Part 4
Vance finally returned to the property in late November. The oak leaves had long since rotted into a black, slippery paste on the driveway, and the ground was locked in the season’s first hard freeze. The black SUV rolled to a stop, the heavy tires fracturing the thin ice over the puddles.
He left the engine running. He popped the liftgate and pulled out the felt cat cave—the one from the city condo—and an empty plastic litter box. He carried them into the wooden gazebo and dropped them onto the frosted floorboards. Then, he pulled a large paper bag of the cheapest supermarket kibble from his wool coat pocket. He didn’t look for a bowl. He just ripped the paper open and dumped a pile of it directly onto the wood. The brown pebbles scattered into the corners.
“Meredith is in the ICU,” Vance said. His voice was hollow, stripped of its usual sharp edge. He was staring past the gazebo, looking out at the dead, gray tree line. He was talking to the empty air, meticulously filing away his own guilt. “I have a dying wife. I don’t have the capacity for this.”
He didn’t try to look under the far bench where the cat was hiding. He turned around and walked briskly into the brick cabin. He stayed inside for barely fifteen minutes—just long enough to bleed the water lines so the pipes wouldn’t burst in the winter, and to grab a few taped cardboard boxes. He threw them into the trunk. This time, he wrapped a heavy steel chain around the front gate and secured it with a brass padlock. He got behind the wheel and drove away, never once checking his rearview mirror.
When the engine noise finally faded down the county highway, Mia crept out from the shadows. She approached the scattered kibble, sniffing it cautiously. A moment later, the sparrow dropped down onto the edge of the wooden picnic table. It tilted its head, fluttered down to the floorboards, pecked at a broken piece of kibble, and gave a short chirp. It wasn’t playing; it was foraging before the deep freeze. But for Mia, that small burst of movement was the last tether to the warm days she had spent with Meredith.
The gazebo boards offered no protection against the massive lake-effect snowstorms that buried the community weeks later. Heavy drifts sealed off the private roads. The long nights brought sub-zero wind chills that howled through the gaps in the wood. The pile of kibble vanished quickly, carried off by local birds and field mice. The water in the plastic bowl froze into a solid, unbreakable block of ice by early December.
To avoid freezing to death, Mia learned to wedge herself into the very back of the felt cave. She curled into an impossibly tight knot, tucking her frostbitten paw pads under her belly, breathing into her own fur to trap whatever microscopic heat she could generate. Her body consumed its own fat reserves. Her ribs pushed against her skin like a wire cage. The thick undercoat, without Meredith’s brushing, formed dense, rigid mats that pulled painfully at her skin with every step.
She survived the dehydration only by licking the midday ice-melt off a rusted aluminum downspout on the side of the cabin, waiting for the brief hours when the winter sun hit the metal.
But hunger was a stronger drive than the cold. The hunting instincts that had once been a lazy summer game became her only mechanism for survival. She learned to sit perfectly still against the brick foundation, where the wind was slightly broken. She closed her eyes and listened. She learned to differentiate the hollow sound of wind in the dead branches from the faint, rhythmic scratching of tiny claws deep beneath the snow crust. The blood of the voles provided the moisture and calories the frozen landscape denied her.
On a blindingly bright morning in February, when the sunlight reflected off the icy snowpack like shattered glass, Mia sat near the buried porch steps. She was dangerously exhausted. A fine, uncontrollable tremor ran continuously through her front legs. She breathed shallowly, refusing to expend a single unnecessary calorie.
Suddenly, her right ear flicked.
Just beneath the snowpack, inches from the bottom step, came the distinct, steady friction of movement. Something was burrowing through the powder beneath the hard ice crust. Mia shifted her weight backward, moving a fraction of an inch at a time so the snow wouldn’t crunch beneath her paws. Her pupils dilated into wide black pools despite the glaring sun.
The scratching grew louder. A tiny fissure appeared in the crust. For a fraction of a second, the gray nose of a vole broke the surface. Mia stopped breathing. She loaded all her remaining strength into her emaciated, trembling muscles and launched herself forward.