“I’ll probably need a new truck,” he mused, ever hopeful.
“Maybe so. Come on, now. Shut down the mine and clean up. Nana made cornbread for us.”
“Papá is home!” Francisco bellowed from the living room, and Bach’s Invention sped up to light speed, finishing with a resounding crash. For the next half hour, Estelle let the natural momentum of the meal draw them together. Dr. Guzman didn’t allow the conversation to center on Butch Romero’s misfortune, and Francisco’s initial apprehension about what his father was going to say about the rattlesnake episode relaxed.
They talked about Irma’s impending marriage and studies, but no one dwelled on what losing their nana would mean to the household. At one point, Estelle happened to glance across at her husband. Francis raised an eyebrow as if to say, “and now what? ” But he didn’t pursue the question.
“Did you see the paper?” he asked instead. He cut another square of cornbread and balanced it on the edge of his salad plate. He leaned back in his chair, scooped the mail and the newspaper off the counter, and shuffled through them quickly, seeing the note from Padrino, Bill Gastner. He tossed the rest of the mail back on the counter and folded the newspaper neatly, presenting one of the inside pages to Estelle.
The article included a photo showing Nate Underwood, a biology teacher at the high school, as he bent over an animal’s skull, probe in hand. It was a surprisingly good picture, taken from table level so that the skull appeared large and impressive, with the teacher looming in the background. Frank Dayan, publisher and sometimes roving reporter for the Posadas Register, had triumphed this time in his struggles with the digital camera.
From the left, a student leaned over the skull as well, pointing a pencil at one heavy, blunt canine tooth.
“I heard about that,” little Francisco said. He leaned over Estelle’s elbow to look at the picture. “Freddy found that.”
Skull of Rare Jaguar Found, the headline trumpeted. Estelle scanned the brief article. A Sunday afternoon jaunt south of Borracho Springs ended with discovery of a jaguar skeleton by a local student. Intrepid explorer Frederico Romero, 18, said that the skeleton was found in the San Cristóbal mountains, in a small cave deep in Salazar Canyon within a few hundred yards of the crest.
The rest of the article didn’t add many details of the discovery’s circumstances. Salazar Canyon was carved out of the north flank of the San Cristóbals, one of the few mountain ranges on the continent that ran east-west. Hunters like Sheriff Bobby Torrez would know the mountain range and its various canyons intimately.
“I’d like to see that skull,” her husband said. “Did Padrino have something to do with all this? I saw the note from him.”
“Curiosity, at the least,” Estelle replied. “Anything unusual, there he is, especially if it has something to do with local history. I’m guessing that curiosity has Padrino deep in his library, exploring. Irma tried to get him over for dinner, but he refused. I didn’t think that there has been a jaguar sighting in this part of the country in generations.”
“That’s what the teacher said,” Francis added, nodding at the newspaper.
She looked at the article again. “At first, I thought it was a mountain lion skull,” Romero reported. The high school senior added that, “But then I found a little patch of fur that was still attached to one of the hip bones.” Biology teacher Nate Underwood agreed with his student’s assessment.
“The skull is much too heavy and broad to be a mountain lion,” Underwood said. “The jaguar is an altogether different genus-a much bigger, heavier, more powerful cat.” Underwood said that although now considered to be an endangered species throughout Mexico and Central America, the jaguar’s original range included portions of the Southwestern United States, particularly areas near plentiful water.
“This animal might have died of old age,” Underwood said. “The teeth are blunt and show lots of wear. One of the canines is broken off near the jaw-line as well. This big cat wasn’t much of a hunter any more. That’s one theory. There’s some damage to the skull, too. It’s hard to say what happened to him.”
“Curioso, ¿no? ” Estelle said, handing the paper to Francisco. “What was old gato doing this far north. You should walk over to the high school to see it tomorrow.” Even as she said it, she remembered that the gulf of the parking lot between the elementary wing and the high school might as well have been the San Christóbals for younger students. They weren’t allowed to wander about by themselves. “Maybe your teacher can take you over.”
“How did he get way up there on the mountain?” the boy asked.
“Somebody chased him,” Carlos offered.
“Or he might have just been tired, sick, old…that’s as far as he was able to go before he found a comfortable place to call it quits,” the boys’ father said. “Nice view from up there. Lay on a nice warm rock and wait it out.” He frowned judiciously at a piece of cornbread. “It’s too bad that Freddy’s younger brother didn’t go exploring with him. It would have been more productive than chasing snakes.”
Estelle saw little Francisco duck his head as if he’d been slapped. “I wonder what trail Padrino is following with all this,” she said. “Maybe he remembers someone talking about jaguars years ago.”
“They would have been rare then, too.”
“Do they eat people?” Carlos asked.
“Not this one anymore, hijo, ” Estelle said. “With teeth like that, he’d be lucky if he could catch a sick calf. Maybe that’s what Padrino is thinking about. Maybe somebody down that way has complained about losing cattle.”
“If they lost cattle, it wasn’t because of this old guy,” her husband laughed. “And that skeleton could have been lying in that cave for ten years…or more. Enough time for all the bugs and mice to pick it clean. If all of the skeleton is there, they should bring it out and get it mounted. That would make a rare display.”
“Freddy might have been thinking along those lines,” Estelle said. “I hope that Mr. Underwood told him that he can’t just possess the carcass or skull of protected animals without permission from the Fish and Wildlife Service. Even the school would need permission.”
Her eldest son wrinkled up his face. “Not even an old skull? That’s silly.”
“Well, it’s like possessing eagle feathers,” Estelle said. “They don’t want those things on the open market. You start allowing that, and pretty soon you’d have a flood of things showing up at garage sales.”
“I think that you could sell a jaguar skeleton in old Mexico for a good deal,” Irma said. “If there’s such a thing as a sacred cat, the jaguar is it.”
Estelle nodded. “It’s likely that the school will be able to cut a deal with the feds to keep it as part of their academic collection.”
“If Freddy gives it to them,” Francis amended. “Of course, now that he’s gone public with it, what choice does he have?”
Chapter Four
The next morning, the last thing on Estelle Reyes-Guzman’s mind was the old bones of a dead cat. The younger Romero brother who’d managed to peg himself in the eye with a charged rattlesnake fang was her immediate worry, since despite the rapid EMT response and the most advanced treatment, Butch Romero’s case was proving a challenge. The optic nerve provided a short, direct, wide-open pathway to the brain. Whether the venom was delivered by an angry rattlesnake’s strike or by the fragments flung by the plastic strings of the trimmer, the end result had been the same.