Part 3
By noon, the storm had closed the county road and made immediate transport impossible.
Rebecca took legal custody of the bobcats under her rehabilitation permit. With Nate’s approval, Walt’s heated workshop became a temporary satellite holding site until the road reopened and the animals were stable enough to move.
The arrangement came with rules.
No visitors. No unnecessary handling. No photographs posted online. The windows were covered, the exterior door was locked, and a camera allowed Rebecca and Walt to monitor the animals without entering.
“You are providing space and following my written care plan,” Rebecca told him. “They are not pets, and you are not running a private zoo.”
“I’ve never wanted a zoo.”
“You followed a wounded predator into the woods with a heart condition. I’m being specific.”
Nate called an ambulance for Walt despite his objections. At the hospital in Ely, an ECG and blood tests showed no new heart damage, but the physician warned that the combination of exertion, cold exposure, and angina could easily have ended differently.
Walt returned home that evening under orders to rest.
He found Rebecca asleep in a folding chair outside the workshop enclosure. The adult bobcat lay behind the inner barrier with both newborns pressed against her belly. The yearling occupied the far corner, its injured paw wrapped and its yellow eyes fixed on every movement.
“The kittens nursed twice,” Rebecca whispered. “That’s the best thing that’s happened all day.”
The mother’s microchip identified her as B-14, a female briefly studied by state biologists three years earlier. The yearling was almost certainly her surviving offspring from the previous spring.
Walt privately thought of the young cat as Scout because it had crossed the lake first and found what the mother could not. He never used the name around Rebecca.
For the next several days, his life settled into the rhythm of the rehabilitation chart taped beside the workshop door.
6:00 a.m.: check temperature and camera.
8:00 a.m.: replace water through the service hatch.
Noon: record whether the mother ate.
Every four hours: observe the kittens without entering.
Rebecca came twice a day. Nate searched the forest with two other conservation officers, removing every illegal cable restraint they found.
Walt spent more time watching the monitor than the television. The mother initially ignored food, but she kept the kittens beneath her chest. Scout ate only when no humans were visible.
On the fourth evening, Erin called.
“You missed the cardiology telehealth appointment,” she said.
Walt looked at the muted monitor. “Something happened here.”
“There is always something happening there.”
“This was an emergency.”
A tired silence filled the line.
“What kind?”
He told her about the fish, the den, and the temporary rehabilitation setup. He left out the moment his boot went through the ice. He also left out the two nitroglycerin tablets.
Erin listened without interrupting.
When he finished, she said, “May twelfth is three weeks away.”
“I know.”
“You promised you would come.”
“I said I’d try.”
“No, Dad. You said yes, and then you began changing the meaning one word at a time.”
Walt rubbed his eyes. “I can’t leave while these animals are here.”
“Of course you can’t.”
The bitterness in her voice struck harder than anger.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means every emergency gets the part of you that never hesitates. Everyone else gets whatever is left.”
“That isn’t fair.”
“Was it fair when Mom died?”
Walt said nothing.
June had been at home under hospice care when a bus collided with a fuel truck on Highway 53. Although Walt was off duty, the county called every experienced medic it could reach.
June had told him to go.
Erin, twenty-six then, had stayed beside her mother while Walt spent six hours helping strangers out of twisted metal. June died forty minutes before he returned.
Walt had carried her last instruction—Go, they need you—as permission and punishment ever since.
“She asked me to leave,” he said.
“She was dying, Dad. She was still trying to take care of you.”
Walt stared at June’s blue mug on the workbench.
“I’m not discussing this tonight.”
“That’s what you always say when the conversation isn’t something you can fix with gauze.”
He ended the call too quickly and immediately regretted it.
At 2:13 the next morning, an alarm from the monitoring camera woke him. The smaller newborn had crawled away from its mother and lay alone near the edge of the bedding. Walt turned up the infrared image. The kitten’s chest was not moving…
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