Molly and I watched as the game warden drove off after leaving the live bear trap outside our garage. It was like a super sized steal or iron garbage can on its side and resting on a short trailer on wheels. There were large clamps that held the trap portion in place on the trailer. And at the front there was a large metal door on a sliding hinge. If and when the bear tripped some lever inside the trap, the door would shut behind it. The front and the "door" were covered in a checkerboard pattern of wires. That would allow anyone to look into the trap should something trip it, and would obviously allow anything that tripped the trap to breathe.
"Will this thing hold a bear?" Molly wondered as she looked at it.
"I suppose so," I commented, and then gave a slight snicker, "Never had problems like this in Peoria, did we?"
"George, I'm serious," Molly answered, "that thing looks a little small."
"And how big do you think it should be?" I asked her.
"Our size," Molly answered, "Aren't bears our size?"
"Black Bears, yes, Brown Bears... or Grizzlies, no," I answered, "Grizzlies are easily bigger then we are. But I don't think Black Bears stand up on their hind feet all the time. He'll have to hunker down if he gets trapped, but I'd think he'd be fine. The purpose of these sorts of traps, I think, are to catch them alive, take them out away from civilization and let it lose."
Molly looked at the trap somewhat nervously and then at the area of paw prints where the bear had obviously been sniffing around our garage door.
"I don't want to have to fight a bear, George," she said after a moment, "shoot... I still feel a bit bad about having to kill that Mountain Lion... I mean... deer are one thing. They're food... but I don't want to have to fight all these other things..."
"That'll be a fact of life out here, Molly," I reminded her, "and we're out on the edge of town... shoot, I think we're actually beyond the city limits... and that means we will have things like this to deal with. With reasonable caution and being careful with our kills we should be fine in the long run. And besides, the warden says he thinks this is a youngster. It doesn't know any better, and if things go well, we won't have to worry about confronting the bear. It'll get caught in the trap and will be relocated to a more remote area."
Molly looked a little nervous.
"Or would you rather go house hunting again and end up in an area where we're going to have a lot of people pressing in?" I asked.
"No," Molly sighed, "No..."
And that was the instinctual thing. The urge to control a large territory in relative seclusion. Molly and I had that with Bandhavgarh Ranch and Preserve, and so long as we obeyed the law, we'd be able to hunt on it for as long as there were deer to hunt. Molly, instinctively didn't want to be in a spot where she would feel confined, and I didn't want feel that way either. Our cabin was the best option for us in that way. The obvious negative side of having the cabin would be dealing with things like Bears, Wolves, Wolverines and Mountain Lions that could be serious competitors, as well as Raccoons, Skunks, Coyotes, Foxes, Bobcats, and Lynx that could merely be annoyances.
"The trap will work," I assured her, "you don't need to be afraid."
"I'm NOT afraid," Molly said firmly, "as you said, if push came to shove, we could take it. I simply don't want to have to fight it... doing so... it's sorta like doing what Beauregard wanted me to do when we first moved here."
"I see," I slowly nodded, and understood what she was getting at, "I see... well don't worry. The trap will work and we won't have to fight it."
Molly then glanced to the garage door for a moment.
"What about your truck?" she asked me, "we moved it in there now that the hunting season is over and you're not butchering dead deer..."
"I doubt we're going to be going anywhere over the winter," I commented, "and even if we were, it's not like we could drive it anyway. We'd need your Uncle or Dave or someone to drive us."
Molly nodded and we went back in.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
As we went in, Molly and I moved to handle what events would come next. Molly set to starting dinner by this time, and insisted she didn't need my help. With Molly getting dinner ready, I went upstairs to our bedroom and dialed a number from the phone we had on a desk in there.
"Hello?" came Veronica's voice on the other end of the line.
"Veronica?" I asked, "This is George. Is your father home?"
"Tiger-Man?" Veronica asked.
I chuckled at the application of the nickname. Just as the kids called Molly the "Tiger-Lady", they had occasionally called me the "Tiger-Man". I found it to be something of an odd nickname, as it probably fit a superhero better then me, but I couldn't really complain.
"Yes, the Tiger-Man," I sighed, "Is your dad home?"
"Hold on," she told me.
There was a brief silence for a moment before a load child's yell went through the phone, "DADDY!"
I then overheard footsteps and nervous parental calls.
"Veronica, are you alright?" that was Tabby asking her daughter.
"What is it?" that was Dave.
"Telephone," was Veronica's answer in a softer tone.
"You needn't yell, dear," I heard Tabby tell her daughter. However that became a background conversation as Dave answered the phone.
"Hello?" Dave asked into the phone.
"Hello, Dave, this is George," I spoke into the phone, "sorry to bother you..."
"Oh it's no problem," Dave answered, "Mostly enjoying a quiet break from a lot of the political and news related stuff going on."
"I'm sure," I commented. The election had to have some effect on the Choir family.
"What's up?" Dave asked me.
"I just heard that you were having bear trouble," I said to him, "wanted make sure everything was okay... from the sound of Veronica's lungs, I'd assume she's fine."
"You heard about the bear?"
"He or she likely came sniffing around Bandhavgarh too," I told him, "Molly found the tracks and we had a warden leave a trap outside our garage..."
"I wouldn't have thought a bear would mess with you and Molly," Dave commented, "Don't tigers occasionally eat bears?"
"Occasionally, but it always depends on the circumstances, some tigers have been killed by bears just as easily as bears have been killed by tigers," I reminded him, "but in either case the bears that live here have never seen a tiger before... and while there are "Grizzlies" in Russia, they don't interact with Molly's and my subspecies of tiger. Bengal... the only bear species that lives in India is the Sloth Bear... and what has been messing around here as been a Black Bear. The Black Bear may recognize our scents as feline, but he'd only know of Mountain Lions, Bobcats, and Lynx, all of which are smaller then it is and easily driven off."
"So, it's been messing with you two too?" Dave asked after a moment.
"We think it was trying to get into our garage where we store our meat," I told him, "and the warden we called said he'd been up to your vineyard. I wanted to make sure you were okay?"
"Oh, we're doing fine," Dave answered, "it hasn't threatened anyone... and for the most part we haven't seen it... all we have is the evidence that it was there."
I heard him sigh on the other end of the line.
"As you know, we've put up a small fence around the rows of grape vines to keep deer out," Dave continued, "and as the seasons have started to change, Tabby and I have been working to collect the grapes that we grew over the spring and summer before we get hard frost that kills the grapes and makes them worthless."
"Thankfully things are still fairly mild," I told him.
"Yeah," Dave replied, "which means we've had the bear trouble this year."
"Have you ever had bear trouble before?" I wondered.
"Not since we moved up here, but my folks have had one or two incidents in California," Dave told me, "they come on for the grapes... and one even got into one vat that they were fermenting the grapes in... that bear in its drunken stupor did more damage trying to run away then it did getting in... and since we didn't have any problems here, I figured the fence I put up to keep deer out would deter bears."
"It failed, I guess?" I asked him.
"Tabby and I found one of the posts pushed down in one direction and a side post pushed down in the other direction, and two vines were essentially destroyed," was Dave's reply, "it'll hurt us a bit this year, but not too bad... though we'll have enough grapes to make a small batch. But we have some grapes still on the vine, and we can't afford to lose any more. That's why I had the warden come in and set the traps... the ground will be too hard soon to put in a sturdier fence around the vines..."
"Let Molly and I know if you need anything," I told him, "we're busy during the day, but until Officer Howard can hire a permanent DARE officer, my late afternoon and evenings are free."
"Thanks for your offer, George, we'll let you know," Dave answered.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The next couple of days went quietly. The bear that had visited our Cabin did not return overnight and no other animal visited it, and for awhile it seemed as if the bear had gone off into the woods. And maybe it had gone into its hibernating period by now, Molly and I couldn't be sure. We did have the live trap kept there just in case. As, if it did return, the trap would probably be the only thing that would prevent a fight, which Molly and I wished to avoid. We also didn't hear anything from Dave or Tabby, so apparently the bear hadn't returned to their vineyard either.
Things regarding the election obviously remained hectic. Hireman's numbers had finally leveled out from the nose dive it had taken earlier in October and in late September after Amy made her statement. But even while his poll numbers had stopped plummeting, he was still in a fairly deep hole, and with no further debates scheduled before the election, it was doubtful that Hireman would be able to come up with something that would truly change the numbers to be in his favor. After all that he had done, though, I felt he deserved it.
The other big thing remained things at the school. We had actually reached the cycle of mandatory drug searches that had to be done at the High School and Middle School. It wasn' too big of a problem. The procedure was for the school to go into lock-down and lock all the students in the rooms they were in. Officer Barnes and I would then wait for the local K-9 Officer to arrive. In our area, that actually meant having a Kalispell officer come up, as Columbia Falls's Department didn't have a drug dog. Now, in theory they had me, but I didn't know what drugs smelled like and wasn't trained to handle it.
My presence did come as a bit of a surprise to the Kalispell K-9 officer as he arrived.
"They have you doing the DARE work?" the Kalispell officer asked.
"Until we can hire a permanent replacement," I told him, "Is that a problem?"
"No," the Kalispell officer answered, "though to be curious, did they give you any sort of scent training at the academy? You might be able to help out Trigger here."
I looked down to the German Shepard that stood loyally and calmly by the Kalispell officer. Many dogs that Molly and I had encountered after our transformations barked almost ceaselessly when behind their fences or nervously tried to keep away and gave some whining noises. Which were instinctual actions on their part to responding to something near their territory and realizing that the something was a cat they'd likely never seen before. Trigger, however, stood calmly and barely even looked interested in me.
"No, I was still human when I went through the academy," I told him, "and my transformation was accidental. My wife was the last of Changes' victims..."
"Saw that on the news," the Kalispell officer cut me off, "I just don't know when the order of things was. Was it academy, wedding, transformation or wedding, transformation, academy."
"Academy, wedding, transformation," I told him.
"Ah-ha," the Kalispell officer nodded.
"Officer Wayne and I are here to maintain basic security while you and your dog do the sniffing out of things," Officer Barnes told him.
"Okay then, shall we get started?" the Kalispell officer spoke and moved ahead.
We moved on and went to the top floor of the High School to start things there and then work our way down. And Trigger did his job quietly and with a lot of precession. The only sound I heard coming from him was the clicking of the dog's toe claws on the tile.
"Trigger seems to be very well trained," I commented to the Kalispell officer as we went through one row of lockers. Trigger had not detected anything, yet.
"All police dogs are well trained," the Kalispell officer answered, "though Trigger is also eight years old, not too far from retirement."
"Retirement?" I wondered.
"Shepherds only live on average of nine to ten years," the Kalispell officer explained, "and Trigger is eight. My department will probably retire him fairly soon and will either assign me a new dog to train or give a different officer the duties of being the K-9 Officer."
"Oh," I commented, "They'll let you keep him though, right?"
The Kalispell officer gave a slight smile, "Yeah... I don't know what I'd really do without Trigger."
We turned and started going down the next row of lockers, "why do you ask?"
"Nothing much, really," I answered, "most dogs have been very fearful of my wife and I... or trigger instincts in tigers related to their interactions with wild dogs of India and so forth..."
"You fear Trigger? As big as you are?"
"Not necessarily fear," I explained, "with Wolves, Tigers are actually known to attack them and reduce their populations... and with Dholes, in small numbers, Tigers might go after them... but in large numbers, Dholes have attacked Tigers, though suffering massive casualties in the processes."
"And dogs are similar to these animals?" the Kalispell officer asked.
"In some sense, yes," I nodded, "but your dog isn't doing that to me as much as he doesn't seem concerned with me and isn't either dodging away or growling."
"Well, as I said, Trigger is well trained," the Kalispell officer answered, "the whole flight or fight thing has been trained out of him."
I nodded as we continued on.