Not sure if anyone will want to read this, but if you are here I guess you might want to. If you read it and want to hear more let me know. Comment below or send me an email here. Here is the first chapter:
No More Fear
Written by Jane Hinrichs
Chapter 1
It began with a herd of elk – not even a big herd. It was a bachelor herd of six elk bulls. Beautiful creatures. Majestic. They didn’t belong in our part of the country, so when they showed up everyone hoped for a glimpse of them. I remember the day I saw them. Driving home off of Highway 63 on the gravel (really more like dirt) road going west. And on the north side about a mile from my driveway I saw three of the bulls standing motionless in a field watching my rusty Suburban drive by.
I stopped. I couldn’t help it. It was my first chance to see them. There was no doubt what they were. You couldn’t mistake them for deer. They were much too big and their heads and necks were darker than their bodies. I stopped right in the middle of the road and stared. They stared back. If only I had brought my binoculars, but I really didn’t expect I’d ever get a chance to encounter them. The first time I heard about them was from my husband. They’d been on our driveway. I figured they were just passing through.
That was weeks, even months before I saw them. They have claimed this country theirs. No one knows where they bed at night. They’re stealthy, great hiders. Not like white-tailed deer which are skittish and pretty stupid (forgive me if you disagree). Sometimes it seems they have a suicide pact with each other. I’ve hit three of them in the last 18 months.
After the elk came the big cats. Now, we didn’t see any correlation between them and the bulls. It was Loony Larry 10 miles south of us (I don’t mean any disrespect. That’s the name he goes by. I think his dead brother was the first to call him that – ironically Larry seems to resemble his nickname more and more every year). Loony Larry has a zoo license. No, he doesn’t have a zoo, and I know that is probably not the legal term for what he’s got. He never intends to have a zoo. He just has too much money to play around with. So, he watched that Tiger King show on Netflix and what he got out of it was that he needed big cats. So, he got his people (none of us locals know who they are) and his money to get him all the legal licenses he needed to house big cats on his ranch. Last count he had ten African lions, two Bengal tigers, a leopard and four mountain lions. I think maybe the mountain lions were the problem. More on that later.
But we have to go on living no matter what inhabits our world, right? These days everyone carries firearms on their belts or in their bags. Even if they hate guns. Even I carry one now.