Tiger Country: A Novel of the Wild Southwest

By Stephen J. Bodio

Rancher Juan Aragon has begun to revive the Pleistocene, and everyone must pay the bill.

In the high country of southern New Mexico, home of the oldest wilderness and the biggest roadless area in the lower 48, ghosts are stirring, waking shadows of things that haven’t been seen for a hundred years. Reports of iconic beasts and mysterious carcasses filter down from the mountains, while something the newspapers call "The Bosque Bigfoot" is killing cows down by the Rio Grande.

Soon the world’s attention will be fastened on the wildlands of New Mexico, as more than the fate of a single native species is at stake. In his first novel, acclaimed natural history and travel writer Stephen J Bodio, whose 1988 memoir Querencia depicted the landscape and ways of southern New Mexico, and gave many readers their first glimpse of this faraway country, imagines the rebirth of big predators like the grizzlies and jaguar, in his own back yard. All too often discussions of "re-wilding" are abstract, with little thought for their unfolding in the real world, as though the country were a park. In Tiger Country, the effects are real. As viewpoints and people collide, the media, ranchers, naturalists, activists, politicians, and ordinary people must take their stands in the real world, not just in theory. Respectful of all the actors, especially the non-human ones, and in debt to none, Bodio shows the heartbreak of unintended consequences.

At times suspenseful, lyrical, hair-raising, and even funny it is a worthy fiction debut, and Bodio is uniquely qualified to tell it. Biologist, falconer, dog breeder, literary critic, and hunter, born in Boston but a rural New Mexico resident for almost forty years, he knows the wildlife, people, and cultures of his chosen Querencia. Malcolm Brooks, author of Painted Horses, says: "Steve Bodio brings his legendary Renaissance vision to this startling first novel, a work so mammoth in scope and elegant in execution it makes me wish he’d been writing fiction all along. Recalling the edgy best of Ed Abbey and Jim Harrison, and reminiscent of James Carlos Blake’s contemporary border noir, Tiger Country throws modern heroic renegades into the gravitational pull of the ancient past, to encounter the origins of the human condition."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Perkunas Press
• Release date: Nov 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781629620633

Book preview

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Tiger Country

RANCHER JUAN ARAGON HAS BEGUN TO REVIVE THE PLEISTOCENE, AND EVERYONE MUST PAY THE BILL.

In the high country of southern New Mexico, home of the oldest wilderness and the biggest roadless area in the lower 48, ghosts are stirring, waking shadows of things that haven’t been seen for a hundred years. Reports of iconic beasts and mysterious carcasses filter down from the mountains, while something the newspapers call The Bosque Bigfoot is killing cows down by the Rio Grande.

Soon the world’s attention will be fastened on the wildlands of New Mexico, as more than the fate of a single native species is at stake.

Acclaimed natural history and travel writer Stephen J Bodio imagines the rebirth of big predators like the grizzlies and jaguar, in his own back yard. All too often discussions of re-wilding are abstract, with little thought for their unfolding in the real world, as though the country were a park. In Tiger Country, the effects are real. As viewpoints and people collide, the media, ranchers, naturalists, activists, politicians, and ordinary people must take their stands in the real world, not just in theory. Bodio shows the heartbreak of unintended consequences.

At times suspenseful, lyrical, hair-raising, and even funny it is a worthy fiction debut, and Bodio is uniquely qualified to tell it. Biologist, falconer, dog breeder, literary critic, and hunter, born in Boston but a rural New Mexico resident for almost forty years, he knows the wildlife, people, and cultures of his chosen Querencia.

Malcolm Brooks, author of Painted Horses, says: Steve Bodio brings his legendary Renaissance vision to this startling first novel, a work so mammoth in scope and elegant in execution it makes me wish he’d been writing fiction all along. Recalling the edgy best of Ed Abbey and Jim Harrison, and reminiscent of James Carlos Blake’s contemporary border noir, Tiger Country throws modern heroic renegades into the gravitational pull of the ancient past, to encounter the origins of the human condition.

Tiger Country

Behind the Ranges Press

A division of Perkunas Press

2635 Baughman Cemetery Road

Tyrone, Pennsylvania 16686

USA

BehindTheRangesPress.com

Author contact: BehindTheRangesPress.com/stephen-j-bodio

© 2018 by Stephen J Bodio

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published 2018. First Edition.

Cover: Cloud over Ladron Peak December 2016, A. Jackson Frishman

EPUB ISBN-13: 978-1-62962-064-0

EPUB ISBN-10: 1629620645

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

provided by Five Rainbows Cataloging Services

Names: Bodio, Stephen, author.

Title: Tiger country : a novel of the wild Southwest / Stephen J. Bodio.

Description: Tyrone, PA : Behind the Ranges Press, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018954409 | ISBN 978-1-62962-063-3 (pbk.) | ISBN 978-1-62962-066-4 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-62962-064-0 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: New Mexico--Fiction. | Rural conditions--Fiction. | Environmentalists--Fiction. | Ranchers--Fiction. | Wildlife reintroduction--Fiction. | Extinct animals--Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Small Town & Rural. | FICTION / Animals.

Classification: LCC PS3602.O32566 T54 2018 (print) | LCC PS3602.O32566 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23.

ALSO BY STEPHEN J BODIO

Aloft

The Art of Shooting Flying

Eagle Dreams

An Eternity of Eagles

Good Guns

Good Guns Again

The Hounds of Heaven

On the Edge of the Wild

Querencia

A Rage for Falcons

A Sportsman’s Library

Tiger Country

DEDICATION

To Peter Bowen, Il miglior fabbro, whose Wolf, No Wolf inspired me to emulation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Living in the west for years and hearing a lot of opinions causes you to write a book like this. Those who have lived in the southwest for years have strong opinions on such things as the return of predators. That they don’t agree is no surprise, as they don’t agree on much except that this is still the last best place.

I attended my first meeting about the reintroduction of wolves over thirty years ago. Then, the commander of the White Sands Missile Range generously offered to use the range as a soft release site for the wolves. At this point a fellow got up and said, Thank you. This way we'll be able to two kill birds with one stone. We can get the wolves back and shut down the U.S. War Machine by closing the base so that it will not interfere with the wolves. Needless to say, his suggestion was withdrawn, and we’ll never know what a population of wolves that had to adapt to an abundant, delicious, and dangerous source of food, Frank Hibben’s vagrant oryxes, might have done when it finally left the base.

Nor would I want to misrepresent anyone’s view, or get anyone into trouble, but still I’d like to thank a few friends who have kept me entertained on this subject for many years. Emphatically for the predators: Doug Peacock, king of the grizzlies, and his wife Andrea; Dave Foreman; Yvon Chouinard; and artist Thomas Quinn. Against them, or at least against their unregulated presence in the human environment: Val (Dr. Valerius) Geist, dean of the wildlife biologists, polymath, and inveterate letter writer, a voice against wolves who wants to give most of Canada back to them; C J Hadley, English cowgirl and editor of Range Magazine; Tom’s Montana rancher brother Dan Quinn; and Mike Kelly, government trapper, who used to get an unholy kick out of introducing me to environmentalists as an environmentalist who wants to bring back wolves, and kill them, and who claims that the problem wolves are the ones who come up and watch TV through your` windows. (His father, Tom, purports to think that both the wolves and the astronomical telescopes on the top of the mountain are a plot to drive ranchers out of business. This sounds so exactly like a paranoid rancher plot invented by an eastern novelist that I suspect Tom doesn’t believe it any more than you do, but loves being thought of as a paranoid old ranch fossil by those who see him as a living stereotype.

Most of us just muddle along doing the best we can with the information and the changing rules. This is especially true of pastoralists, who must now cope with bureaucracies and their changing rules as well as the old dangers of the stock-rearing way of life. Chief among them are my dear friends Cat and Jim Urbigkit who have raised sheep on public land in the Yellowstone ecosystem for over thirty years and written eloquently about it. They have also pioneered ancient Asian and European techniques using stock protection dogs in the U. S. public lands. Down here, Mary Helen Sissy Gianera Olney, the first female brand inspector in the United States, her husband Tom, and her siblings on the Pound Ranch have given me similar perspectives from a south¬western point of view, and Pieter Ditmars runs stock protection dogs successfully against predators here. And I don’t want to forget John Davila, who gave Juan Aragon his distinctive voice; or Pat Cooper, who helped with all the computer work. As the cliché goes, all the book’s virtues are theirs; the vices are my own.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ONLY A MOUNTAIN

LIONS AND TIGERS AND BEARS

THE MULE’S EARS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FOREWORD

In Tiger Country the protagonist is responsible for the introduction of the Mexican wolf. Everyone knows that the government actually did that. But before the government action, even before they offered to put them in White Sands, there were over fifty sightings of wolves in the Gila by biologists and ranchers.

Could Juan Aragon have brought them in? We should consider Tiger Country to have taken place in that one short moment of history.

EPIGRAPH

You ever meet my karate instructor? He doesn’t talk much. He’s a big Korean, probably about sixty-five, and still moves like a cat. His body looks like it was built with an axe out of hardwood, and his face is like a granite boulder. He has about as much hair as a bowling ball. We were driving from Silver City to a ranch in northern Catron County that day and stopped at the Aldo Leopold Overlook to stretch our legs and see the country. We went back to the truck for the binoculars and spent a long time looking over the land, glassing it carefully. Finally he said to me You got tigers up there?

No, sir, I said. Lots of deer and more elk, and we got more antelope than anyplace but Wyoming. Little bears that go up trees, and we used to have big bears that won’t. We have a thing they call a lion, but it isn’t really, and a rare thing called a jaguar–it’s more like a leopard. We used to have big wolves. What we don’t have is a tiger–never had and never will.

He spat at the ground, looked me in the eye like I was a little slow, and growled, Looks like tiger country to me.

ONLY A MOUNTAIN

Virtue and the wild share no common universe.

----James Hamilton Paterson

I became intoxicated by their company, and was hard put to keep up, pretending that I, too, had always lived dangerously.

----Sybille Bedford

Born in the fifties, coming of age in the sixties, Nick Sharpe had always wanted a life that was not mundane. He had grown up in a dreamy small town in the cranberry counties south of Boston, spending endless solitary happy hours amidst the old natural history books hidden in the neo-medieval library, a strange building designed by H. H. Richardson and donated to the town by its plutocrats, a bunch of shovel manufacturers turned to squires and scholars by time and money.

Mostly he disliked other kids, preferring books, dead explorers, frogs, snakes, birds of prey, and his dog. He kept a raccoon, a kestrel, and a Cooper’s hawk, though his parents drew the line at a Blue Hills rattlesnake. Unlike his romantic idols—Beebe, Roosevelt, Finch-Hatton (he read Out of Africa at eleven despite the disapproval of the librarian)—he had no inherited fortune, though at first he did not realize that they did. Nor did he have any interest in making money. He did know that only the life of an artist or a scientist was likely to provide him with travel, adventure, and access to wild things, things he craved with a deep unaccountable longing that had everything to do with the shadowed vaults of the library and the woods, and nothing at all to do with his family. His father was an unhappily stable Boston businessman, a golfer and martini drinker; his mother a 1950’s homemaker of Swiss-Italian and lace-curtain Irish descent, whose not so secret hope was that he would become a Jesuit.

He had a little of his father’s caution, though he would never admit it. He was a skilled careless sketcher and painter, but he opted for biology at Harvard over art, despite a scholarship at the Museum School that tugged at him. He was married at nineteen to a rich girl. He thought she shared his passion because she talked well, and because she drank and danced and loved to go birding on Plum Island when they took acid. It was 1969.

He and Carole drank and gave parties and went to school. It seemed in retrospect that was how they spent all of the seventies and a good bit of the eighties. They never considered children; Carole very seriously said that they were their own kids. She wrote poetry and sculpted large vague bronzes. Nick moved through phases. For a while his passion was ornithology. He watched nesting terns off the elbow of Cape Cod, secretly and nobly executing herring gulls with his 20-bore double gun, to protect the terns’ eggs. He did a stretch of sorting pickled fish from Bermuda for the Museum of Comparative Zoology. He collected invertebrates from the mucky floor of Boston Harbor, and built a huge refrigerated salt water aquarium for his living room which he decorated with bryozoan-encrusted Budweiser bottles found in the same places that he caught his specimens. Carole considered it too deliberately whimsical but everybody would stare into it when they got drunk.

He somehow acquired a taste for nice stuff. If anyone asked he would have admitted to, no, bragged, that the life of a mildly intellectual yuppie connoisseur fitted him like his English-cut suits. And then, about the time he installed two color phases of tree vipers from the Yucatan in the living room by the tank, Carole left him for her, their, accountant, a soft vague man who played tennis and had one eyebrow running the width of his forehead. He cared about security, and money, and her, unlike Nick who dreamed of mountains and junipers and jeweled snakes and Victorian shotguns more than he did of their future.

Three weeks after she left, Carole died driving her vintage MG into a patch of black ice in upstate New York, in the company of an old friend of hers he didn’t know existed. Suddenly he was bereft, rootless, and rich. It was to his credit that he did not also consider himself lucky, especially since he had finally had the wit to realize that he had been trapped. He cried sincerely at the funeral, but, in a sort of emotional double vision, he felt as free as a secret agent. He was twenty-seven years old, and ready to do something; he was terrified that he would die before anything real happened, and was not sure it had, yet.

The only question was what. He did not want to talk to anyone who had known their lives. He sold everything he owned but two pieces of art—a Rodin sketch, and a terrifying Bruce Kurland oil of zombie sea ducks—plus a couple of shotguns, a tent, his hiking clothes and (in case he changed his mind) his best English suit and shoes. He rented a car and drove into the sunset, not so much as slowing down until he reached the plains. Somewhere west of Miles City, Montana, he stopped and stood beside the road in the enormous empty dawn, naming the things he could see: meadowlark, juniper, arroyo, barbed wire fence, white faced cow, West. A magpie started the world again, rowing past, trailing a shining ribbon of tail. When he regained the car, his face was wet with a different kind of tears.

But Montana, as spoiled by people like him as New England had been, was no answer. All his friends went to Yellowstone, Paradise Valley, and the Bighorn to fish. They tended to regard Montana as a backdrop for casting nymphs while dressed in the right clothes. He himself had once flown to Bozeman, rented a boat on a spring creek south of Livingston, caught and released forty decent fish, and ended the day eating something called Navajo Shiitake: grilled mushrooms over what looked like chips of blue cardboard, served by a smiling surfer with an earring. The conversation had run toward the necessity of getting rid of ranchers, who despoiled the streambanks. Although he could recall no objections to any of this at the time, something about the memory made him turn sharply left before the mountains, down past the Indian reservations and coal mines, toward Sheridan, Wyoming. Wyoming mesmerized but failed to hold him. Endless stretches of sage and grass and dry streambed were populated only by drifting white specks that resolved into antelope, flaring marsh hawks and, once, a great black eagle that stood at the side of the road like a proud child. He felt as though he were driving in the sky. Colorado’s front range was an endless suburb of traffic, precisely spaced state troopers, and too many radio stations. He didn’t slow down until he dropped over Raton Pass into New Mexico.

Raton was a funky old mining town hidden in a crack in the mountains with no tourists and a preponderance of Italian names in the phone book. He spent an idle evening in a bar, enjoying himself. He was thinking about New Mexico: Ernest Thompson Seton, rough riders, Aldo Leopold, grizzlies, Apaches.

He asked the bartender for a road map, with a vague recollection of place names from Leopold’s Sand County Almanac. The southwestern quarter of the state had plenty of place names, but almost no roads. His finger traced a roadless square; thumb and index finger held against the scale of miles, then bounced along the roads, north and south. There was a piece as big as Connecticut down there with no lines through it. Luna, a name from Leopold, on the west; Kelly and Santa Rita on the east.

What’s that area there called?

Not much. The Gila, I guess. I got a brother-in-law who goes hunting down there.

The Gila. A vision came to his mind then for a moment, from nowhere: blue mountains, lion-colored plains, big animals. He wandered through the door into a cold black night full of stars. Six hours after sunrise, he ascended a series of switchbacks out of the Rio Grande Valley, to top out in the land of his vision.

Six months later Nick met his new best friend, on a cold blue fall morning after the flowers had died but while the aspens still made gold impressionist slashes against the slate of the mountains. He had hoped his dreamed-for life of action would just naturally evolve from being in such a fine place. First, he reactivated his old falconry permit and bought a huge restless gyrfalcon from a breeder in Sheridan. He found some work painting birds for a neotropical specialist at the university, rented a four-room house that had once belonged to a ranch foreman, and painted the inside a stark white, deciding to wait until meaningful possessions suggested themselves.

They didn’t. Life soon came to consist of drinking Black Jack and beer in and out of the Stockman’s Saddle Saloon. His substitute for action became falconry. Every day, he flew his silver gyrfalcon Cara on the Plains of St. Augustine, where there was no game, only the ravens that were both illegal and, in Nick’s mind, immoral, to kill.

He had had a hangover that day, but thought breathing cold air and seeing horizons might go a