Shadow of the Jaguar by Steven Savile

Author:Steven Savile [Savile, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781848568969
Publisher: Titan
Published: 2010-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

The ‘something’ was a single plaster cast of a print taken from the region where Nando had last noticed the peculiar silence.

It was no bigger than the bottom of the whisky tumbler Nando handed him, but it was far more potent a thing. Cutter took it and ran his fingers over the contours of the cast, lovingly feeling out the raised areas which corresponded with the pads of the Thylacosmilus’ paw. A slow smile stole across his face. He looked up at Nando, who hovered over him.

“Talk me through it.”

“It was out on an area we call Kon Ridge, after the god of the wind and rain because it is so exposed; the elements are all heightened there. The wind bellows and the rain lashes down. It is not an area for moderation in weather, or in anything. We were tracking the area, looking for anything out of the ordinary, like you asked, when Xavier, one of the more experienced rangers, found a carcass in the undergrowth. It wasn’t the animal that interested us; it was the tracks that circled its body. As you can see by looking at the cast we made, it isn’t a jaguar, though it appears to be some species of big cat.”

Cutter peered at his old student trying to superimpose the boy he had been ten years ago over the face of the man he had become. It was difficult, but it wasn’t impossible. That was one of the things about being a teacher, especially fitting when it came to dealing with the past; the brain had a way of fixing the lives of those you came into contact with into a single space and time, and didn’t allow for the notion of ageing. In his head Cutter still saw the nineteen year-old Fernando Estevez, not the man nearing the end of his third decade. Salt-and-pepper grey had crept into his temples and his stubble, and there was a darkness around his eyes that hadn’t been there before, but it was easy to see how the boy had become the man.

The work area in which they stood was compact, and segregated by mosquito nets from the steel-tube framed bunks in which the rangers slept. The nets hung like curtains around the individual carrels. There were six bunks, but only three desks, which made sense as most of the day the rangers would be out patrolling the territories, not cooped up behind a desk marking inventory or recording their observations on the migratory habits of the animals under their supervision.

The lazy ceiling fans revolved like something out of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, while a beetle scuttled across the hardwood floor. There was a mobile air-conditioning unit cranked up to full power, pumping out its BTUs, and a small portable radio beside a pile of mouldering paperbacks. Beneath the window there was a long distance radio-set and a solitary computer. The machine must have been ten years old and working on an obsolete operating system, yet

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