No lights were struck, no navigation lights marked the helicopter. The only illumination was the eerie glow of the pilot's instrument panel through the bubble of Plexiglas on the front of the fuselage.

Two men jumped from the helicopter. One's hair shone like a white flame in the cold light. The other was dark- another shadow in the night. Between them they dragged a crate six feet long and three feet square from the back of the helicopter. Moving quickly, with practiced motions, they lifted two more boxes, one from each of the wire-mesh baskets suspended above the runners to either side of the aircraft, and set them on the ground. If they spoke, the sound of the rotors drowned out their voices.

The white-haired man climbed back into the helicopter. Shadowman waved once and the aircraft lifted up, slipped over the ridge and dropped again from sight down the long ravine.

"Cheeky bastards," Anna whispered. Flashes sparked in the periphery of her vision. She was pressing the binoculars too hard into her eye sockets. Easing back, she forced herself to breathe slowly. Then she let herself look again. The shadow man had disappeared. Focusing her glasses on the largest of the three crates, Anna studied it. Through the slats she could just discern a faint green light, the color of a glowworm.

Anna had expected it, waited for it, considered it when she was planning this night venture. This time she was to watch and wait, make notes and remember. She'd promised herself and, in her mind if not via AT &T, promised Molly. There'd be no Lone Ranger, no John Wayne, no Rambolina, no misguided tragic heroines. Just the watching and the waiting and the gathering of evidence. Then channels: proper channels and legal gymnastics. And faith.

"One whole hell of a lot of faith," Anna muttered. Staring hard at the dying green light inside the crate, she wondered where she'd thought she would find that faith, the strength to sit and watch the slaughter, the belief that this one must die to get the system rolling. A system that didn't give a damn, a system that counted non-human lives as "resources."

"Fuck that," she said aloud, frightening herself with the noise. For a second she froze, a palm clamped across her mouth, in horror of her outburst. But Shadowman did not reappear.

Where was he?

Anna cursed silently.

Slipped off for a pee? Why hide? To his knowledge none but spiders and snakes looked on. Anna forced every spark of her concentration into her hearing until it felt as if her ears waved around her head on stalks.

Faint, scrabbling: a tiny avalanche scraped loose in the ravine between the hills, down from the saddle. Shadowman had made a misstep. Anna knew where he was and, from where he was, he couldn't see the crates. That decided her.

Rising in one fluid motion, she moved to the far edge of the ridge where she, too, would be out of sight from the inhabited darkness of the ravine, and ran lightly down the animal track she'd followed that afternoon. In the glareless light of the moon with its hard contrasts of shadow and light, Anna could see the faint trail clearly. Stones gouged her feet through the soft rubber of her running shoes. Cactus spines would easily penetrate the thin leather. But she moved with scarcely a sound.

Within minutes she reached the flattened saddle where the helicopter had landed. There she dropped to a crouch and, willing heart and lungs to be quiet, again pushed her ears out over the desert. From the ravine came the sound of feet crunching on gravel, rustling. A man unselfconsciously moving about, comfortable in the knowledge that he was alone. A metallic ringing: the top of a canister pried loose.

Shadowman had climbed down to a cache hidden somewhere in the rocks on the side of the ravine. This rendezvous point had all the amenities neatly arranged right on National Park lands. Bastards! Anna repeated, this time without sound.

Staying low, she trotted over to the large crate. A lechugilla spine, sharp as a dagger, cut across her shin above her sneaker top. Anna hardly felt it. She knelt by the box. Snoring, deep and labored, came from inside. Pale fur pressed through the flat metal slats that formed the sides of the cage. Stripes of moonlight painted the panther within. A ghostly midnight tiger with a glowing green necklace and a black radio collar.

Anna squeezed a hand between the slats, touched the fur. Gently, she worked her fingers under the collar, feeling for a pulse. The animal was still deeply under the effects of the ketimine.

The latch on the cage was simple, made to withstand paws, not fingers. Anna tripped it and eased the end of the cage open. The lion's head lolled out, the mouth open, tongue protruding black and deathlike in the colorless light.

Anna unsnapped the glow-ring and dragged it from the cat's neck. The radio collar would not be so easy. Radio collars were riveted on. It would take more time than she had to saw through the heavy leather with her pocketknife. Somewhere there would be a rivet punch.

Great White Hunters don't like their trophies cluttered up with proof of cowardice, Anna thought bitterly. One ear on the ravine, she crept to the crates that had been unloaded from the helicopter's side panniers. Dreading the squeak of metal hinges, she lifted the lid of the first. Noiseless. Oiled. Everything bespoke well-planned, often executed night operations. How often? Anna did the simple arithmetic in her head: twenty radio-collared lions; three left. One lay in the crate. Karl tended one in his animal Shangri-La. One still roamed free. This was the nineteenth time. Nineteen full moons had spotlighted this murder-that-was-not-murder.

"Goddamned sons-of-bitches," Anna whispered. In the crate she had opened rifle barrels gleamed. Cold polished metal catching the moon. The top rifle, resting on a cloth of felt, was ornately carved. Anna dragged it out where she could see the stock clearly: the Sako, Paulsen's baby. Beneath were four more rifles, a cleaning kit, four custom-made silencers and several hundred rounds of ammunition.

Anna moved to the second crate and opened it. A radio receiving device set, no doubt, to the stolen frequency; the frequency emitted by the collars on the lions. What better way to locate one's prey in this technological age? In a canvas pouch affixed to the crate's inside edge she found the rivet punch.

The panther's breathing seemed slightly less stenorous. Again Anna felt for a pulse. Slightly stronger, perhaps. "It's okay, sweetie," she whispered as she pushed her hands beneath the lion and dragged it partially out of the crate where she would have room to work. Near a hundred pounds: the lion was fully grown, probably male.

The rivet punch was less straightforward than Anna had hoped. Wrestling with the leather and the inert lion, trying to thread the jaws of the punch through the proper holes, the light of the moon was suddenly inadequate. A final wrench and the collar fell free.

Anna smoothed down the fur of the lion's neck where it had been worn ragged beneath the collar. Feeling blessed, she stroked the darker ears, the fine muscled shoulders. Wake up, Anna thought, run away. Then I can, too.

A scraping, stone on stone, jerked her attention from the panther. Shadowman. Just below the ridge. She had stayed way too long. He was so close she could hear his puffing breaths. She didn't bother to look around. There was no place to hide.

Unsnapping the keeper with her thumb, she drew the.357 from its holster and steadied her arms on the top of the lion's crate. Without moving, she waited until the man had climbed clear of the ravine, taken a few steps onto the flat. His arms were full of goods retrieved from the cache: a canvas tarp meant to shroud the lion's corpse, flares so the helicopter could find the hunters at the end of the hunt.