Track of the Cat - Part 1 - Nebraska Barr - 1993

Aug 5, 2026

Uploaded by Patrick

Track of the Cat follows ranger Anna Pigeon as she flees New York for refuge in West Texas wilderness and becomes entangled in violence and murder. When fellow park ranger Sheila Drury is mysteriously killed and another ranger vanishes, Anna’s investigation unfolds against the harsh realities of the Guadalupe Mountains. The early narrative grounds the case in Anna’s transect work for mountain lion sign while contrasting her desire for solitude with dangerous human connections.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryStory & Novel

FormatPDF

Pages197

Reading Time5 h 3 min

AccessFree to download

Track Of The Cat

Anna Pigeon’s arrival in West Texas

A murder and a missing ranger

Mountain lion transects and sign collection

Track Of The Cat

Nevada Barr

Fleeing New York to find refuge as a ranger in the remote backcountry of West Texas, Anna Pigeon stumbles into a web of violence and murder when fellow park ranger Sheila Drury is mysteriously killed and another ranger vanishes.

Nevada Barr

Track Of The Cat

The first book in the Anna Pigeon series, 1993

For my mother and sister

THERE hadn't been a god for many years. Not the nightgown-clad patriarch of Sunday school coloring books; not the sensitive young man with the inevitable auburn ringlets Anna had stared through in the stainedglass windows at Mass; not the many-armed and many-faceted deities of the Bhagavad Gita that she'd worshipped alongside hashish and Dustin Hoffman in her college days. Even the short but gratifying parade of earth goddesses that had taken her to their ample bosoms in her early thirties had gone, though she remembered them with more kindness than the rest.

God was dead. Let Him rest in peace. Now, finally, the earth was hers with no taint of Heaven.

Anna sat down on a smooth boulder, the top hollowed into a natural seat. The red peeling arms of a Texas madrona held a veil of dusty shade over her eyes. This was the third day of this transect. By evening she would reach civilization: people. A contradiction in terms, she thought even as the words trickled through her mind. Electric lights, television, human companionship, held no allure. But she wanted a bath and she wanted a drink. Mostly she wanted a drink.

And maybe Rogelio. Rogelio had a smile that made matrons hide the hand with the wedding ring. A smile women would lie for and men would follow into battle. A smile, Anna thought with habitual cynicism, that the practiced hucksters in Juarez flashed at rich gringos down from Minnesota.

Maybe Rogelio. Maybe not. Rogelio took a lot of energy.

A spiny rock crevice lizard peered out at her with one obsidian eye, its gray-and-black mottled spines creating a near-perfect illusion of dead leaves and twigs fallen haphazardly into a crack in the stone.

"I see you," Anna said as she wriggled out of her pack. It weighed scarcely thirty pounds. She'd eaten and drunk it down from thirty-seven in the past two days. The poetry of it pleased her. It was part of the order of nature: the more one ate the easier life got. Diets struck Anna as one of the sourest notes of a spoiled country.

Letting the pack roll back, she carefully lowered it to the rock surface. She wasn't careful enough. There was an instant of rustling and the lizard

vanished. "Don't leave town on my account," she addressed the seemingly empty crevice. "I'm just passing through."

Anna dug a plastic water jug from the side pocket of her backpack and unscrewed the cap. Yellow pulp bobbed to the top. Next time she would not put lemon slices in; the experiment had failed. After a few days the acid taste grew tiresome. Besides, it gave her a vague feeling of impropriety, as if she were drinking from her finger-bowl.

Smiling inwardly at the thought, Anna drank. Finger-bowls, Manhattan, were miles and years away from her now, Molly and AT &T her only remaining connections.

The water was body temperature. Just the way she liked it. Ice-water jarred her fillings, chilled her insides. "If it's cold, it'd better be beer," she would tell the waitress at Lucy's in Carlsbad. Sometimes she'd get warm water, sometimes a cold Tecate. It depended on who was on shift that day. Either way, Anna drank it. In the high desert of West Texas moisture was quickly sucked from the soft flesh of unprotected humans.

No spines, she thought idly. No waxy green skin. Nothing to keep us from drying up and blowing away. She took another pull at the water and amused herself with the image of tumbling ass over teakettle like a great green and gray stickerweed across the plains to the south.

Capping the water she looked down at the reason she had stopped: the neatly laid pile of scat between her feet. It was her be

FAQs

What sets Anna Pigeon’s story in motion in Track of the Cat?

Anna flees New York to take refuge as a ranger in West Texas and becomes involved when ranger Sheila Drury is mysteriously killed and another ranger disappears.

Where does Anna Pigeon’s work intersect with the investigation?

Her ongoing transect searches for mountain lion sign in the Guadalupe Mountains provide details of her routine and context for the surrounding dangers.

What is Anna’s broader situation during the early part of the novel?

She is isolated in the remote backcountry, focusing on survival and her field work, while the escalating violence involving fellow rangers pushes events toward murder and pursuit.

Aug 5, 2026

Uploaded by Patrick