Read Online Claws by Ozzie Cheek - Free Book Online

.375 again. He handed Shane the keys to the Escalade. “You so much as scratch it, and you’ll wish you were staring down a tiger instead of me.”
    Shane looked so eager to leave that Jackson doubted if coming on the hunt was his idea at all.
    They started at the hog pens and crossed a long and wide potato field before climbing to a thicket of Big Tooth and Mountain maple. A smattering of leaves already were turning red and yellow. They followed the blood trail through the maples and beyond them, always going higher. Thirty minutes later Dell held up his hand to halt them. They had reached a patch of snowberry and juniper. Dell pointed some sixty yards ahead to a grove of blue spruce. He motioned for them to go forward slowly.
    Once they were hidden in the evergreens, Dell dialed in his scope for distance. During the walk he had told them all about the superior merits of his variable power scope over the usual 4X scope found on most rifles. While Skip and John sighted their inferior scopes, Jackson watched the thickly wooded area. Before long, he spotted four northern gray wolves, three adults and one adolescent, loping along.

    “It’s just wolves,” Jackson said softly.
    “You’re wrong,” Dell whispered. “See those young blue spruce about seventy-five yards up and to the right?” A second later, he said, “The tiger’s laying flat behind one. I can just make out the head.” Before anyone else could locate the tiger, if there was one, Dell’s gun roared. Jackson hadn’t put in his earplugs yet, and his ears rang.
    Dell said something to Jackson and started forward. Jackson motioned for his two officers to follow. The four of them fanned out as they approached the small trees, although not so far as to create a potential crossfire situation.
    Dell reached the area first. “Hell of a head shot,” he said, looking down at the cat. The top of tiger’s head was missing. His tongue stuck out and lay in the dirt. There were rips and bite marks in the dirty, loose skin. The tiger’s belly had been torn open by something other than gunshot.
    Jackson didn’t see how anyone could think this tiger was longer than a car or how it could nearly bring down a horse or manage to kill the best man he had ever known.
    John knelt. “This cat’s been dead a while.” He touched its belly. “Wolves were already feeding on it.”
    While the water warmed in the shower, Katy selected an outfit for dinner, undressed, and stood naked before themirror: she was thirty-five, average height, her body firm from trekking and ranch work, mostly firm anyway, her fair skin prone to freckles, her eyes hazel, and her dark blond hair longer than she wore it when on safari. Many thought her beautiful. She scanned her face and her body. In most species it’s the male that primps, she knew. She also knew that apart from looks, humans are like all other animals. All creatures are driven to survive and procreate. Africa taught her that.
    Katy had spent the past hour on the Internet, but her search had yielded little information about Safari Land. She found nothing about a big cat attacking anyone in Idaho today or yesterday or on any other day. Still, the man in the golf jacket bothered her. She wondered why. Or maybe it was not the smug man from the reading that bothered her at all. Maybe it was Stan flirting with her.
    Maybe Stan reminded her of how much she missed Jacques, the French photographer who had been her lover until a year ago, when Jacques had asked her to move in with him. As tempting as the offer was, for Paris was her favorite city, and she truly did care for Jacques, she knew that she would wither away if she gave up her life in Africa. Survival always trumps sex. Africa also had taught her that.

Eight
    After stopping at Safari Land again and finding the entrance still padlocked and the phone unanswered, Jackson returned to Buckhorn. By the time he arrived, a crowd had gathered downtown to look at the dead tiger in the bed of