Part 7
Rebecca waited.
No one approached the crate or called to the animal. The forest settled around them, alive with mosquitoes, distant birds, and water moving through the sedges.
After nearly four minutes, the mother’s face appeared in the doorway.
She tested the air before placing one paw on the ground. The healed hind leg held.
The bobcat emerged in a single fluid motion and disappeared beneath the spruce without looking toward the people.
A soft chirp came from the trees.
The two younger kittens tumbled from their crate almost together. One hesitated in the open, startled by sunlight, then followed its sibling into the cover.
Scout came last.
The yearling stepped out, crouched, and stared across the clearing. For an instant Walt saw the same wary animal that had dragged a perch over the ice.
Scout placed weight on the formerly injured paw.
Then the young bobcat bounded after the others and vanished.
No animal returned to thank him. No mother paused to offer a human farewell.
Walt was glad.
Wildness was the result they had worked for. If the bobcats left without needing him again, the rehabilitation had succeeded.
Erin stood beside him as Rebecca collected the empty crates.
“You okay?” she asked.
“I think so.”
“That sounded convincing.”
Walt looked at the trees.
“The workshop will feel quiet.”
“Quiet isn’t always empty.”
“No. Your mother used to say that.”
They drove back to Birchwater Lake in separate vehicles. Erin stayed for four days, and for once she did not reorganize the medicine cabinet or measure the bathroom.
She helped Walt remove the temporary barriers from the workshop. Beneath the old workbench, they found the gray wool sock Scout had tried to steal.
Erin held it up. “Is this evidence?”
“Of criminal intent.”
“Should we call Nate?”
“I think the statute of limitations has expired.”
It was a small joke, but it carried them through the first evening after the release.
Walt kept the sock in the bottom drawer of his workbench. He did not need to imagine that the bobcat remembered it.
For the first two weeks, the trail cameras captured deer, a black bear, three raccoons, and a moose whose nose filled an entire frame.
No bobcats appeared.
Walt told himself that absence was a good sign. Predators that avoided cameras and roads were doing what predators should do.
Still, each morning he checked the secure monitoring link Nate had given him.
On the nineteenth day, an alert arrived at 2:13 a.m.
The first image showed a blurred adult bobcat crossing between two spruce trunks.
In the second, two smaller cats followed.
The fourth shape appeared at the edge of the frame, carrying something pale in its jaws. Walt enlarged the photograph until the pixels broke apart. The young bobcat stood on all four paws…
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