Free Hunting Season by Nevada Barr Page B

the interview with Mama Barnette. Whatever the cause, Anna was getting increasingly twitchy. Chief Ranger Brown fixated on the FBI. National Parks were federal lands. When capital crimes occurred, the Federal Bureau of Investigation could be given jurisdiction, either assisting or taking over from local talent. often, for reasons of their own, the Bureau was not interested and the park was left to solve its own problems. During her career with the Park Service, Anna had worked with the FBI three times. Naturally she'd heard the gossip about their high-handed, authority-stealing ways, but her experiences had been positive. Her discomfort stemmed not from the fact that Brown talked of calling in the Feds—this murder had the trappings of what could be a sex crime and, next to drugs and guns, the bureau seemed drawn to the bizarre—it was the way Brown was talking about it.
    She couldn't tell whether he was motivated by lack of faith in her and her admittedly unpromising-looking crew or whether, because of the crime's potentially lurid aspects and the circled religious text, he was merely anxious to separate himself and the park service from it as much as possible.
    "I'll call the agent in Jackson," she said to end the discussion.
    "I'll call the agent in Jackson," Brown said, shutting her down in front of her rangers. He had the courtesy to look apologetic, but the satisfaction on Thigpen's face cancelled any comfort Anna might have taken from it.
    In other circumstances in other parks, she would have wondered what she'd done to compromise herself in the chief ranger's eyes. On the Natchez Trace she wondered what Randy Thigpen said she'd done that brought about the change.
    Days were growing short, clocks had long since been dialed back to daylight wasting time, and it was dark by the time the meeting broke up. Chief Ranger Brown headed back to Tupelo, preferring a late arrival home to a night in a motel by the freeway in Jackson.
    Anna headed for her house in the Rocky Springs campground area. The headlights of her patrol car cut along the tree trunks, firing a litter of leaves beneath. This fall had been bone-dry following a summer of drought, and the leaves were mostly dun-colored, but a few still sparked with crimson and flame orange. Two deer, caught in the high beams, stared at her with startled eyes. One was a doe, the other a young buck with polished antlers, either a two- or four-pointer. Anna could never remember whether one counted all the prongs or just those on one side.
    She slowed to a crawl. Deer were silly creatures. It was impossible to tell which way they would break. Though it saddened her to see the carcasses, she never much blamed the drivers in car-deer collisions. As often as not the skittish deer seemed to throw themselves under one's wheels.
    This time of year, danger threatened them from all sides. Cars on the Trace, and beyond the narrow ribbon of federally protected parkland, it was hunting season in the South.
    Lacking the huge tracts of public lands of the west on which to hunt, Mississippians—or at least those who could afford it—joined hunting clubs. These clubs owned hundreds of thousands of acres in the state. The fancy ones boasted clubhouses, cabins and indoor plumbing. The simpler ones promised only male bonding and a chance to kill something.
    The deer, for all their innocence and stupidity, seemed to have some sort of race memory. During hunting season, they crowded the safe zone of the Trace in staggering numbers. One night Anna had counted one hundred and twenty-three on the forty-mile stretch of road between Natchez and Port Gibson.
    Disappointed hunters driving home from various hunting camps were often tempted beyond their ethics by this largesse. Poaching was an ongoing problem.
    Turning into the familiar darkness of Rocky Springs, she allowed herself to think of home. Taco would be waiting with great leaps and slurps of canine welcome. Piedmont, an aging yellow tiger cat she'd