Part 6
Fifty yards from the release site, Frank watched Cole open the transport crates by remote cable. Megan stood beside him because she had asked whether he wanted her there, and he had answered before pride could rewrite the question.
F-17 remained inside for nearly a minute. Then her face appeared in the opening, ears moving independently as she measured the sounds of the forest. She stepped out low to the ground, tested the healed rear leg, and crossed the clearing in three quick bounds.
The first kitten followed almost at once. The smaller one crouched beneath the crate door until a soft call came from the ferns, then shot after its sibling. Within seconds, the clearing held only three open crates and the smell of damp cedar.
No animal looked back at the people. Frank felt relief, not rejection. A bobcat that searched human faces before entering the woods would not have been ready to leave.
Cole collected the crates while Tessa reviewed the camera locations one last time. No one went after the animals to confirm where they had hidden. The first useful evidence would come later, at a distance, if the cats chose to cross a monitored trail.
On the drive back, Megan rested one hand against the passenger window. “Does it feel wrong without the other one?”
“A little.”
“Do you think it understood they were leaving?”
Frank considered the question. “I think it understood there was a truck, unfamiliar people, and a reason to stay under cover. Anything beyond that belongs to us, not the cat.”
Nine days later, Tessa changed the yearling’s evaluation routine. Staff stayed entirely out of sight, and remote cameras recorded the enclosure overnight. On the third morning, the footage showed Bandit stalking through the ferns with its weight balanced across all four paws. The rabbit disappeared behind a log. When the yearling emerged, it was carrying its own kill.
Tessa sent Frank a single still image. He enlarged it on the kitchen table until the pixels softened: spotted legs, level shoulders, a snowshoe hare held firmly in the jaws that had once dragged stolen perch across the lake.
Bandit was released the following week several miles from F-17’s den, within suitable habitat but at the distance expected of an animal old enough to begin separating from its mother. Frank did not attend. Tessa had explained that the fewer familiar human scents at the site, the better, and he had decided not to turn his desire for closure into another risk the animal had to carry.
He watched the remote recording that evening. The crate door lifted. Bandit remained invisible for several seconds, then crossed the frame so quickly that the camera captured only the full extension of its once-injured front leg. It vanished into balsam shadow and did not return.
Three weeks passed before separate trail cameras offered proof that all four bobcats were alive. F-17 appeared with the two kittens near a beaver flowage. Eleven miles away, the yearling crossed a narrow game trail alone. Its head was down, its body lean and strong, and no wire followed its step.
Frank printed the two photographs for his workshop. He did not post them online or show them around town. The coordinates remained confidential, and the animals’ privacy mattered more than having strangers believe him.
Dean Voss’s case took most of the year. He eventually pleaded guilty to several wildlife offenses, surrendered equipment, paid fines and restitution, and lost his trapping and guiding privileges for a substantial period. Frank attended no hearing. When Cole called with the outcome, he listened, thanked him, and asked whether the remaining cable had been removed from the forest.
It had. That answer mattered more to him than the sentence.
Autumn came early to the Upper Peninsula. Frank completed cardiac rehabilitation and began wearing a medical-alert device outdoors. He disliked it on principle and forgot it twice in the first month. The second time, he had already reached the porch when he remembered Megan’s face beside the den. He went back for it without pretending he needed something else from the kitchen.
In January, he spent six weeks in Milwaukee. He and Megan learned that they could share a house if each had a door to close and neither treated a quiet breakfast as evidence of a crisis. She stopped presenting completed plans as questions. He stopped waiting until Sunday-night calls to mention symptoms he had felt on Tuesday.
They still irritated each other. Megan bought a nonslip shower mat he considered ugly. Frank repaired a loose cabinet door in her kitchen without asking and rehung it slightly crooked. Their first argument in Milwaukee ended with both of them staying in the room.
He returned to Alder Lake in February. The cabin had not become a shrine while he was away, nor had Milwaukee become a threat to it. One could be his home without making the other an admission of defeat.
By spring, Frank was teaching two first-aid sessions a month at the fire hall and coordinating wildlife transports for Tessa. He knew which volunteer had a four-wheel-drive truck, who could manage an overnight route, and who needed more training before handling a raptor crate. He remained useful. He simply stopped making usefulness a test that only danger could grade.
On the first anniversary of the fish theft, he walked to the edge of Alder Lake with his neighbor, Sam Ortega. They stayed behind the posted line marking unsafe spring ice. Frank wore traction cleats, carried his medication and alert device, and had texted Megan before leaving.
Near the cattails, a line of round tracks crossed the crusted snow. The prints were too weathered to measure well, though the lack of claw marks suggested a cat. One trail entered the spruce and disappeared between the trunks.
Sam studied it. “Want to see where it goes?”
Frank looked toward the trees. A year earlier, curiosity and need would have felt like the same command. Now he could tell them apart.
“No,” he said. “Whatever made those tracks has somewhere to be.”
He did not leave a fish. He packed the catch into his sled and walked home before the afternoon thaw softened the shoreline.
Megan arrived the following Friday for a long weekend. She brought groceries but no grab bars, appointments, or printed real-estate listings. Frank made stew. She set Beth’s green mug beside his place without asking whether it was too painful to use, and he poured coffee into it.
Halfway through dinner, his phone sounded with a transport alert. A barred owl had been struck beside a highway seventy miles south. Frank read the location, checked the volunteer roster, and called a trained driver who lived twelve miles from the scene.
The driver accepted. Frank confirmed where the bird would be taken, recorded the handoff, and put the phone facedown.
His red emergency bag hung in the mudroom, clean and fully stocked. He left it there.
“You were telling me about your contractor,” he said.
Megan narrowed her eyes. “You said you didn’t want to hear the rest.”
“I changed my mind.”
She resumed the story. Outside, meltwater slipped from the eaves, and the old bag remained closed by the door while Frank stayed at the table.