Part 5
The release site was a shelf of high ground where an old logging road narrowed into rhododendron. Below it, Millstone Creek ran clear again between new banks. The flood had left pale branches caught fifteen feet above the autumn water, a measure of what Juniper had climbed away from in April.
Claire and I left our own vehicles at the center and rode in with Maya’s team. We reached the lower blind before first light, wearing clean outer layers stored at the center, and came in from downwind without speaking. The team carried the two transport crates from the truck and set them with their doors facing the tree line. Juniper traveled alone in the first. The three juveniles shared the larger compartment, separated from her by a solid wall but close enough to hear and smell her during the drive. At sixty, after a working life spent making things that opened and closed, I had no job once the crates were level.
I knelt behind the camouflage screen beside Claire. Thirty yards away, Maya checked the release cables, withdrew with the other handlers, and raised one hand. The woods were beginning to take shape out of darkness: black trunks, gray stone, the polished green of laurel leaves.
The first door lifted. Nothing happened for several seconds. Then Juniper came out low and fast. She crossed the clearing in three bounds and vanished beneath the rhododendron. A branch moved where she had passed. Farther upslope, a towhee scratched once in the leaves and went quiet.
Maya waited. When Juniper did not return to the open ground, she pulled the second cable.
The larger female left first, exactly as she had approached every new object in the enclosure: claws before caution. She jumped over the crate threshold, stopped at the unfamiliar earth, and ran toward the cover Juniper had taken. Her watchful sister emerged behind her. That kitten paused to smell the crate corner, then followed the first one’s track into the brush.
The small male remained inside. From the blind, I could see one pale eye and the edge of an ear through the open door. Nobody moved. The release plan allowed time. A frightened bobcat was permitted to choose its own moment; no one would tip the crate or reach inside.
The male came as far as the threshold. He put one forepaw on the ground and lifted his head. His ears turned first toward the trees, then down the slope. Toward us.
My body knew the call before my mind formed it. Come on, bud. Three soft words, the same rhythm that had brought him to the feeder wall. I felt them rise behind my teeth as he looked straight at the blind.
Beside me, Claire’s left hand moved from her binoculars. For a second I thought she would catch my sleeve. Instead, she rested it on her own knee and kept watching the clearing.
I lowered my chin and let the words go nowhere.
The kitten waited. Wind moved across the slope, carrying our scent away from him. From somewhere inside the rhododendron came a low, rough chirr. Juniper appeared between two leaves, mostly hidden, her notched ear visible for an instant. The male turned.
He stepped fully out of the crate, crossed the patch of open ground, and slipped under the same branch. Juniper’s shape moved upslope. Three smaller shapes followed at uneven distances until the leaves closed behind all of them. No animal looked back again.
We remained in the blind for twenty minutes. When Maya finally signaled that we could stand, my left knee locked halfway up. Claire rose first, brushed damp earth from her pants, and waited without asking.
We carried the empty crates back to the truck. There were scratches inside the juvenile compartment and tawny hairs caught along one vent. I closed the door and lifted my end.
Three weeks later, Claire came to the shop on a rainy Saturday. She had a trail-camera photograph in a plain paper envelope. Juniper crossed the upper corner of the frame, lean and clear-eyed, while three juveniles moved through fern behind her. The small male was last, his face turned toward his mother’s path.
“It’s one picture,” Claire said. “It doesn’t tell us everything.”
“It tells us where they were Tuesday.”
“That’s what it tells us.”
I studied it once more, then slid it back into the envelope and handed it to her. “Put it in your folder.”
The center had ordered another transport box, this one for foxes. Claire stayed to help me fit the door. She had her own apartment in Asheville, her field season, and a Sunday morning meeting with the siblings who hated conference calls. When she said she would leave before supper, I did not invent a reason for her to stay.
We worked with the shop door open. Outside, rain began to bead along the wire of the empty enclosure. Claire held out her hand without looking. I passed her the square, and she set the next line.