Read Online The Ridge by Michael Koryta - Free Book Online Page A

but there were no polar bears in the lower forty-eight. Lions would stalk, though. He’d seen it done, and heard tell of many other occasions. They were faster, more agile, more deadly, and far smarter than any other creature, and for those reasons a lion hunt had nothing to do with food or money and everything to do with the thrill of battle.
    Those hunts outlasted almost all of Wesley’s childhood memories. The frigid air, the deep snow, the howling sounds the wind made as it worked through the mountains. An expanse of wilderness completely empty except for Wesley and his dad and the three Plott hounds. They’d find a track, measure it, estimate the size of the cat, and then they’d be off, off through some of the most unforgiving terrain in the area, because the cat’s first instinct when dogs were at its heels was not, contrary to popular belief, to tree. Cats were too smart for that. So first they’d run, and they would run toward territory that favored them. A mountain lion could cover twenty miles or more in a day.
    Some of the locals had calling stands, and they’d sit up in the trees and call for the big cats, and sometimes it worked. Bill Harrington had no patience for such approaches. Lion hunts were supposed to be
chases.
    When Wesley was fifteen, he and his father had the greatest hunt of both their lives, scrambling through crusted snow and treacherous canyons, the hounds hoarse-voiced and with torn, bloody pads on their feet. They watched the lion—a massive cat, a true trophy—swim a frigid river to escape them and then, just as twilight was settling, they treed it on a rocky ledge. Bill Harrington gave his son a chance.
    That was the first and last cat Wesley ever shot.
    It was while they were preparing the body for transport back home that they found the cubs. The lion had led them on a merry chase away from the den at first—a wise instinct, carrying the threat away from those she loved—but in the end she’d decided to go back, maybe hoping to take refuge, maybe thinking she needed to stand and fight, but more likely confident that she’d lost the dogs in the river.
    She hadn’t.
    There were two cubs in the den, and Bill Harrington told Wesley that they would not survive on their own and should be put down fast and painlessly. Wesley, feeling tremendous shame, had refused, and Bill had relented. They took the cubs back down and called the state to come get them. That same night a screaming blizzard blew in, and it was four days before someone with the state arrived to inspect the cubs. By then one had died in Wesley’s arms; the other was alive. He’d bottle-fed it, slept with it, never left it. Those four days shaped a life.
    He never hunted cats again. He tracked them, but with only a camera in his hands. After high school he worked with a group in California that studied the cougar populations. From that he met a woman who was headed to Africa to work with lions. He spent two years there. Then it was South America for jaguars, then back to the States to work for the USDA as an investigator on cases where tigers were being raised and slaughtered for their pelts, then on to one private preserve, then to another and another.
    He’d spent far more time around cougars, lions, tigers, cheetahs, and ocelots than he had around people. The only people he knew well, in fact, were cat people. Big cats were his world, his life. He knew them well.
    And he knew this: the cats at Audrey Clark’s rescue preserve did not like their new grounds.
    Wesley lived at the preserve. He’d joined them years earlier, when David was getting it started, and he’d expected it would bea temporary gig. But they were wonderful people, the Clarks, and their mission—providing rescue, then homes and safety and pleasure, for abused exotic cats—was one he believed in deeply. So Wes had stayed, living on the grounds in a well-equipped trailer and surrounded by cats that he loved as family, happy both because he knew he