The Caldera

  She stooped and gathered up the arrows, fletching equipment and glue pot and elbowed the door open. The man spoke just as she was about to step inside and close the door behind her.

  “There’s a monster. It’s taking our sheep.”

  2

  SHE TURNED BACK. THE ELDERLY COUPLE HAD MOVED A LITTLE closer and were standing a few meters from the porch, looking totally forlorn. The man had removed his hat and was twisting it anxiously in his hands.

  “How many have you lost?” Maddie asked.

  “Two. Two ewes carried off and a lamb injured.”

  Maddie made a small moue of surprise. Two ewes was a serious loss for a small farm—and she assumed their Spiny Mountain property was a small one. She set her equipment down on a small table just inside the door and held it open, beckoning to the couple.

  “Perhaps you’d better come in,” she said.

  The couple trooped in after her, peering curiously around the interior of the neat little cabin. They stood uncertainly just inside the door until she gestured to the kitchen table and four upright chairs around it. There were only two easy chairs in the cabin, arranged either side of the fireplace.

  “Sit down and tell me about it,” she said. The pair sat, still looking ill at ease at being in a Ranger’s inner sanctum—although anything less confronting than the comfortable little cabin, Maddie couldn’t imagine. She offered them coffee, which they refused—somewhat suspiciously—and she realized they had probably never drunk coffee in their lives.

  “Maybe we should introduce ourselves,” she said. “My name is Maddie.”

  The farmer bobbed his head, looking as if he was about to rise from his seat, then thinking better of it.

  “I’m Hector,” he said. “Hec Farrows. And this is my wife, Gert.”

  Maddie smiled at Gert as the older woman nodded. “Now, tell me about this monster that’s taken your sheep.”

  “Carried them off, it did,” said Gert. “Must be a bear, maybe.”

  “It’s not a bear,” her husband said doggedly. “It’s some kind of cat.”

  Maddie frowned. “It’d take a big cat to carry off a full-grown sheep.”

  “Oh, this one is big enough,” Hector averred.

  Maddie looked keenly at him. “You’ve seen it then?” she asked.

  He hesitated. “Just a quick look when it tried to take the lamb. I scared it off.”

  Maddie rubbed her chin thoughtfully. She had a sudden sense of déjà vu. When she was first apprenticed to Will, she had helped a couple whose chickens were being killed. But that had turned out to be a marten, not something big enough to carry off a full-grown sheep.

  “Did you see it?” she asked the woman, who shook her head.

  “Didn’t see it. But it’ll be a bear sure enough.”

  “Wasn’t no bear,” Hector insisted angrily. Maddie had the feeling that they’d had this conversation several times already on their way to Castle Redmont. “I’ve seen bears. This wasn’t one,” Hector continued. “Didn’t walk upright. Wasn’t as heavy in the body as a bear. It moved like a cat.”

  Gert sniffed disdainfully.

  “How big was it?” Maddie asked.

  Hector looked thoughtful, then answered. “Big,” he said. “Not as big as a bear, but almost. Bigger than a wolf.”

  Maddie screwed up her lips. That didn’t help much.

  “Did you see its tracks?” she asked, and they both shook their heads.

  “Don’t know nothing about tracks,” Hec said.

  “Did it leave any marks on the lamb?” Maddie asked. She assumed that since the sheep had been carried off, the pair wouldn’t know anything about their injuries.

  “Claw marks down its right flank,” Hector told her. He held up four fingers, spread apart. “Like that.”

  “Like a bear,” Gert said. Hec glared at her.

  “Could it have been a wolf?” Maddie asked. It seemed the most likely answer, although it would need to be a very big wolf if it had carried off two fully grown ewes.

  Hec shook his head. “Weren’t no wolf. As I said, it was a big cat. Bigger than any I’ve ever seen.”

  Maddie sat back. “So what do you want me to do about it?” she asked. They looked at her, assessing her.

  “We want the Ranger,” said Gert.

  “We want him to kill it,” her husband continued. “We can’t afford to keep losing sheep like that. Only got five left.”

  “Can you afford to wait another two weeks?” Maddie asked, knowing the answer.

  Hec looked at his wife, and they both answered at once. “No.”

  “Then you might have to be satisfied with me,” she said. “Why don’t you go back home and I’ll ask around about big cats in the Spiny Mountains. Then I’ll ride out and see what I can do for you.”

  Hector cleared his throat, reluctant to agree but seeing no alternative.

  “Well, all right. But I’m not sure what you can do,” he said.

  “Being a girl and all,” Gert added.

  Maddie gave them a thin smile. “I might surprise you,” she said.

  • • • • •

  “They say there used to be big cats in the Spiny Mountains,” George said, “hundreds of years ago.”

  He reached up onto a high shelf in the library, ran his fingers across several old volumes and then brought down a battered, leather-bound book. He set it on his table and began to leaf through the pages.

  “How big would they have been?” Maddie asked.

  He pouted thoughtfully. “Certainly big enough to take a sheep.” He smiled up at her. “Not as big as the desert lions Will said he ran into in Arrida, but quite big.”

  George had trained as a scribe when Will was apprenticed to the Ranger Halt. Over the years he had served as an attorney, an advocate and a linguist, and in the last five years he had gravitated to the position of head librarian and historian at Castle Redmont. It was a job well suited to his studious nature.

  “Aah . . . here we are,” he said, finding the page he was looking for and spreading it out for her to see. It showed a sketch of a large catlike creature, with long fangs bared in a snarl, and sharp claws in all four feet.

  She read the name under the sketch. “It’s called a cuga or cougar.”

  George nodded. “Of course, it may all be a myth,” he said. “But if these things did exist, it’s possible there might be one or two survivors in the Spinies. It’s a wild area, pretty much uninhabited.”

  “I wonder why it’s suddenly come down into the farmlands there,” Maddie said.

  George regarded her with an avuncular smile. “That’s if it really has,” he said. “Remember, nobody’s seen a”—he checked the page again—“cougar for hundreds of years. We’re not even sure if they really existed.”

  “Maybe it’s injured and can’t hunt its normal prey,” Maddie mused. “That’s often the reason why wild predators start preying on domestic animals.”

  “That’s a possibility, of course,” George admitted. “So what do you plan on doing about it?”

  “I might ride out to the farm and see what I can find out,” she said.

  George raised a warning finger. “You be careful, young Maddie. It may or may not be a cougar, but whatever it is, it sounds dangerous. Are you sure you can handle it?” Rangers and their apprentices, he thought. They were all the same, always ready to go dashing off, putting themselves in danger.

  She nodded confidently. “I can handle it,” she said.

  3

  MADDIE RODE INTO THE CLEARING WHERE THE SMALL FARMHOUSE stood, overshadowed by the Spiny Mountain range looming in the distance.

  The farmhouse was a whitewashed wattle-and-daub construction with a thatched roof. A small barn stood five meters away, its sides unpainted gray timber slabs. The roof was made of shingles that had been w
arped by the weather and would clearly leak in any sort of rain. In winter, she assumed, the livestock would be kept in the barn. Three sheep and two lambs wandered nervously around the paddock closest to the house. A milk cow stood placidly by the far fence.

  Hector and Gert were busy repairing a fence that surrounded the home paddock. Though, Maddie realized as she looked more closely, they weren’t actually repairing it. They were reinforcing it, adding a barrier of spiny thornbushes to the top rail and lashing it in place.

  “Good afternoon!” Maddie called.

  The elderly couple hadn’t noticed her arrival. Now they looked up and reacted in surprise. Dressed in a gray-and-green Ranger cloak, mounted on what was obviously a Ranger’s horse and with a large bow slung across her shoulders, she looked considerably more impressive than she had on their first encounter.

  Gert squinted at the mounted figure. “Who is it?” she called.

  Hec nudged her with his elbow. “It’s the girl from Redmont Castle,” he said. “The apprentice.”

  Maddie noticed that he didn’t use the word Ranger in his description. Apparently, that was a still a matter of debate.

  “Doesn’t look like her,” Gert said. “She looks like a Ran—” She too stopped short of using the word.

  Maddie shifted in her saddle. She had been riding for some hours.

  “I said, good afternoon,” she repeated, with an edge to her voice. The farm couple remembered their manners, such as they were.

  “Eh? Oh, yes. Good afternoon,” Hec said.

  “Better step down,” Gert added, without a great deal of warmth.

  Maddie raised an eyebrow and swung down from the saddle. The movement caused her a twinge of pain in the hip, and she wondered if she’d ever be rid of the reminder of that old wound.

  She led Bumper toward the farmhouse, where there was a spindly hitching rail. Fortunately, Bumper didn’t need to be tied, as the rail didn’t look strong enough to prevent an elderly vole from escaping. She dropped the rein on the ground and Bumper made himself comfortable, resting his weight on one side and leaning around to snap his teeth at a persistent fly.

  Hec finished tying a last bundle of thornbush in place, then stepped back and took off his heavy canvas gauntlets. He and Gert moved to meet Maddie by the door to the farmhouse.

  “Better come inside,” he said gruffly. Maddie let him hold the door open for her—noting that it dragged on the ground when he did—and entered.

  The interior was one room, with a curtained-off section for sleeping quarters at one end. The rest of the space was a combined living room/kitchen, with a crude wooden table and benches to one side and a pair of homemade canvas-and-timber easy chairs by the open fireplace that took up the end wall.

  A bread oven was built into the surrounds of the fireplace and a swiveling iron arm held a large black cookpot, which could be moved in and away from the flames of the fire as required. A rack held an assortment of wooden platters, bowls and cups sitting in pairs. The floor was hard beaten earth, with rushes laid over it for warmth and dryness.

  The farmhouse was clean enough, but it was small and very poorly ventilated. The air was stuffy and smoky, and there was an overlaying odor that either came from Hector’s socks or from Gert’s attempts at cheese making. Maddie wrinkled her nose. She wouldn’t be sleeping here, she decided.

  “What are you doing here?” Gert asked.

  Maddie smiled at her, although the blunt tone made her want to shake the old woman by the shoulders. “I said I’d come out and see what I could do about this monster of yours.”

  Gert sniffed disparagingly. “Don’t see what you can do,” she muttered.

  Maddie chose to ignore her. She reached into her jerkin and produced a sheet of parchment, onto which she had copied the illustration of the cougar.

  “I did a little research,” she told them, spreading the drawing out on the table. Hec mouthed the word research as if it were totally unfamiliar to him. “The librarian at Castle Redmont showed me this. It appears there might have been creatures like this in these mountains hundreds of years ago. They were called cougars.”

  “We didn’t lose our sheep hundreds of years ago,” Gert said. “It were last month.”

  Again, Maddie resisted the temptation to take her by the shoulders and shake her.

  “George, he’s the librarian, said it’s possible that one or two of them might have survived in the mountains, well away from human contact,” she said. She looked at Hec and tapped the drawing. “Does this look like what you saw?”

  He frowned, turning the sheet toward him to study it more closely. “Could be,” he said.

  Gert leaned over to look too. “Don’t look like no bear.”

  Hec turned angrily to her. “That’s what I said. It ain’t no bear.” He looked back at Maddie, his mind made up by Gert’s disagreement. “Yes. This could be what I saw.”

  “So what do you plan to do about it?” Gert asked.

  Maddie inclined her head. “I thought I’d spend a few nights here and see if it reappeared,” she said. “How long is it since it took your last sheep?”

  He considered. “Mebbe ten days gone,” he said. “Took the first one nine days before that.”

  “So it should be ready to feed again,” Maddie said. “I shot a small deer on the way here and I thought I’d leave it as bait, see if I can draw the beast in so I can get a better look at it.”

  “Deer belong to the king,” Gert said primly. “Common folks ain’t allowed to hunt them.”

  Maddie smiled thinly at her. “I’m a Ranger. We’re allowed.”

  Hec waved a hand round the small farmhouse interior. “Well, you’re welcome to bed down by the fire,” he said. “Ain’t much room but it’s warm.”

  “I thought I’d sleep in the barn,” Maddie replied. Normally, she would have camped in the open, but the thought that there may be a large predator in the vicinity meant she was unwilling to risk Bumper, or herself.

  Hec shook his head. “Barn’s very drafty,” he said. “Wind cuts through there like a knife.”

  Maddie wiped her eyes, which were watering from the smoke and Hec’s sock odor.

  “That could be a good thing,” she said.

  • • • • •

  For all her disagreeable nature, Gert was an excellent cook. Maddie, knowing how farm folk like this lived hand to mouth, had brought two chickens and a small sack of potatoes and onions with her. She had no intention to deprive Hec and Gert by eating their meager rations. Gert quickly jointed the birds, dipped them in flour and fried the pieces over the fireplace in clear lard. The onions went in with the chicken, and she boiled the potatoes separately.

  After the meal, Maddie contemplated whether to help with the clearing up, before deciding against it. Hec and Gert weren’t the most welcoming of hosts and they tended to irritate her.

  I’ve provided the meal, she thought. They can clean up.

  She pushed the door open and went outside, sitting down on a long bench under the eaves of the barn, looking out into the darkening evening. Several minutes later, Hec emerged, carrying a bundle of torches under one arm. He set them up on the fence of the small paddock, spacing them five meters apart. She watched him curiously, and he turned to explain.

  “I keep these lit during the night. It keeps the cat away,” he said. She nodded, though she doubted that the light of the torches would discourage the cougar if it was hungry enough. And, she thought, she didn’t want to keep it away. But if it made the old farmer feel his sheep were more secure and kept him out of her way, so much the better.

  “I’ll leave a joint from the deer over by the edge of the trees,” she told him. “That should keep it away from the sheep.”

  Hec grunted. “Waste of good venison,” he muttered to himself. He set the last of the torches in place. “I’ll light these when it gets
to full dark.”

  Maddie nodded. “Good idea. I might get settled in the barn while there’s still a little light.”

  Bumper was still waiting where she’d left him by the farmhouse door. Maddie led him into the small barn and forked hay into a bin. The horse munched it gratefully, then turned his head to one side as he studied her. She forked more hay out of the stack and spread it on the floor for a bed. Not that she expected to sleep for long tonight.

  She stowed her belongings, gave Bumper a quick rubdown with several handfuls of straw, then took the rear leg joint of the deer and carried it across to the point she had determined—a young sapling on the edge of the tree line. She wedged the leg into a fork of the tree, then attached a small bell she had brought with her to the sapling itself. She wanted the cougar to have to work to get the meat. That would cause the bell to ring and that would alert her.

  An hour later, she was sitting on the bench, rugged up in her cloak, when the farmhouse door creaked open and Hector emerged, carrying a lighted torch. He didn’t notice the dark figure by the barn as he moved around the paddock, lighting the nine torches he had left there wedged into the top of the fence rail. Maddie estimated that they would burn for several hours. She wondered whether he would replace them when they burned out. Probably not, she thought. She was about to wish him good night but decided against it. That would lead to a conversation, which would probably be about what she was doing and what she intended to do if the beast showed up. Since that would also probably lead to Hec’s decrying her ability to cope with the cougar, she elected to remain silent and unseen.

  The brightly burning torches and the relatively early hour would probably dictate against the cougar’s making an appearance just yet. Maddie slipped inside the barn and settled into her bedroll on a pile of dry straw as Bumper snorted a friendly good night. She settled herself more comfortably, removing a piece of straw from where it was tickling her neck. The straw and the blankets were warm and toasty, and she soon fell asleep.