Panther Gap by James A. McLaughlin

Author:James A. McLaughlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

31

The Jeep came up the switchbacks too fast, sideslipping on the turns, fishtailing in between, raising an obvious cloud of dust. Border Patrol was going to notice, might send someone. They would back off when they saw it was her, but still.

Rice Moore set down his binoculars and keyed the microphone on his radio.

“Slow down.”

No response. No slowing down.

He crawled backward from the edge of the outcrop into the shelter of a mesquite thicket. Once he was hidden, he stood and turned and jogged down a steep slope to their campsite.

Apryl had left earlier after a sat text from Jorge telling her to call him ASAP. The closest cell signal was in Douglas, an hour away over shitty roads. After she’d left, he’d finished swapping data cards in their line of trail cameras along a tributary to the Guadalupe, where he’d surprised a group of five migrants under a paloverde, three women and two teenage boys too terrified to run. Abandoned by their coyote. He calmed them down, let them drain his water bottle, handed over his protein bars. When he asked them to hand him the wrappers, not leave them on the ground, they didn’t understand. The desperation. White dude worried about litter. But Christ, this was a special place.

He and Apryl always offered water, food. Cleaned up the trash they left. Kept a box of thirty-gallon trash bags in the Jeep for the purpose. Apryl chanting, Fuck this fuck this fuck this I’m not judging but fuck this.

Not that migrants’ litter was the real threat. Not by a long shot. The rugged southern foot of the Peloncillos was a fragile ecological hodgepodge, part of a tenuous bridge between the Sierra Madre Occidental and the Rocky Mountains, where the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts met, where the southernmost reach of many North American species overlapped with the extreme northern range of species found in Mexico and Central America. It had always been too remote and rugged for the feds to bother with, but recently the Department of Homeland Security had started making noises about building a wall here. Rice and Apryl specialized—for several reasons—in biological research along the border, and last year the owners of this property had hired them to build a credible database of species dependent on the ability to move back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico.

They wouldn’t log the new images until they got back to Tucson in a few days, a kind of zoological treasure hunt that had become more consequential ever since they’d photographed a jaguar here in March, not a dispersing male but a female of breeding age. The landowners had decided to keep it quiet for now, didn’t want the attention a confirmed female jaguar would bring, at least not yet. They wanted more pictures, a pattern of residency. They wanted cubs. Rice wondered how that would play in the fight over the fucking wall: jaguar cubs versus Homeland paranoia.

At their tent, he dropped his backpack and waited, listening to the Jeep’s engine rev and back off: frantic frustrated roars and impatient downshifted whines.

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