Part 4
Walter did not enter the house again. For several weeks she came to the deck once or twice after dark, circled the mat, and moved on. Some mornings Ben found only tracks; on others the trail camera caught a blur of spotted flank at the edge of the frame. The three hairs remained in the footstool until Maggie visited in June and removed them with a strip of tape.
“You can’t preserve wildlife by embedding it in Mom’s furniture,” she said.
“I wasn’t preserving anything.”
“Then why did you glare at me?”
Ben put the tape in an envelope anyway. Maggie wrote WALTER, PROBABLY FEMALE on the front and tucked it into the junk drawer.
Nora came by a few days later to inspect the camera and download its clips. She had seen enough to believe Walter was feeding herself, moving normally, and keeping most of her activity away from people. Ben asked whether a bobcat that rubbed against a boot was unusually friendly.
“She was scent-marking something unfamiliar,” Nora said.
“The boot was not unfamiliar.”
“Then she was scent-marking something familiar.”
“That answer covers considerable ground.”
“Wild animals generally do.”
She reminded him that breeding and denning could change Walter’s movements. Bobcats covered large territories. An absence was not evidence of injury, abandonment, or personal offense.
Ben nodded as if all three had not already occurred to him.
Summer filled the yard quickly. Ferns rose along the brush line. Mosquitoes collected beneath the porch in numbers that made Ben reconsider the moral value of all living things. He replaced the old wind chimes with a small set Maggie found at a garage sale, then watched Walter spend one indignant evening studying the moving tubes from beneath a spruce.
She crouched, sprang, missed, and landed sideways in a planter Ben had not yet filled. For several seconds she remained there with her front paws among the dry potting soil, looking toward the woods as if another animal had made the error.
Ben laughed hard enough that he had to lean against the doorframe. He did not reward her with food. Walter shook soil from one paw and left with what dignity remained available.
At Wes’s Fourth of July cookout, Lucy introduced Ben to a cousin as “the man whose bobcat goes in his house.” Ben corrected every part of the sentence except man. The cousin wanted to put scraps near the trail camera so he could show his friends a close photograph. Six months earlier, Ben might have liked the idea and disguised that pleasure as education.
“No bait,” he said. “And don’t go looking for her.”
The cousin appealed to Wes, who was turning burgers at the grill. Wes did not look up.
“You heard him.”
It was the first time Wes had treated Ben’s judgment about Walter as something worth reinforcing. Ben carried a bowl of potato salad to the table and did not thank him. Wes handed him the serving spoon and did not ask to be thanked. By then, their truce had acquired the shape of friendship, though both men would have objected to the word.
The following week, Walter disappeared. One week became two. Ben checked muddy patches after rain and found raccoon hands, deer slots, and the precise little prints of a fox. None of the tracks had Walter’s broad, round pad, and the camera—which Wes had helped him remount farther from the house—caught no ragged-eared silhouette.
By the fourth week, Ben had drawn a search route on a county map. He marked the creek, an abandoned logging road, two culverts, and the low cedar swamp east of his property. In his road-commission years, a map had meant that concern was becoming work. Once a problem had a route and a yellow marker, he could put his hands on it.
He knew how to conduct that kind of worry. During spring washouts, he had sent crews from one soft shoulder to the next, keeping a grease pencil on every truck until the last driver checked in. If a culvert backed up, he found the blockage. If a plow missed its route, he called until a voice answered. Once each problem had a road name and a crew beside it, he could stop imagining all the places something might have gone wrong.
Walter offered no radio number, no mileage marker, and no obligation to report.
Ben laid the map on the kitchen table and called Nora.
“Don’t go looking for her,” she said after hearing him out.
“I know how to move in the woods.”
“That isn’t the issue.”
“There are old traps out by the logging road. People leave all kinds of junk.”
“And if she has shifted to a den site, following her is exactly what you should not do.”
Ben looked at the red line he had drawn toward the cedar swamp. “You think that’s what happened.”
“I think it’s one reasonable explanation. So is a change in prey, water, or territory. We don’t have enough information.”
“How long before not knowing becomes a reason to act?”
Nora exhaled. He heard a metal kennel latch close on her end of the line.
“If you see an injured animal, we act. If somebody reports a trapped cat, we act. Right now, you miss one.”
The bluntness stung, but it also stopped him.
Ben folded the map and put it in the drawer over the envelope of fur. He did not hike the logging road or move the camera deeper into the woods. He spent the afternoon helping Wes replace rotten boards on the small bridge over the drainage ditch, and when Maggie called that evening, he answered before composing a version of himself that sounded unconcerned.
“She’s been gone a month,” he said.
Maggie did not tell him Walter would be fine. She asked what Nora had said, listened to the answer, and then described the disaster created when a freezer failed at her school and four hundred fish sticks thawed before lunch. Ben let the story be about fish sticks. It helped more than reassurance would have.
By the time Maggie finished, he knew which custodian had found the puddle, which assistant principal had suggested serving cereal, and why a delivery of emergency cheese pizza had been delayed at the wrong loading dock. Ben asked questions without proposing a refrigeration schedule. When Maggie said, “You haven’t interrupted me once,” he told her the phone connection must be failing.
She laughed, and Ben laughed with her. When they hung up, he left the map folded in the drawer.
Walter returned near the end of August. Ben saw her at dawn beyond the stump, lean but not gaunt, her coat dusty and her head turned toward the woods. He remained behind the glass. Walter drank rainwater from a shallow depression in a deck board, sat for less than a minute, and left.
The camera caught her twice in September. In one clip, the fur along her belly looked thinner. Nora studied the images and said the angle, summer wear, or half a dozen ordinary causes could change the way the coat lay. The picture proved nothing.
“No following,” Nora said.
“I didn’t ask.”
“You sent fourteen photographs.”
Ben deleted the other nine he had considered sending. October returned with cold nights and the smell of leaf smoke from somewhere beyond the county road. Almost a year had passed since Walter first stood outside Ben’s glass door. She visited less often now and rarely stepped onto the deck.
One evening, Ben was putting away dishes when the porch board gave a familiar hollow thump. Walter stood outside the door. Her coat had thickened along the neck, and the torn tip of her ear made a dark notch against the light.
Ben set down the plate. Walter did not look at him. She looked over her shoulder toward the cedar at the corner of the house. From beneath its lowest branches came a thin, rough chirp…
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