Read Online Wild Penance by Sandi Ault - Free Book Online

We had shared a handful of wildlife rescues—either injured animals or orphaned young. Our most daring endeavor was when we managed to trap a bear who had been shot in the leg and transport it in a cage in the back of a pickup truck to the wildlife rehabilitation center in Española. This was a clandestine endeavor, as the director of Game and Fish had declared the bear unsalvageable and ordered it shot. I was the one who persuaded Bennie to risk losing her job to help save the animal. Bennie now served at the wildlife center on the board of directors as well as working nearly full-time as a volunteer. Running the Golden Gecko was an investment for her, but her heart still belonged to wildlife.
    “You’ll only need to rehearse once, just a quick run-through on Saturday morning,” she said, knowing she had called in a debt I would have to pay.
    I gave a little grunt of surrender. “I can’t believe you’re asking me to prance around in a nightie in front of a crowd.”
    She winked. “I couldn’t believe it when you asked me to haul a bear down the highway from north of Taos all the way to Española in a pickup truck. That’s a hard thing to do without attracting attention, you know.”

9
    Agua Azuela
    My next stop was Agua Azuela, a scattering of old adobes tucked into a crevice carved between two mountains by a bubbling stream, which the Hispanic residents referred to as the río . In the village center, an ancient-looking church, poor and sad, struggled out of the lower slope of the mountain. Farther up in the hills, newer homes built by Anglos perched on lofty precipices with panoramic views. Their owners did not have to concern themselves with protection from Comanche and Apache raiders, as the original inhabitants of Agua Azuela did. The early settlers here needed to be within quick running distance of the well-fortified churchyard wall in case of attack, and so this was the sole basis for the original design of the community. There were no streets other than the one-lane dirt road that ran through the narrow canyon right up to the church. Rutted dirt drives fed off the main road back into the folds of terrain where the houses nestled. An old wooden bridge spanning the rio rumbled whenever one of the residents drove over it. An abundance of large gray-white cottonwoods and red willows lined the blue-green water for which Agua Azuela was named.
    I aimed my Jeep toward the home of a friend of mine. Regan Daniels lived right on the rio in a beautiful adobe with a wall of south-facing windows. I left my Jeep at the bottom of her drive and walked up the hill to a corral-style gate. Her silver Toyota was in the open-front garage there. Neatly stacked cords of firewood stretched from the corral to the house, and an old nag stood catatonic in a patch of brush beyond a fence. I walked up a path to the kitchen entrance, grabbed the leather loop on the bottom of the old iron bell that hung beside the door, and gave it a hard shake. The sharp clanging pierced the quiet day. I shuffled my feet, looked in through the sidelight at the elegant terra-cotta tile on Regan’s cocina floor, the intricate carving on her handmade cabinets. No answer. I walked around the house and looked farther up the path toward the barn. Its doors were closed. Still higher up, beyond the barn, at the casita Regan rented to bed-and-breakfast guests, I saw a mud-covered green Land Rover with California plates. I knocked loudly on the French doors at the back of Regan’s house. No answer still. I could see the cool, dark living room within. No one in sight.
    Knowing Regan was a little hard of hearing, I wanted to open a door and call to her, but somehow I knew that would not be well received. I sensed that she hoped no one would notice this infirmity. In her youth, Regan had been a dancer and even performed her way around the world doing USO tours. She had done a smattering of bit parts on television and ended up a long career as a dancer in summer