Part 6
Seven weeks later, Wren asked Sarah to help remove the supplemental feeding station.
Nova had visited it twice after release, both times at night. Then the camera recorded only mice, a ringtail, and one feral hog that spent twenty minutes trying to uproot the locked feed box. Collar data placed Nova along the creek and in the broken hills west of it. She had crossed ranch tracks but had not approached another paved road.
The station had stood unused for eighteen days. Leaving it longer would serve the people monitoring her more than it served the bobcat.
Wren drove Sarah’s four-wheel-drive pickup. She did not ask permission before adjusting the seat, and Sarah did not tell her to take the washout in low gear. When the rear tires slipped, Wren corrected without drama.
“You can say it,” she said.
Sarah held the door grip. “Say what?”
“That I came in too fast.”
“You came in too fast.”
Wren smiled despite herself. It was the first easy expression Sarah had seen on her daughter in months, and Sarah was careful not to look at it too long.
They parked half a mile from the release point and carried tools along the creek. Autumn had thinned the heat but not softened the country. Burrs caught Sarah’s jeans. Wren stopped twice to examine scat and once to photograph a scrape beneath an oak without assigning it to Nova.
The feeding station sat behind a screen of brush: a wooden box, a trail camera, and a shallow water pan gone green around the rim. Nothing about it suggested the drama other people had attached to the animal. Sarah held the box steady while Wren backed out the ground screws.
“How’s Robert?” Sarah asked.
“Mean on a cane.”
“So, better.”
“Dr. Price says he can start fieldwork in January if he follows the plan.” Wren leaned her weight onto the wrench. “High Mesa has a two-person rule now. He complains about it every morning and schedules two people every afternoon.”
The center was still taking fewer mammals. Wren still worked reduced hours and filled two evenings a week at a veterinary clinic. No last-minute donor had appeared to erase the cost of Sarah’s correction. Yet the broken freezer circuit had been replaced, and Robert had begun sending Wren—not himself—to meetings about the next release season.
They lifted the empty feed box between them and moved it into the shade. Beneath it, protected from wind, the dust held one round feline track.
Sarah crouched. “Hers?”
“Maybe. It’s the right size.”
“How old?”
“Not fresh.”
Sarah waited for more. Wren gave her none.
On the hike in, Wren had carried the receiver switched off in her pack. Now she extended the antenna and listened. Static washed through the speaker. She turned toward the western slope, adjusted the gain, and found a pulse so faint Sarah first mistook it for an imperfection in the noise.
There. Gone. There again.
Wren took a bearing and wrote it on the back of her hand. She did not increase the gain.
“Do you need a second point?” Sarah asked.
“The ranch tech will collect one from the north boundary tonight. This is enough to know the collar is active.”
Wren collapsed the antenna.
“I owe you a better apology,” Sarah said.
Her daughter slid the receiver into its case. “Probably.”
Sarah looked at the dismantled station rather than at Wren. “I kept treating your choices like hazards I could clear off a road. Then I did the same thing to Nova. I made up a meaning because uncertainty bothered me.”
Wren brushed dust from her palms. “That still sounds a little like a report.”
“I practiced it in the truck.”
“I know.”
Sarah laughed once, embarrassed. Wren picked up one end of the feed box.
“Try again later,” she said. “Without practicing.”
Wren did not hug her or say the old argument was finished. She only shifted the box toward Sarah and waited.
Sarah took the other end.
Before they left the draw, Wren switched the receiver on once more. The pulse came faintly through the oak and stone, steady at a distance neither of them needed to close.
Then Wren turned it off, and together they carried away the last thing that might have called Nova back.