The Ridge by Michael Koryta Page A

such thing as what he’d claimed to have seen, and still he pursued it with absolute conviction. It was disturbing to watch.
    And then, nine days after he’d first spotted the cat, Wesley wheeled it into the preserve in a transport cage. The cat had entered, he said, and then chosen to ignore the bait that was inside. The guillotine gate hadn’t been tripped by his entrance, though; he’d somehow gracefully avoided triggering it. Rather than retreat, he remained inside and watched Wesley as if daring him to come close enough to lower the gate himself.
    “I had a moment of doubt,” Wes admitted.
    He’d done it, though. Approached and lowered the gate, and for a moment the cat could have struck, but he did not. Then the gate was down and he was trapped and the Kentucky preserve had the only melanistic cougar in recorded captivity.
    David considered that a stroke of luck unlike any other in his life—
Thanks a lot,
Audrey remembered telling him dryly whenhe’d informed her of that news. He believed the cougar had been drawn out of the deep woods by the presence of the other cats, by curiosity over his own kind. Wes never seemed convinced of that; cougars were not pack animals, they were isolated, territorial creatures. He would grant David the animal’s curiosity, but he didn’t believe the cat wanted anything to do with his peers, either—a belief that was rapidly borne out by Ira’s behavior. He was surprisingly docile around people, but he
demanded
solitary confinement. Many of the cats were happy to socialize with the others. Ira wanted his own space.
    The chaos built quickly. David’s fellow experts disagreed at first, claiming that Ira was the product of crossbreeding, but DNA tests supported Audrey’s husband: Ira was a North American puma, or cougar, or mountain lion. Wes had disregarded the controversy—
Told you from the start he was a mountain lion,
he’d said, and then gone on about his business. The cat, everyone except Wesley agreed, could certainly not have been wild. He was too good with people, too comfortable. Clearly he’d escaped from some private owner, and clearly that person had been involved in something illegal, or he would have reported him missing. Would have reported him, period.
    Wes disagreed, but he didn’t like to be in the spotlight, and he refused to give any interviews when curious media folks came calling. David handled that. All Wes would say was, “The cat came out of the woods. Right now, that’s all you know. Don’t presume a damn thing when that’s all you know.”
    It was, though, the most uncertain Audrey had ever seen him with a cat. Wes spent hours studying Ira, and she was convinced that he was wondering the same thing: where in the world had he come from? If he was wild, why didn’t he act like it? And if he was not, then how was he an unknown?
    They researched for endless hours and came up with nothing but legends. According to Native American folklore, the blackcat was a symbol of death. According to scientific history, the black cat didn’t exist. Put the two together and you generated a lot of excitement.
    “He’s ready to go, you can tell,” Wes said when they arrived back at the now-empty preserve to collect the cougar. “We’ve moved everyone else, and it’s making him edgy, being the only cat left. He didn’t like watching the others go away. He’s ready to see where we’re taking them.”
    Audrey hadn’t been able to perceive the slightest change in the cat’s countenance, but she knew better than to argue with Wes. If he suggested what a cat was feeling, he was probably right. He seemed to live inside their strange feline brains. It was, frankly, a source of irritation for her. In the months since David had died, she’d tried to think of the cats as her own, but at her core she knew that they did not trust her in the way they had trusted David, trusted Wes. Could she have even handled them without Wes, could she have kept the preserve