Part 2
The second cry ended in a wet little gasp. Through the uncovered corner of glass, Jonah saw the bobcat bend over something that moved against the red wool. A forepaw no longer than the top joint of his thumb opened and closed once before the mother drew it beneath her.
One kitten. Alive.
Jonah’s old training pushed him toward the door: clear the airway, warm the patient, count breaths. He stayed where he was. The mother tore the birth sac, cleaned the kitten with fast strokes, and pulled it against her belly without any help from him.
Maya’s voice finally came through the satellite phone in bursts of static.
“Tell me what you can actually see,” she said.
“Adult female. Alert. First kitten moving. She’s cleaning it now.”
“Bleeding? Collapse?”
“Nothing I’d call abnormal.”
“Then you’re furniture, Jonah. Quiet furniture on the other side of that door.”
“The mudroom’s barely above freezing.”
“Bring the cabin up a little and let the wall do the rest. Don’t aim a heater at her. Don’t open that inner door. If she chose the coat, the coat is hers tonight.”
He looked at the red sleeve disappearing beneath the cat. “Understood.”
A second kitten arrived forty minutes later. The third took almost another hour and lay still long enough for Jonah’s fingernails to press crescents into his palms. The mother worked over it, nudging and licking until its head jerked and a thin cry reached the kitchen.
Only then did Jonah breathe out.
By two in the morning, all three were nursing. Their eyes were sealed and their damp coats were already drying into dark mottled fur. The mother curved around them, her chin resting on the torn lining of Cal’s coat, but her ears continued to track every creak and tick in the cabin.
Jonah fed the stove and sat with his back against a cupboard. Cal had once called him from this cabin because a nail had gone through his palm. He had wrapped the hand in a dish towel and driven himself halfway to town before Jonah met him at the highway.
“You know you can ask before you start bleeding on the upholstery,” Jonah had told him.
Cal, pale and sweating, had laughed. “You know you can answer your phone before I start bleeding.”
It had been an old argument dressed as a joke. Jonah knew what to do with a nail through Cal’s hand. He had not known what to do with Cal’s anger, so he’d done nothing.
He woke to metal clattering across the mudroom floor.
The water pan struck the inner door. On the other side, the bobcat paced with her body low, leaving the kittens and returning to them, then raking the floor beside the wall. Her mouth opened in a cough or hiss Jonah could not hear through the glass.
At first he thought the open outer door had carried the wolves’ scent back in. Then he smelled hot pine.
Not wood smoke from the stove. This was sharper, resinous, the odor of lumber heating where no flame should touch it. A brown thread of smoke slipped from behind the metal shield at the stovepipe wall collar.
The smoke alarm went off.
Jonah closed the stove’s air control, grabbed the extinguisher beside the kitchen door, and opened the cabin’s back door. The bobcat had the mudroom doorway; he had the back porch. If the hidden fire broke through, neither would be trapped.
The wall behind the shield was hot enough to sting through his glove. He used the extinguisher on the first smoldering gap, then carried packed snow in a steel bucket until the heat began to fall. The work was ugly and brief, more smoke than flame, but the blackened wood around the collar showed how far it had started to travel.
Outside, the branch that had struck the roof lay crooked against the chimney pipe. The impact had shifted the joint where the pipe entered the wall. Jonah could see that much by flashlight. Anything beyond that could wait for daylight and someone with the right tools.
When the alarm stopped, he stayed outside until the air cleared. His pulse had steadied by the time he looked through the mudroom window.
The bobcat had returned to the kittens. Smoke had driven her from them; now she covered them so completely that only one small tail showed against the coat. Whether she had meant to warn Jonah or had only been trying to escape the smell made no difference to the minutes her noise had given him.
He set the extinguisher down in the snow. The wall was scorched, the stove was unusable, and the temperature inside the cabin was already falling.
The outer mudroom door stood open to the storm. The bobcat looked toward it, then folded herself more tightly around her young…
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