Part 6
Walt did not have another heart attack.
The emergency physician found dehydration, exhaustion, and recurrent exertional angina, but no new damage to his heart muscle. That was the good news.
The bad news was that Walt had skipped medication, lost eleven pounds, and treated repeated chest pain as an inconvenience.
He spent the night under observation.
Rebecca and her volunteers continued caring for the bobcats without him. Nate supervised their transfer to the outdoor rehabilitation enclosure the next morning.
Nothing died because Walt was absent.
That fact relieved and unsettled him.
Erin sat beside his hospital bed with her laptop closed on her knees.
“I’m sorry,” Walt said.
“For the ice?”
“For making you stand alone with your mother.”
Erin looked toward the window.
“She told me she wasn’t afraid. I think that was another thing she said to protect us.”
“I should have stayed.”
“I don’t know. Maybe she truly wanted you to go. What I needed was for you to come home afterward and let me be angry.”
Walt nodded.
“I didn’t know how.”
“You still don’t.”
“No.”
It was the first answer he had given her in years that contained no defense.
He told her the truth about the cabin. Without June and the ambulance service, he woke each morning feeling like a tool left behind after the work was done. The bobcats had not simply needed help. Their need had made him recognizable to himself again.
Erin listened.
“Being needed is not the same as being loved,” she said. “You don’t have to almost die to earn a place in my life.”
Walt swallowed.
“I know that when you say it.”
“Then practice knowing it when I’m not in the room.”
They did not solve everything beside the hospital bed. Erin did not withdraw her invitation to Chicago, and Walt did not agree to sell the cabin.
They made smaller promises.
Walt would see the cardiologist in Duluth and wear a medical-alert device outdoors. He would not go onto late-season ice alone. Erin would stop buying tickets before asking whether he wanted them.
He would spend part of the coming winter with her in Chicago.
She would visit Birchwater Lake without treating every visit like an intervention.
The May 12 flight was changed rather than abandoned. Walt would use it later, after his follow-up appointment.
Over the next ten weeks, the bobcats lived at Rebecca’s facility in a wooded enclosure designed to prepare predators for release.
The mother became less tolerant of human presence, which Rebecca considered progress. She hunted live prey, hid food, and moved her kittens whenever she heard people beyond the screen.
The two young kittens grew into spotted, long-legged bundles of muscle. Scout regained full use of the injured paw, though a slight turn remained visible when the yearling walked slowly.
Walt visited only twice, watching through a concealed blind. He never entered the enclosure.
He began helping Rebecca in ways that did not require him to become the hero of another emergency. He coordinated volunteer drivers, repaired transport crates, and taught a Saturday CPR class at the community center.
Nate’s investigation moved more slowly than the rumors.
The trail-camera card showed Cal Rusk’s snowmobile entering the closed state parcel after trapping season. A search later recovered untagged cable restraints matching those removed from the bobcats, along with messages about selling live animals to an unlicensed exhibitor.
Cal was charged under state wildlife laws. His trapping privileges were suspended pending the case.
There was no dramatic arrest in front of the town and no speech from Walt. The cable was removed from the forest, and the legal process continued without asking him to become its center.
In late July, Rebecca scheduled the release.
The family would return to the same general home range, now cleared of illegal snares, several miles from the nearest occupied cabin. Nate placed trail cameras along two game corridors so the animals could be monitored without pursuit.
Erin flew back to Minnesota.
At dawn, the four transport crates stood beneath tall spruce near the edge of a bog. Walt, Erin, Rebecca, and Nate moved fifty yards away before the remote latches were released.
Three doors opened. The fourth remained closed. Inside it, the mother bobcat did not move…
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