Chapter One

The phone rang. Nora Siler, a naturalist waiting for transportation to her next research site, had to switch on the light to find it in the unfamiliar motel room. The night clerk was half asleep on the line.

"You the lady that wants to get to the Cayer place?"

"Yes."

"Tordilla's leaving in half an hour."

"In the middle of the night?"

"Don't matter none to a cattle boat."

There was no reason to question it, even though Nora had been told departure would be that afternoon. Tordilla's skipper probably suspected a change in the weather. The viejos who worked the channel had an uncanny sense about it. They'd know about a storm moving toward the coast hours before the craft warnings went up in Hueneme and Santa Barbara.

"How about getting me a cab?" Nora asked, although she was pretty sure of the answer.

"No cab's coming over here at 2 AM."

"Anybody around here rent cars?"

"Nope. You'll have to hoof it. It ain't far. You won't get lost."

Nora wasn't afraid of getting lost. It was the idea of that long dark pier that bothered her. Port Hueneme was no tourist spot, with appropriate night lighting. The wharf served growers, shippers, the Naval Construction Battalion and the big cattle ranch on San Rosario, not an inviting stretch for a casual nighttime stroll. Nora didn't point that out because the clerk would know it.

"Check on the cab, anyway. Okay?"

"Sure. You don't have much time, though."

"I'll be over to pay the bill as soon as I call Santa Barbara." Nora gave him a number in the university district.

"Cheaper if you use the pay phone outside."

"Bound to be yanked out."

She listened while the clerk punched in the number she had given him. The phone rang half a dozen times before a sleepy voice answered.

"Bueno?"

"It's Nora, Jimmy. Do me a favor."

"What do you call answering the phone at 2 AM?"

"Another one. I want you to get in touch with Doctor Stahl before nine o’clock-this morning. He was coming down to tell me something, more stuff about the foxes, I guess. I'll have to get along without it. I've got to leave right now."

"Ought to give you a tickle if he makes a wild goose chase."

"He's still the boss."

"Si," Jimmy agreed with weary mockery,”Patron!"

Nora could get a little exasperated at Jimmy, adorable as he was.

"I'm in a hurry, Jimmy. The boat's going to pull out in half an hour."

"Set sail, weigh anchor, put out, Boats don't pull out."

"Come on, Jimmy!"

"All right, Sugar. For you, I'll stall Stahl at dawn's early light. Have a nice time studying the island fox and," his voice got low and spooky,”watch out for Old Man Cayer."

"I thought you weren't going to needle me about that!"

"Old coot's been dead for a year," the desk clerk cut in.

Jimmy accepted the eavesdropper.

"Doesn't keep him from walking around the island. They say there's this cove--"

"Goodbye, Jimmy!" Nora said

Jimmy sent a loud kiss over the wire and Nora hung up while the clerk was still chuckling.

Sometimes, Jimmy got Nora's goat because he was a born tease. She couldn’t get really mad at him. It had been great ever since they'd met, two years before, right after Nora got her university grant to do grad work. It wasn’t for the reason she got kidded about either, Jimmy's prominent family.

Sure, the martyred publisher father, the political aunts, the visionary older brother lawyer and all the other clever Salazar kin. They'd just added to the attraction. Still did. It was one of Jimmy's cousins, the new activist priest cousin, who was leading the beef boycott on behalf of the local ranch workers' union. He was the same zealot who had directed the Native American occupation of San Pasqual Island the month before. The latter had taken plenty of nerve because nobody had been into ethnic demonstrations for a couple decades. Besides, San Pasqual was federal land, even if it was nothing but a rock.

Jimmy was enough all by himself, lean and sleek, with Mexican honey skin and wonderfully thick, black hair. Dressed for dinner or skinny-dipping, nobody looked as good as Jimmy Salazar.

She'd have to get Jimmy off her mind for a couple of weeks, skinny dipping or otherwise. A 2a.m.walk down a scary pier ought to be good for that much.

She dressed in the same jeans and old blouse she'd worn the day before. The pants just made it down her long legs, the wine-red color of the top clashed as it always did with her chestnut hair and hazel eyes. Thrift store, you can’t be picky. Style wouldn't count for much on a cattle barge like Tordilla, anyway.

She added a heavy sweatshirt over her blouse and took a jacket out of her pack. The weather was nice enough here in town but the passage from Port Hueneme to San Rosario would be a couple of bone chilling hours. Being no paying passenger, she'd spend it on deck.

Her deadhead status would also keep her from asking about the departure time. Although the more she thought about it, the more weird 2a.m.seemed, even for viejos who knew their winds. The tides were wrong, for one thing. Pre-dawn fog blankets could be thick around the offshore oil rigs, especially if a squall was brewing to the north.

If Tordilla hadn't had to come to port to pick up a seed bull and some calves for the Cayer ranch, she would've had to pay a stiff price for transport. The university would have come across, much as they wanted San Rosario data. Trouble was she probably couldn't have got anybody to make the trip at all for one passenger. Small boat skippers didn't like the anchorages around San Rosario and, being private, the island was off limits to sport fishermen. The park service would've liked to run a few tours to San Rosario's grove of Torrey pines, seeing it was one of the only two stands left on earth, but botanical sightseers weren't allowed either.

There wasn't any public landing at all on San Rosario. The Cayers owned the whole thing. They had since the U.S. swiped California from Mexico. The people who worked on the island used the cattle boat, just like Nora was doing. The presiding Cayer, Adam, Dandy, to friends and admirers, had his own helicopter, which went along with his vaunted athletic and aeronautical accomplishments and his grandmother's successful financial investments. Jimmy had pointed out Cayer's whirlybird over the university one time. Nora had seen it, and Dandy himself, from a distance, on the ground at the Santa Barbara airport the week before. Very impressive, Patron and his chopper.

She shouldered the Hillary that held her cameras, laptop and analysis equipment and strapped on the field pack with her personal stuff. Together with her not exactly sylph-like carcass, they'd tip the scales at two hundred. She hoped she didn't have to take any long jaunts before she got to her quarters on the island. Cayer had promised the university a roost, although nothing in the way of running water or power had been mentioned. Ranch, after all. Fortunately, the little computer ran on batteries and she had spares, provided by the department.

Gathering her bags, she went to the motel office.

"No cab," the clerk said.

"Let me see your city map, so I don't get mixed up," Nora said, after she paid her bill.

"No maps. Just follow your nose down the boulevard to Pier Street. Pier heads straight down to the wharf. Cattle pens are right there. You can’t miss 'em. Yniquez ties up straight across from 'em. Ought to be a bunch of cowpokes, too."

"Yniquez the skipper?"

"Right."

In spite of the clerk's claims about transport, Nora used the pay phone outside, which hadn't been yanked out, to ring the two cab companies listed in the book. One didn't answer. The other had a recording that advised the caller to get in touch during business hours, after 9 AM.

She set out for the pier on foot.

The boulevard in front of the motel was surprisingly quiet for a California town's main street, even considering the hour. Sodium vapor street lamps marched in both directions, each with a pinkish orange aureole, providing adequate, if muted, light. The area sported a few bright, old-fashioned neons, too, announcing the bars, The Top Deck, The Porthole, Anchors Aweigh, and, out of deference to the local truck gardeners, El Tomate Sediento.

Nora passed stores with darkened windows and CERRADO signs, a tailor specializing in altering navy uniforms, a Japanese fish market and a barber with a faded VIVA LA RAZA spray-painted on his siding. When she turned at the Pier Street intersection, it was a lot darker, with a single street lamp in each long block ahead. The first stretch had a sidewalk bordering vacant lots, a cause for concern in any California town. Construction equipment behind a cyclone fence guaranteed that a developer would soon remedy the situation.

It was so still that Nora began to hear the sound of her own sneakers. At the next cross street, she welcomed a flight of gulls and shearwaters, squawking at her intrusion. The birds were remarkably active for pre-dawn. It was something else the viejos would be able to explain, a storm somewhere, the gray whale pack heading down the coast, even an earthquake coming. Old time naturalists would have had a few speculations, too. Nora didn't consider the subject at any length because modern zoologists were supposed to limit themselves. Some, like Stahl, were damned limited.

A pair of ravens came to investigate the night visitor; the other birds rode off on an air current. The ravens followed Nora's route with short, soundless flights from one utility pole to another, vanishing between stop offs. When they settled on the lamp struts, light caught the sheen of their purple-black feathers and painted them bigger than they actually were, which was plenty sizable as it was.

Even though Nora didn't go along with Stahl's notion that animals never had anything in mind but food or sex, she was no mystic, certainly not sympathetic with the psychology that called ravens sable satans and endowed them with sinister characteristics. She did have a good imagination and found it eerie that they could literally disappear, inches from her shoulder, and materialize ahead, moments later, waiting on a lamp pole.

After she crossed Harbor Street, the ravens left her. The neighborhood took on more of a waterfront air, with the Port Commissioner's parking lot on one side of the block and the Santa Clara Lemon Growers' long warehouse on the other. Both were empty, if the blackened windows could be trusted. Only one floodlight, in the center of the warehouse, provided illumination. The commissioners were home in bed and the lemons apparently didn't need so much as a watchdog to guard them after hours.

As Nora walked by, shapes appeared at the corners of the warehouse and shadows bent in the doorways, phenomena she attributed to the changing perspective. She crossed a network of railroad tracks that came angling in from the north. They were mostly abandoned, a fact witnessed by tall grass clumps between the rails. The sidewalk turned into a gravel lane, wide enough for wharf traffic. Judging by the furrows, it included trucks.

A sign proclaimed that she was on PIER ONE, no great surprise since there was only one pier at Hueneme. The Navy side protected its military privacy with a high steel fence topped with razor wire. A row of connected warehouses hid the water just as effectively on the municipal side. The center was still graveled, still wide enough for vehicles.

Nora stopped and looked ahead as far as she could see but no loading dock was in evidence. There was no watchman checking on interlopers, no human of any sort, except a lone figure far behind her, likely heading for the Navy's gate. There was no way of telling where the cattle pens and mooring facilities lay, except by walking the dark corridor to the end of the pier. Although she had no choice, the prospect of having to go exploring for Tordilla's landing didn't bring on any rush of enthusiasm.

She took to the center of the pier, as far from the sides as she could get. Single light bulbs burned over the warehouse doors and a few sheets of ebony glass interrupted the clapboards. Otherwise, the facades of the buildings were monotonous and the atmosphere around them gloomy. The scene made her feel dismal, a poor beginning to what she had regarded as a prize field study.

She hadn't got the assignment because of rank or scholarship. Rancher Cayer had invited Stahl, the head of the department, not Nora, to his ranch. Another reason why she couldn't have asked the lord of the island for a lift, even if he'd been approachable on the subject of transport.

The invitation to observe the island's rare, tiny foxes had been a long time coming. The zoology department had been trying to get permission to do the study for years. Now the favor had been granted quite suddenly, after a PBS documentary in which Stahl had given forth with his Sex or Food-Only theory of animal motivation, the focus of his current literary efforts. Stahl's thick glasses had caught the studio lights and his droning delivery detracted from his narration.

Fortunately, for Stahl and the department, he had included a very good photographic essay on the Mojave Coyote. The film didn't do a thing to support his ideas about what motivates critters, as he'd intended, but the footage on the handsome beast had been engaging. Cayer called the university the following morning and said the professor was welcome to do the island fox study that the university had requested so many times. It would be much appreciated if, at the same time, Stahl would film the annual whale migration past the Cayer hacienda on San Rosario. The request was clearly a tradeoff.

Nora could only guess what a tabloid feature like Adam Cayer would want with a wildlife documentary on whales. Expand his image, maybe? She did understand why Stahl had given her the job instead of going himself. It wasn't because she was a field-trained zoologist with good credentials, although she was, or because Stahl was headed north for the conference season, which was the excuse he gave. Neither did her being female influence the decision, although Stahl had mentioned that he hoped Cayer would find her a charming young woman. The assignment was due to the fact that it was Nora, not Stahl, who had shot the coyote film. The professor was so nearsighted he couldn't have told a coyote from a poodle at thirty paces, which should have been obvious from his squint on TV.

Nora wasn't going to quibble about who got what credit for the antics of a coyote. The Mojave footage that Adam Cayer had admired was her most recent effort for the department. She'd got her grant and an instructor's spot to begin with, because of her reputation as a wildlife photographer. The academic post paid a lot better than the freelance work she had been doing for the previous five years. Just now, she could stand a break from teaching under-grads, not to mention that she was crazy about foxes. A photo essay on the little grays, even if Stahl would get all the credit, suited her just fine. Living on an island with Adam Cayer for a couple weeks didn't strike her as a downer either. She wouldn't really be with him, of course, but proximity had been enough to call up more than one poetic fantasy.

Problem on the horizon? Could be. It was bad enough to have an imagination that was a bit too active. She also had a romantic streak that was a real weakness. She had honestly tried to overcome it but it was part of her, like her thick, chestnut hair, big hazel eyes, and legs that others besides Jimmy had admired. She didn't know why she could lapse into lyric moods so easily. Not any more than she really understood why she'd transferred to academic zoology when she was only two quarters away from a veterinary certificate. Her family hadn't known what to make of it, either.

Mother had been a Ventura County veterinarian for years. Nora had certainly been expected to follow in Mama's footsteps instead of centering on academia and going off into the bush with camera, tape recorder and laptop. Not that the family hadn't liked the idea of the job at the university and hoped that Nora would make it to tenure status. In spite of her mother's remarks about her own profession being the most realistic course for the zoologically minded, Nora knew she was secretly proud of her daughter. Nora's hunting down island foxes, dwarf variety, all by herself, would be no great surprise to her kin, whom Nora loved, one and all, and whom she wouldn't like to disappoint.

The lonely witching hour tramp down the pier brought on the first twinges of real doubt about that solitary element in her venture. She welcomed the crunch of footsteps on the gravel, the other nightwalker, closer behind now.

The warehouses ran out and she spotted signs of a dock ahead, fuel tanks so tall that they had winking red crowns to warn off low flying aircraft and an enormous crane that wore a necklace of white bulbs for the same reason. A glimpse of dark water, lapping around pilings, proclaimed wharf's end. Still, there weren't any cattle pens the way the motel clerk had said, or cowpokes, or boats or the crews that would man them.

At least it wasn't so blamed quiet any longer. Waves were slapping the wharf ahead and the footsteps behind her were growing louder and quicker. Nora glanced over her shoulder and saw a man coming out of the darkness, pounding down the boards beside the last warehouse. The bulb over the door he'd just passed outlined a pair of shoulders that seemed too broad for the leatherjacket he wore. It was open and the shirt beneath it flapping. The brim of afield worker's pale straw hat hid his face.

Nora was no mountain of courage, though it was unlike her to be afraid of any fellow human, even a stranger. Her first impulse was to wait for him to catch up and use a little karate if he had funny ideas about attractive young ladies that take midnight strolls. Suddenly, though, he raised a fist that held a thick pike, the point aimed straight at her breast. She ran like crazy toward the lights at the end of the pier, her liberal feelings toward fellow travelers vanishing.

"Stop, damn you!" he yelled.

Nora had a good lead and she was scared enough to keep it. She raced down to the crane, darted under its long arm and found the channel right in front of her. Waves were hitting the bumper rail and shooting spray high over the planks but she was willing to risk any kind of soaking rather than fall victim to the man with the pike.

Another alternative offered itself. The pier made a right angle on the municipal side and extended another hundred feet or so. To her relief, Nora saw a sizable boat, Tordilla, according to the nameplate on her stern, moored directly across from a line of cattle pens. A workman was loading salt sacks up a narrow aft gangplank and a couple vaqueros were prodding calves up a second, much broader ramp, farther forward.

Nora looked back over her shoulder. The man with the pike had vanished, raven-like, into the dusk of the pier. Although she didn't feel silly for taking fright, she slowed to a walk, heart still beating like a bongo, to avoid being conspicuous.

An ancient mariner in a skipper's cap, Yniquez probably, was in charge on Tordilla's deck. There wasn't any question about the status of another old fellow who was directing operations down in the wharf pens. Foreman, top vaquero, ramrod, whatever you called him, it amounted to the same thing. He was the real ranch boss, in spite of what the owner, even if he was Adam Dandy Cayer, might think. The foreman was astride the top rail of the largest pen, holding a restraining rope on some obstreperous animal inside and cursing in fine Sonoran. His oaths at the beast were only a little less vehement than those he threw down at a vaquero by the pen's gate."I got him, Cuate!" the vaquero kept assuring the foreman.”He ain't going to give me no trouble!"

The handler's confidence may have been bolstered by a rifle slung over his shoulder. He must have convinced his boss he could manage because the foreman relinquished control from the rail, letting go of his rope while still swearing at the vaquero. A ton of Hereford bull, as broad as any four of the calves that Nora had seen going up the ramp, fidgeted out of the pen. Everybody took to high ground, onto the corral rails, up one of the gangplanks or aloft, into the protecting steel cab of the crane.

Nora didn't mean to get in the bull's way either, even though he seemed to be well in hand and had only a yard or so to navigate to the main ramp. She considered the route to the closest corral rail but she retreated behind the boat's aft hawser instead. It was a good thing because the fellow who had threatened her, still carrying his pike and just as frightening as the Hereford, came around the other side of the bullpen.

No one else seemed worried about him. Just another cowboy. The foreman jumped down and the two of them formed a rear guard behind the bull. Nora looked closer and realized, with sudden embarrassment, that the weapon the big man was carrying was only a hefty cattle prod. Still, she reflected, it had been pointing at her bosom back there

The vaquero leading the Hereford suddenly made an odd move. It was a vicious tug on the bull's nose ring, pique at the ramrod's cussing him out, Nora figured. It brought forth a bellow that shook the wharf and echoed up the pier. The bull's head went down, his body shook and he charged the man who’d cut his tender nose. The vaquero dropped the chain and made for the safety of Tordilla's deck, by way of the flimsy aft gangway, the huge Hereford galloping right after him.

Bulls are selected for other than their intellectual attributes, Nora knew. This one pounded straight for the shaky, little plank, which wouldn't have supported a calf, much less a creature his size. It had bowed under the weight of one man with a sack of salt and bounced under the fleeing vaquero. That didn't bother the Hereford. He made for it in a rage to gut the cowboy who'd inflicted the painful indignity. The foreman and the man with the prod saw the danger and shouted, a futile effort to turn the bull.

When Nora saw that valuable animal heading for a watery grave, all her own ranch upbringing and veterinary endeavors surfaced. She slipped her jacket from the pack straps of her Hillary. Waving it like crazy at El Toro, she hollered at him, pasture fashion, without regard for his sex or the setting.

"Hey! Bossy!"

The yell didn't slow him until she pulled off the pack itself and flipped it, catching his monster flank with the metal frame. The impact couldn’t have hurt him much but it startled him and he jerked to a standstill.

"Look out, lady!" someone yelled from the deck.

The warning wasn't necessary. Nora dropped the rest of her gear and lit out along the edge of the pier toward the closest refuge, the cab of the crane. The bull stopped long enough to paw and pivot his enormous body before he thundered after her. The whole wharf quivered. The vaquero who'd caused the trouble raised his rifle and fired. The shot didn't stop the Hereford anymore than the shouts. Neither did the cold salt spray coming over the boards. The bull gained and Nora knew she'd never make it to the crane. When she felt the heat from his snorting, she chose the lesser of two evils and jumped into the harbor, making a good long leap to clear the barrels and the corrugated steel on the bumper.

Hitting the water just beyond the bumper, her sleeve snagged one of the metal corrugations. An oncoming wave lifted it off before peaking and smacking Nora against the wharf. She sucked air only once before a new comber surged in, slamming her against the bumper again. The same thing happened, over and over. As good a swimmer as she was, par with any certified YMCA grad, she couldn't pull herself away, no matter how hard she tried. The swells coming in past the breakwater were too frequent and too strong, ramming her against the steel guard with such force that she had to fight like mad just to breathe between impacts.