Once the new project is settled in, I, and I am sure each one of you too, look forward to life on our wonderful ranch returning to normal.

  The message was signed “Jimmy” in a bold scrawl. Bridget and Shel looked across the office at each other, eyes wide in surprise, speechless. Almost immediately Bridget picked up her tab.

  “What the fuck, Tom?” It was the first time Shel had heard Bridget swear.

  Shel called Matt.

  “Have you seen the memo? Did you know?”

  “I’m down here now with Jimmy Bell and Steve. It’s like somebody just kicked an anthill. Jimmy made the announcement t’ the workers here, and now we’re all rushing around doin last minute stuff. They say one hour. Got t’ go. Talk tonight, babe.” And the connection broke.

  There was a number marked “Cousin Colin” in Shel’s tab that was intended for emergency messages. She called it, got the voice message box, and said only two words, “Panthera leo.” She’d send a report tonight. Her mind was racing with the same question Bridget had been asking Tom—What the fuck?

  Shel had a degree in environmental science and had spent a decade working with environmental activist groups, particularly in opposition to genetic engineering, and she just couldn’t think what the point would be. After the first time Colin had mentioned the lion ranch she had looked it up. All the available information suggested it was on the up and up, exactly what it’s publicity said it was. But why bring them to Montana? Lions were not well adapted to the climate, and there were already native mountain lions filling one of the predator niches in the forested areas. She could not imagine anything that might explain this, unless there was some supersecret genetic modification project being concealed. But again—why? Who needs cold-weather African lions? Makes no sense. I’m glad I like it here, otherwise this would make my six months of spying seem like a waste, a big zero.

  When they talked that night on the video link Matt’s response was similar to what he’d said about the ants: “Rich boys and their toys. I got no explanation, no justification but that. Rich people think differently and Jimmy Bell’s really, really rich. He decides he likes lions, bingo—they get money. There was a guy, back in the 2010s I think, who made billions in computers or software or something and do y’know what he spent hundreds of millions of it on? Sailboat racin. Crazy.”

  “Maybe,” she replied, unconvinced or at the very least uncertain.

  “At least the money’s good. I’ve racked up a bunch of overtime. I’m going t’ see Charlie for Labor Day weekend and buy him a bicycle and start teachin him t’ ride it. And I owe you a night on the town since I’ve been too busy t’ pay attention.”

  She started to mutter, “You don’t need to do that,” but he insisted. The idea of being away from the ranch at a restaurant or a hotel, especially a hotel, warmed her.

  After a brief pause, she asked him, “What do they look like? How many are there? What did you see?”

  “I didn’t see much, really. They had what looked like horse-transport trailers, four of ’em, backed up t’ pens outside the main buildin. They attached some nettin between the trailers and the fences, opened the backs of the trailers, and the lions came walkin out. Not mountain lions, the adults were twice as big. Like lions y’see in the movies. A little confused, looking around at the new place. The cubs I saw must’ve been the youngest because they were a lot smaller than the adult.” He continued to describe the scene, but as much as Shel tried to connect with his story it felt anticlimactic, a letdown. She couldn’t say what she had expected—something visibly altered, alien, or what. But not lions. It just didn’t make sense, not as the culmination of her “assignment” at the ranch. For the first time in months she felt lost, directionless.

  When she finished talking to Matt, she wrote her report to Colin. She felt bad about using so much of what Matt had said after she’d promised herself not to use him as a source. Once the report was out, she waited for Colin’s call, which she expected within ten or fifteen minutes. She didn’t want to talk to him but figured there was no way around it so she poured herself a drink before the call came through.

  He asked some perfunctory questions, like he was going through the motions, until Shel asked, “What is this about Colin? Is this what your people expected?”

  “No. It’s reasonable to think genetically engineered alterations might not be visible to the eye. But lions? We have no idea what’s going on.”

  “Maybe he just likes them. It’s not like he can’t afford it. Can I send the ear punches back?”

  “There’s got to be something, we’re just not seeing it,” he replied, quietly, for once, his voice conveying uncertainty and confusion. “Keep me posted.”

  Chapter 12

  On the Friday morning after the lions’ arrival, Matt came into the office to meet with Tom about the ranch work that had been delayed by the ant farm project. Shel and Bridget were standing together by Shel’s desk talking with Mary and Julia, who were leaning on the office counter. They were all giggling and whispering as if sharing some particularly juicy piece of gossip. Tom had just come out of his office and was looking at the women, clearly mystified. When he saw Matt, he looked up at him and shrugged.

  “Matt,” Shel said. “We’ve figured out the new project.” She looked at the other women as she said this. All of them were grinning.

  “So?” he asked.

  Julia answered, “I’ve heard from Arlen that there’s no adult male lions, right?” Matt had seen that, too.

  “Yeah,” Matt said, “there’s male cubs but no male adults.”

  “We figured,” Shel followed up, “that’s the genetic thing they’re doing. I mean they wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t some genetic experiment, right?” Matt nodded, and Mary chuckled. “So the most reasonable assumption is that there aren’t any males because they don’t need males to produce the cubs anymore. It’s about parthenogenesis.” More giggles from the women.

  “What’s so funny about that?” Tom asked.

  “Tom, dear,” said Bridget, “when they make it work for people, you guys will be out of a job.”

  “You’re all done for,” Julia added, laughing. For a second Matt thought, that can’t be right. Then he saw it was a joke, smiled weakly, and followed Tom’s lead into the office, closing the door on the women’s laughter.

  **

  Matt and his crew worked every day but Sunday that week and into the following one. Mainly he was catching up on ranch maintenance, but he was still out at the ant farm for a couple of hours every other day. He escaped to Shel’s apartment Saturday night and Sunday, and despite the welcome day off he felt some tension from the continuing secrecy that the PAS people insisted on.

  The arrangement of the main ant farm complex was a grid two squares wide and three long, with each square being one hundred feet on a side. The middle square on one side was the research building, while the other five were pens originally built for the Bison antiquus project. The pens and the building were separated by twelve foot wide corridors between the fences. By opening and closing the gates in sequence, the staff could get the animals from the building into the pens and from pen to pen. One of the major outdoor projects in spring and early summer had been building steel-frame roof structures over three of the pens.

  Adjacent to this complex were two fenced pastures of about a hundred acres each, also built for the original bison project. All the fences were twelve feet tall and heavy enough to stop a charging bison. These days, the lions were sometimes in the pastures when Matt was on site, but more often they were in the pens. There were four “families” of lions, each included a mother and her three cubs. He was there often enough that he had learned the names of the mothers—Kitty, Moppet, Dinah, and Rashida—and whenever he was there, coming or going, he made a detour past the pens to look in on them. After all, he might not be able to talk about them, but he could look. Kitty’s and Rashida’s cubs were the oldest at about two and a half years (or so he had been told), Moppet’s were next at about nine months younger, and Dinah’s the youngest at about a year old. It was like going to a private zoo, he thought, exotic animals and no crowds. The staff members he encountered occasionally didn’t say much, but they appeared quite fond of and attached to the animals. He’d wanted to ask them about the cubs, but the PAS people had made it pretty clear that was out of the question.

  He’d noticed that Kitty’s cubs were much bigger than Rashida’s, bigger even than Kitty. They were leggy and tall, their color was reddish rather than buff or tan, and they had no tufts of hair on the ends of their tails like their mother. Kitty’s male cubs didn’t have the manes Rashida’s cub was beginning to grow, but overall they seemed to have thicker coats. Moppet’s looked more like Kitty’s. The youngest ones, Dinah’s, he couldn’t tell. He’d look on the data net and see if there were normal variations like that.

  Matt’s main concern at the ant farm, however, was the contractor for the five miles of new fence. They were weeks behind, and although there were causes of the delay on both sides, the PAS people were livid, saying it threatened the project and going on and on, raging at the contractor during meetings. Matt didn’t think that was helping. The contractor, as far as he could see, was trying to speed up and get the job done as soon as possible. There were maybe three or four weeks to go with a couple of sections close to the pen complex the last to be completed. Arlen was having his own troubles with the contractor who installed the surveillance and access-control systems, which worked for the most part but failed often enough that they were an unreliable headache.

  Matt escaped work to Shel’s apartment Saturday night and Sunday, but despite the welcome time off, he still felt some tension from the continuing secrecy that the PAS people insisted on. He had been reminded a few times not to discuss any details of the project or its facilities with anyone, including other ranch employees. It put a barrier between him and the others that didn’t seem necessary. Maybe that was why Shel seemed edgy, he thought. Could she sense him holding back? When he was back to a normal workload after the ant farm was done, he figured, it’d be time for them to have a talk about where they were with each other.

  They went shopping together to pick out a bike for Charlie. On the Friday of the Labor Day weekend, he loaded it in the back of his truck and kissed Shel goodbye before driving to Billings, where he’d stay with his friend Merle and spend his time with Charlie. He thought of her the entire time he was on the road.

  **

  He left Billings on Tuesday at three in the morning, reflecting on his weekend with Charlie as he drove but at the same time looking forward to seeing Shel again. I must be falling for her, he thought. She’s always on my mind. It feels good and it’s scary. Is that love? What if something goes wrong? He could feel his fear like a hollowness in the pit of his stomach.

  He was back at the ranch around nine and his first stop when he arrived was to say hello to Shel at the office. No one else was in, and they took advantage of that to spend a couple of minutes kissing, embracing, and saying how they had missed each other. It felt so good to see her and feel her embrace.

  “OK if I come for dinner?” she asked. A picture of his empty refrigerator flashed through his mind, but she went on, “I stocked you up when I was here Saturday. There’s enough for two.” She kissed him again, playfully. So that was set, and he went off to start through his to-do list for the day with a smile on his face.

  That evening Matt and Shel sat naked in Matt’s bed eating their cold dinner and talking about the weekend. Shel had made dinner at Matt’s place after work, but he had not arrived until seven. The excitement of being together again had led to an extended and intimate greeting followed by intense lovemaking. Only now as the sun was setting had they gotten around to eating, lit by the evening sun through his bedroom window.

  He was telling her about his day when she interrupted him: “No more ant farm, please. It’s been nothing but a source of stress and tension for everyone, and I want to be done with it. I know that’s selfish of me, but I just decided this weekend so now I’m telling you. I want it to go away and just leave us here together on the ranch.” He was taken aback. Her tone was assertive—and wow, did she look good there next to him in the bed wearing nothing but smears of barbecue sauce—so he decided not to argue. He let it go, though he felt, even in his postcoital haze, as if some part of him had been dismissed.

  “Tell me about your weekend,” he said.

  “It was fine, considering I was on my own,” she said, winking at him. “Saturday I went with Julia and Mary and Dillon for a ride and a picnic by the river. We got to talking about guns and shooting, and Julia told them she has been giving me lessons; so Mary and Dillon said we should all go to the range and have a contest.” Matt looked concerned. “Don’t worry, we only had one beer apiece. Julia had her .357 and Dillon had a .22 long-barrel revolver, so we spent about an hour killing paper targets. It was fun. The long .22 was different from the one I use with Julia. It’s like you can’t miss at forty feet, but it was tougher at eighty. Mary and Dillon didn’t have a problem, though. Then Julia pulls out her big boy and starts to blast away—that thing is so loud.” Matt was amused at this recitation of weekend ranch entertainment by the city girl.

  “Earplugs?” he asked with a smile.

  “Dillon showed me where they keep some earmuffs at the range, and that made it a lot easier to take. Then Julia tells me I have to move up to the .357 right away in case the lions get out. I was not amused. That’s when I decided no more ant farm talk.”

  “How was the party on Monday?” he asked. “I got a little about it from Eddy today.”

  “You weren’t there so Fred won the horseshoe tournament and the prize for the year.” She said this in a way that indicated disappointment if not downright disgust. He knew she had developed a dislike for Fred. He shrugged.

  “Sorry. I got my priorities, too, and winnin the contest this year fell off the list.”

  “I know,” she said and leaned over to kiss his cheek. “But it was fun. I got to dance with Ronnie, Jeanette wasn’t there. He’s good, but not as good as you,” she said and reached over her plate to squeeze Matt’s thigh. “What all did you and Charlie do?”

  “We learned t’ ride a bike. That was the big event. It required quite a bit of runnin up and down the street, but he finally got the hang of it. After practicin some every day for three days he seemed moderately stable.” Shel smiled. “There’s a big park near his house so Jackie can take him there t’ practice. Sunday we went t’ a space rocket movie that left me absolutely cold, but he liked it. I thought kids’ movies had t’ have jokes for the adults in ’em. Monday we went t’ the wildlife park they have in Billings.”

  “I didn’t know there was one there,” Shel said. “What kinds of animals?”

  “Charlie really liked the big bugs—tarantulas and centipedes. I liked the Siberian tigers, they were huge and beautiful. And there’s snakes and lizards and wolves. A wide range. He hadn’t ever been before, so that was special.” Matt refrained from telling Shel about the lions and how he had studied them, taking some pictures with his tab and even buying a book at the gift shop to bring home. He was getting curious about what was going on at the ant farm, but Shel obviously didn’t want to hear about anything to do with lions.

  **

  The ranch calmed down as the excitement and shock of the lions’ arrival tapered off and people returned their attention to everyday concerns. The ant farm gradually settled into its own routine, and lingering items, such as the fence, approached completion.

  Matt continued to pursue his interest in the lions. He had begun to wonder if Kitty’s cubs, and possibly Moppet’s too, were modern lions modified genetically. Or, perhaps, were they another ice age species resurrected, like the ants? Given Jimmy Bell’s obsession with ice age megafauna that was a possibility. But in Matt’s mind big ice age cats were sabertooths with fangs like butcher knives, not at all what had come to the ranch. Research proved that he was wrong about sabertooths being the only ice age cats, and after more study, he decided that Kitty’s cubs were, in fact, American lions, the—formerly—extinct Panthera atrox.

  “Cubs” was really too friendly-sounding a word for them, though, since two of the three were already larger and moved with a more muscular confidence than Kitty. American lions were estimated to reach six hundred pounds, a quarter again bigger than modern lions. They were more agile and athletic and characterized in some descriptions as “killing machines.” They ate anything and everything from mammoths on down. Pack hunters with big brains, their habitats extended across the continent and from the southern Plains to the edges of the retreating glaciers in Canada. Montana and the B.a. Ranch would be ideal for these predators.

  Shel came by the prefab Saturday afternoon, after what he hoped would be his last overtime Saturday for a while. She seemed relaxed, and he wondered if the ranch’s return to a more normal routine after the ant farm project’s arrival had improved her mood. She was affectionate and talkative, even to the point of speculating about what they might do together when his work slowed down in the winter. After she went back to Great Falls the next afternoon he sat on his deck in the fall sunshine thinking about how good he felt and how much he liked her. More than liked her—he was already missing her, feeling lonely. The thought of the next time they might be together made his heart race.

  So did the thoughts of the ant farm and the lions, which intruded on his reverie about Shel. They were serious, the lions, and dangerous. Despite her not wanting to hear about them, he thought she should know. He felt responsible for her.

  **

  Monday morning he was up and preparing to go to work when his tab began to beep excitedly. There was an important message from the ranch. Damn, he thought, that irrigation pipe we haven’t gotten to yet has finally burst. But when he read the message it was something completely different: