Excerpt from Panther Gap by James A. McLaughlin, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

1

1983

Bowman sat on the floor of the hayloft and kicked his bootheels on the boards to knock off the snow while his father walked downstairs for the eagle.

He wore a green wool watch cap pulled down over his ears, wool pants, a plaid wool jacket. Over the jacket, his father had strapped a baseball catcher's chest pad to Bowman's back and pinned a stiff, poorly tanned Alaskan wolf pelt to the pad. Two half-frozen chicken necks dangled on a leather strap tied to the back of the wolf's head.

Bowman shut his eyes. Wolf-scent from the thick coarse fur of the pelt enveloped him, somehow familiar, triggering what felt like long-ago memories, or the shreds of a dream slipping away in the morning. His saliva flowed at the raw meat of the chicken necks and he swallowed to keep from drooling on the barn floor. His sense of smell was too sensitive, which he thought was strange, but he didn't dwell on it. Instead he leaned over to the hay bales stacked behind him and inhaled the sweet scent of summer afternoons, a mix of brome, grama, wild rye, and bluestem that grew in the high, lush valley his family called Panther Gap. In his mind he left the cold barn and lay on his stomach in the valley, in the breeze and insect buzz, hot under the long sun, watching bison move through tall grass, unhurried as old gods.

Slow footsteps on the stairs. Alecto appeared first, standing two feet tall on an upraised forearm, her head covered with a leather hood Bowman's father had sewn himself. Then his father's thick black hair and graying beard, shaded eyes, a frown of concentration that softened when he saw Bowman waiting.

Bowman rolled to a knee. He and Summer had pulled a lure behind them on a long rope, walking, running, on horseback, teasing the eagle from the sky with a stiff musty fox skin jerked along the ground. But this was going to be different. He knew he should probably be afraid.

The high gable windows showed a blank white sky. Still snowing, the first tracking snow of the season, and when it stopped, he and Summer would walk down into the valley and read the new tracks there. Deer and elk and moose and bison, of course. The black bears were mostly denned up by now, but there would be bobcat, marten, river otter tracks. Maybe they could find the male lion who lived in the valley. A young female had appeared during the fall and Summer was hoping for kittens next year.

Others had arrived as well, animals who weren't supposed to be here, who had come from far away.

Last spring, a pair of wolves had dug a den way up in the old timber at the north end of the valley. In August he'd found a set of long-clawed bear prints in the mud at the head of the lake, a pilgrim from the relict grizzly population up in the San Juans. He'd seen lynx, and at least one fisher cat, and he'd glimpsed a wolverine at dawn in mid-September, disappearing over the high ridge of the Red Creek Range opposite the house.

And there was one other animal, or maybe he was something more, who had appeared in Bowman's dreams, one so powerful and rare Bowman had never even allowed himself to say his name, a massive spotted cat making his way north from the Sierra Madre Occidental, returning home to Panther Gap along pathways forgotten for five hundred years, leaving a trail of carcasses behind him, a trail Bowman would retrace someday himself, following the bones into Mexico.

He hadn't told Summer yet. He wondered where she was now, why she wasn't here to watch.

"You should be moving when I pull off the hood."

Bowman started at his father's voice. It took him a moment to parse the words' meaning. He looked up at the eagle, deep black in the indirect light. It seemed to Bowman that his father had nearly disappeared, had become inanimate, insignificant beside Alecto.

"Will she know it's me?"

"No. She'll think you're an animal. Prey."

Bowman waited. He knew what his father meant by the word, but he was struck by the homophone. There was no church in their lives, no formal religion, but he and his sister had climbed out onto the roof at night and prayed to the full moon. They hid in the willows at the foot of the lake and prayed to the herds of bison and elk feeding in the meadows. And they snuck down through their grandfather's tunnels to the canyon at the edge of the desert and prayed to the ghosts of the Old Ones who roamed the secret cliff dwellings and spoke to Bowman while he slept. They didn't tell anyone they did this, and when they prayed they always asked for things that they knew were going to happen anyway: the sun to come up, the snow to fall and to melt in the spring, their father to kill elk and a bison for their meat, their mother to rest on the east ridge where the sun hit first in the mornings, under the broken stones Bowman had helped to pile on her before Summer was old enough to remember.

Excerpted from Panther Gap by James A. McLaughlin. Copyright © 2023 by James A. McLaughlin. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.