weight of both of them, struggling to remain standing. She went down against a fallen fir sapling that lay across the slope below the trail. There had been a struggle: branches were broken off the dead tree, and a dark stain on the soil smelled a way you don't forget. She stood up again and staggered downhill over the tree. There were a couple of more footprints in the duff. Just below and to the left of these, at the base of a Douglas fir sapling, I found one of Barbara Schoener's cotton gloves soaked red with blood and a Red Delicious apple with her dainty bites around its circumference.

From where these things lay, scuff marks led down to the bottom of the steeper part of the slope below the trail, maybe one hundred feet. There the dragging started, leaving a furrow in the ferns just as wide as a small woman's body, which continued another one hundred feet to where we found her.

Once, years before, as a boy hiking alone in the forests near my home, I had stumbled on a mountain lion kill, a deer, dragged into a cool canyon and covered with sticks so the cat could come back later to eat more. Nothing was scattered around; there was a kind of fastidiousness to it. I recognized it immediately when I saw Barbara Schoener.

***

The legislative history of cougars in California reflects the change in attitudes toward predators with the growth of an environmental ethic in the 1960s and 1970s, and the changing demographics of the state's electorate from rural-agricultural to primarily urban-suburban. Increased protection for mountain lions would probably not have occurred had the legislature continued to reflect the wishes of any sizable constituency who had their next mortgage payment tied up in a flock of stupid and defenseless sheep standing around at night in a remote mountain meadow.

Up until 1963, if you saw a lion, you could shoot it and collect the bounty from the state government: $50 for a female and $60 for a male. This reward was sometimes enhanced by counties.

There may have been only two thousand lions left in the state by midcentury. After 1963 the bounty was removed and the cougar was classified as a nongame mammal. In 1969 California reclassified the mountain lion as a game mammal, and for two years permits were issued to hunt it for sport. In 1972, as younger wildlife managers brought an appreciation for