Chapter 19
“It’s all right,” Trap said, his voice low. He put one hand in front of Lila Mae and then stepped slowly, moving the bulk of his body in front of her. “Stay behind me.”
“What is that?” Lila Mae asked, as she’d never seen anything like it before.
“It’s a badger,” he said. “And we must have gotten in his way.”
Lila Mae had looked over a couple of minutes ago when she’d heard rustling in the undergrowth.
She’d seen the gray animal with the white stripe right down the middle of its face and over its nose and black all around its eyes.
She’d jumped to her feet and cried out, and the badger had flattened itself and hissed at her like a snake. A really angry snake.
“What does he want?” she asked.
“My guess is it’s a female,” Trap said. “They have their babies in June, and they’ll still be in the den.”
Lila Mae’s fingers ached for how hard she clutched the pizza box. She’d almost thrown it at the badger, and something inside her still urged her to do that.
“She doesn’t want to fight with us,” Trap said. “Just stay still, and maybe she’ll find a way around us and back to her den.”
“How do you know where the den is?” Lila Mae asked, the tears on her face starting to dry and crack.
“I don’t,” Trap said. “But you can usually tell. It’s like an oval in the ground or the side of a hill, with a big fan of dirt spread out. Badgers are the best diggers there are.” He curled one hand backward around Lila Mae’s forearm. “I want you to turn around, sweetheart, and look behind us.”
“Why?” she whimpered.
“Sometimes,” he said. “Badgers hunt with coyotes.”
Her heartbeat whipped through her body, and Lila Mae took a deep breath and told herself to be brave. She’d moved halfway across the country by herself to open a new facility that no one believed she could.
She could turn around and look at the landscape behind her. She did, her feet moving an inch or two each time, and it took her probably eight movements until her back pressed against Trap’s.
“Do you see anything?” he asked.
“No,” she whispered, her voice barely louder than the wind in the trees.
“Badgers dig out moles and voles, prairie dogs, mice,” he said.
And while Lila Mae had enjoyed his Three Rivers education up to this point, she didn’t much care what badgers did.
“As those animals try to escape, sometimes they make it. And if a coyote is smart, he hunts with a badger and catches that animal as it flees from its den.”
“I don’t see anything,” Lila Mae said, except for the last mottled rays of sunlight coming through the leaves on the trees.
“We must have caught this one right as she was leaving the den,” Trap said. “Badgers are nocturnal.”
Lila Mae nodded, though she couldn’t see him. “What do we do?”
“I want you to take the pizza in your hands and start walking very slowly back to the UTV.”
“By myself?” Her voice rose in both volume and pitch, and the air she breathed in did not feel like the right thing to have in her lungs.
“You can do it, Lila Mae,” he said. “She’s not lunging at me. Don’t look back. Just go.”
“What if I see another one?” she asked.
“Then stop.” He made it sound so easy, but it took Lila Mae a good ten seconds of scanning tree trunks, branches, leaves, fallen logs, and more before she dared take a single step away from Trap. To his credit, he waited patiently, oh so still, until she took the first step.
“I’m right behind you, sweetheart,” he murmured, and Lila Mae simply looked forward and took one step after the other, telling herself that each one got her closer to safety.
She’d done a lot of research on the Texas panhandle before moving here, but she hadn’t looked up the dangers of a badger attack.
Lila Mae liked to arm herself with knowledge, but she almost didn’t want to know what could’ve happened.
She heard rustling behind her, and when she twisted to look over her shoulder, she found Trap piling the second pizza box and the Styrofoam pasta containers on top of the picnic basket, which he then lifted.
She faced forward again, looking left, right, left, right, her heartbeat pounding a staccato rhythm through every cell in her body.
This couldn’t be healthy, and Lila Mae started moving diagonally away from the riverbed and out into the more open grasslands of her ranch.
She had no idea if badgers lived out here or not, but as that one had come wandering through the trees, she hoped its den was back toward the river.
She reached the road and found the UTV probably twenty-five feet away.
She turned back and caught glimpses of Trap’s jeans and gray T-shirt as he moved through the trees.
It took her a moment, but then she realized that he was walking backward, and every step he took hardly made a sound, despite the dry twigs, grasses, and leaves on the ground.
“Trap,” she whispered. “Come out to the road.”
He didn’t change his course, and Lila Mae started to walk parallel to him, though from twenty feet away. He finally started to edge closer to the road, and she arrived at the UTV before him, but only by a few steps.
“I think we’re good,” he said. “It didn’t follow me, and at one point I think I heard it scurry off.”
“Where do you think its den is?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I didn’t see any fans of dirt or anything that would indicate a badger den. Jason and I can come look in the morning.”
“No way,” Lila Mae said as she moved over toward the driver’s side of the UTV.
That now put the vehicle between her, the trees, the river, and the badger.
Of course, something could be behind her, and Lila Mae whipped her attention around, as if a coyote would be flying through the air, teeth bared, ready to sink its fangs into her chest.
There was nothing but her adrenaline pounding through her veins and her mind conjuring up all kinds of wild animal attacks.
She turned around, and Trap pulled her into his chest. “We’re okay,” he said, his voice calm and soothing. “You’re fine. Nothing happened.”
Lila Mae dissolved into tears and clung to him, and not only because he gave the best hugs on the planet, but because he’d protected her. He’d helped her. He’d saved her.
“I don’t want you to come look for the badger in the morning.” She managed to stem the flow of tears and pulled away. She looked up at him. “Let’s just leave it.”
“Lila Mae, this is your ranch,” he said. “We can at least figure out where it is and leave it for this season. Eventually, you’ll have the whole thing developed, and it will be nice to know what’s living here and where.”
She nodded. “But you don’t have to do it tomorrow, do you?”
He smiled softly down at her. “Like I said, badgers are nocturnal. They’re usually only out from dusk until dawn.” He looked over his shoulder. “That one must have been hungry and come out a few minutes early.” Lila Mae looked around as the sunlight had definitely started to disappear.
“It is dusky,” she said.
“Right, and we’re in her habitat.”
She nodded. “Let’s just go eat on the back deck of the Intake Center,” she said. “There are fans in the ceiling, and it has a good view of the sunset.”
“Sold,” Trap said, and he released her from his arms and kept his hand on the small of her back as she climbed onto the UTV.
He got in beside her, put his arm around her shoulders, and pressed a kiss to her hairline. “We’re okay, Lila Mae.”
“It hissed at me,” she said, a fresh wave of emotion threatening to overwhelm her again.
“Yeah, it sure did.” He chuckled. “It was as scared of you as you were of it, though, baby. And like I said, she doesn’t want to fight us. She just wanted to protect her babies.”
Lila Mae nodded and sniffled. Trap started up the UTV again and swung them in a wide arc away from the river and pointed them back the way they’d come.
Thankfully, the engine noise made conversation more difficult. They hadn’t even tried on the way out, and Lila Mae spent the fifteen minutes it took to get back to the Intake Center focusing on breathing in and out, calming her racing pulse back to normal.
It felt like someone had wrung her out by the time she sat down at the round wicker table she’d put on the back porch. Trap put the pizza box in front of her and said, “You’ve got to eat, Lila Mae.”
She looked up at him, and slowly, the fog that had descended upon her during the drive lifted. “Thank you, Trap.” She gave him a weak smile.
“Of course, sweetheart.” He pulled his chair further around the table so it faced due west and sat beside her. “This is a great view.” He flipped open the tops of the two pasta dishes. “I can run inside and heat these up if you want.”
Lila Mae didn’t want to be alone, and she simply shook her head. “No, it’s fine,” she said. “Stay here with me.”
“You sure?” Trap said.
She nodded as some of her strength came back into her limbs and heart. “I want some of the Alfredo.”
“You got it, baby.” Trap rearranged the containers and then half-stood to lift open the lid on the picnic basket and get out a fork.
He handed it to her, and Lila Mae murmured a thank you.
She really liked how he alternated between calling her baby, honey, and sweetheart, though they’d only been dating for a short time.
Lila Mae felt closer to him now than she had even a half-hour ago. Perhaps a near-attack from a badger would do that.
She twirled a forkful of fettuccine together and looked over to him.
“Every year for my parents’ anniversary,” she said.
“We would do what my momma called ‘The Anniversary Walk.’ They would lead us and every member on our staff on a slow, deliberate walk of the property—at sunset. It was like we had to examine every oak tree, admire the symmetry of every garden, and hear the bubbling of every water fountain. Momma always ran her fingers along the side of the gazebo.”