Part 3
Claire recovered the telephone before the second cry ended. She called Eli while Ruth dragged on Cal’s canvas coat over her nightgown and shoved her bare feet into boots. Eli and Nora were less than four miles away, checking the last camera line before ice covered the lenses. When the phone carried the idle of a snowmobile through Claire’s open door, Eli sent the second warden toward the county-road exit.
“He said stay in the house,” Claire told her.
Ruth took the big flashlight from its hook. “Then he can say it again when he gets here.”
“Mom.”
“I left him out.”
Ruth opened the door. Freezing rain ticked against the porch roof, and the yard shone under a skin of ice. She had taken three steps when Claire caught up in her own coat, carrying the smaller light and Ruth’s cane.
“You are not going into those trees alone.”
It was not permission. For once, it was not a command either. Claire handed her the cane and walked at her left shoulder, where Ruth’s vision was weakest.
The cries led them behind the woodshed and down a familiar skid path. Fifty yards in, their lights caught churned snow beneath a bent spruce. Tuck lay on his side, his left foreleg held in an unmarked steel trap. The chain had wrapped around a root. Each time he pulled, the metal dragged him back into the same bloody hollow.
A snowmobile idled beyond the trees.
Ray Pike stood between the women and the animal. Beside him was a plywood dog crate and a folded moving blanket. He had been waiting for Tuck to exhaust himself.
“Go back to the house,” Ray said. “You get close, he’ll take your face off.”
Ruth swept her light over the crate. “You brought that to help?”
“Trap was set for a coyote.”
“On my land?”
“Lines don’t show under snow.”
The nearest posted sign was visible on the spruce behind him, orange paint bright beneath the ice. Ray looked toward Claire’s phone and shifted his weight.
“Who’d you call?”
“The person you should have called,” Claire said.
Tuck threw himself against the trap again. Ray cursed and reached for the blanket. Ruth moved before Claire could stop her, not toward the lynx but sideways into Ray’s path.
“Leave him.”
“He’ll break his own leg.”
“Then stop making him think you’re coming closer.”
Ray’s face had the gray, pinched look of a man whose plan had narrowed to two bad exits. “You know what this animal is worth?”
“Less dead than you’ve decided,” Ruth said.
“I didn’t say dead.” His glance went to the crate, and that was answer enough.
From the county road came the faint rise of an engine. Ray heard it. He folded the blanket once, buying time while he listened.
Ruth slipped off Cal’s coat. The inside still carried a ghost of cedar shavings from the chest where she stored it. Tuck had slept on it in the mudroom less than an hour earlier.
She crouched as far as her knees allowed and pushed the coat across the glazed snow. It stopped several feet short of the trap. Tuck struck at it, buried his muzzle in the worn canvas, and held on. His body remained taut, but the violent pulling stopped.
“Easy, Tuck,” Ruth said. “Stay mad if you need to. Just stay still.”
Ray took two steps toward the snowmobile.
Claire raised her phone. “Your face, your machine, and your crate are all in this video.”
Ray looked at her with an anger that made Ruth see how thin the night’s safety was. Then a truck turned into the yard, its roof lights washing blue through the branches. Ray ran for the snowmobile.
He made it as far as the plowed road. Another warden blocked the exit, and Ray stopped before a bad choice became a worse one.
Eli and Nora came down the skid path carrying cases and a rolled shield. Eli sent Ruth and Claire behind a broad spruce while Nora assessed the angle of the trapped leg. She spoke in short, ordinary sentences, letting no one mistake urgency for panic.
Tuck lifted his head when he heard Ruth move. Nora saw it.
“Keep talking to him,” she said. “Same volume. Don’t come closer.”
Ruth talked about the old bus route. She named the houses in order: Daigle place at the first bend, Pelletier twins by the sand pit, Eli Haines with snow down both boots because he would never wait on the porch. The details were for her as much as for Tuck. They gave the dark a road through it.
Nora administered a sedative from a safe distance. Tuck fought the heaviness for several minutes, his claws fixed in Cal’s coat. When his head finally lowered, sleet ticking on the spruce tips became the loudest sound in the woods.
Only then did the team approach. They covered his eyes, released the trap, checked circulation, and slid him onto a rigid carrier. The injured paw was swollen, but the limb below it was warm. Nora would promise no more than that.
“Warm means blood is getting through,” she said. “It does not tell us what the bones and tendons look like.”
Ruth tried to step around the spruce. Eli put out an arm.
“Let them work.”
“He’ll wake up with strangers.”
“He needs to.”
The words sounded cruel until Ruth saw Nora brace the animal’s neck with both gloved hands when the carrier tilted over a root. No one hurried merely because the women were watching.
They drove Tuck to a veterinary hospital that worked with Nora’s rehabilitation center. Claire took Ruth in her car. The sleet changed to snow before they reached the highway, and neither woman spoke for the first forty miles.
“I opened the door,” Ruth said at last.
Claire kept her eyes on the road. “Ray set the trap.”
“I fed Tuck after Eli told me what would happen.”
“Yes.” Claire’s hands tightened on the wheel. “You did.”
Ruth had expected comfort or accusation. The answer stung, but it did not confuse the open door with the steel trap.
“You called Eli behind my back,” she said.
“I did.”
“Would you do it again?”
Claire took a long time. “I would call him. I would tell you before I did it.”
The hospital kept them in a side waiting room, away from people bringing dogs and house cats through the lobby. Near dawn, Nora came in wearing clean scrubs and carrying Cal’s coat in a clear bag.
The trap had caused a small fracture and deep bruising around the joint, but the major tendon remained intact. Tuck would need treatment, then weeks in a large outdoor enclosure. Whether he could hunt well enough to return to the forest would be answered by what he did, not by anyone’s hope.
“Can I see him?” Ruth asked.
Nora weighed the request. “For less than a minute, through the observation glass. I need to know whether he still orients to you. You stay silent, you don’t touch the glass, and the instant he reacts, I close the blind.”
Tuck lay in a recovery pen with the injured leg bandaged, still heavy from anesthesia. Ruth remained motionless. One tufted ear turned before his eyes opened. At first his gaze drifted; then it fixed on her shape beyond the glass.
He pushed himself up on one elbow and gave the low, searching call he used at Ruth’s mudroom.
Nora closed the observation blind before he could try to stand.
“Why did you do that?” Ruth demanded.
“Because he was looking for your door.” Nora remained beside the blind, one hand on the cord. “He cannot learn to hunt while he is waiting for you to feed him. He cannot learn to avoid people while one person is still his safe place.”
Ruth looked down at the bag holding Cal’s torn coat. “When can I come back?” Nora’s answer was quiet and exact. “If you want him to have a chance at release, you cannot come back at all…”
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