The bobcat put its paw on Beth Hollis’s sleeve while she was trying to persuade a dairy farmer that a missing receipt was still a missing receipt, even if they both remembered the purchase. Beth stopped talking. The paw had settled just above her wrist, flattening the blue fleece, and beyond it stood an animal that had no business being on her porch in daylight. A ragged strip of blue hung beneath its chin. There was almost no fur where the strip went around its neck.
“Beth? You there?”
She lowered the phone against her knee. The cat’s whiskers trembled as it smelled her sleeve, and one ear turned toward the tiny voice coming from the speaker. Beth could see a burr caught in the pale fur of its chest.
For a moment, she could think only of the stupidest practical problem: she needed to stand up, and her left foot had gone to sleep.
The cat withdrew its paw. When Beth moved the phone, it backed toward the steps and gave a harsh, broken little cry. She ended the call without explaining and pressed her daughter’s name.
Rachel answered with, “Is something wrong?”
Since their argument on Sunday, Beth had received one reply to a photograph of a washed-out fence and none to an invitation to supper. Now, hearing that guarded voice, she nearly said that everything was fine. It was the answer she gave Rachel before she admitted a furnace had stopped working or a bill was overdue.
“There’s a bobcat beside my chair.”
“Can you get into the house?”
“It’s wearing something. A collar, maybe.”
“Mom. The door.”
Beth stood, keeping the chair between herself and the animal. It watched her with its head lowered, neither advancing nor running. She backed into the kitchen and closed the glass door with both hands.
“I’m inside.”
“Good. Stay there.” Rachel’s voice became brisker. “Did it bite you? Scratch you? Any broken skin?”
“No. It touched my arm.”
“Don’t go out again. Can you send me a picture?”
Beth photographed the bobcat through the glass. It was thinner than she had understood from the chair, the bones of its hips lifting beneath its coat. When it turned, the blue material caught against the top step.
A cupboard closed at Rachel’s end of the call. Someone asked her a question, and she answered, “Tell Dr. Foster I’ll call from the truck.” Rachel was a veterinary technician at Ridgeway Wildlife Center, forty miles east. At thirty-one, she supervised people Beth had never met; when she came home, Beth still reminded her which road flooded.
“That may be a lead,” Rachel said. “I can’t tell how it’s fastened. Where did she come from?”
“The creek side.”
“Is Frank at the barn?”
Beth looked past the cat toward the sycamores. Across Gable Creek, behind the wooded shoulder of the hill, the old calving barn stood on land she still paid taxes on and seldom visited.
“I haven’t seen his truck.”
“I’m calling the wildlife officer. I’m coming too.”
“Rachel, it doesn’t mean—”
“I didn’t say what it meant. I asked where he was.”
The bobcat descended the steps, favoring neither leg but moving with a low, economical caution. At the edge of the lawn it stopped to lick its shoulder. The hanging blue strip dragged through the wet leaves.
Beth wanted to describe the paw on her sleeve. She wanted Rachel to hear how small the animal’s voice had been. But the barn was between them now, although neither could see it.
Frank Doran had rented the building in June for equipment and two hawks from the educational program he used to run. He had paid ahead, without making Beth ask. That money had covered the property taxes and the repair to the well pump, and he had left the check facedown on her kitchen table as if discretion could keep it from being a kindness.
He had known Sam before she had. During her husband’s last weeks, Frank had arrived every evening with something to mend and stayed until Beth could sleep. Once, at three in the morning, she had found him in the laundry room washing Sam’s bedding by hand because the machine’s spin cycle woke him.
On Sunday, Rachel had stood at this same glass door and told Beth that she could not find current authorization for the animals Frank claimed to be keeping at this address. She had wanted him to produce the paperwork or let someone inspect the barn. Beth had asked why she always arrived with a problem when other people managed to arrive with a casserole.
Rachel had put the casserole she was carrying into the refrigerator. Then she had left.
“Mom?”
“I’m here.”
“Don’t offer her food. Don’t try to get that thing off her neck. If she leaves, let her.”
The cat disappeared behind the sycamores. Beth watched the last movement of grass settle, her phone warm against her cheek.
“I’ll wait for you.”
After the call, she opened the back of the kitchen drawer where she kept the barn key. It lay beneath an expired mower warranty, its teeth leaving a rusty outline on the paper. Frank had changed the padlock in August. She had meant to ask for the new key.
She shut the drawer and looked through the door again. Across the creek, something tawny moved along the old fence line, heading uphill toward the barn.
Beth called Rachel back.
“I’m taking the farm lane around to the north gate. In the car,” she said before her daughter could interrupt. “I can see where she’s going.”
“Stay in the car, then. Don’t make me come looking for you.”
The second sentence hurt more than the first. Beth put on both boots and Sam’s old field coat, took her binoculars from the coat hook, and left through the front door, away from the animal’s route.
The lane made a long loop around the creek crossing. She passed the stock trailer Sam had bought the year Rachel went to college, its tires sinking into the same four hollows they had occupied since his funeral. Beyond it, the ridge opened onto a sloping pasture and the low roof of the barn.
Even with the car windows closed, she heard the first impact against metal.
She parked outside the north gate, where the lane ran along a bank above the barn. From the driver’s seat she could look down toward the creek-facing wall, thirty yards away. A board near the ground had pulled away, and the bobcat crouched beside it, working its head back and forth until the blue strip came free of a splinter.
Beth lifted the binoculars. The cat squeezed through the opening, leaving the loose end of the lead swinging behind it.
A high call came from inside. Another answered, shorter and sharper.
A row of windows ran along that wall. The glass was dirty, but several lower panes were missing; from the raised lane, Beth could see down into the nearest stalls. In the opening closest to the lean-to, two small spotted faces pushed against a run made of wire panels.
The adult bobcat rose on her hind legs outside the run. One youngster pressed its cheek to the mesh opposite hers. The other tried to stand beside it, then sat abruptly and held up a front paw.
Beth adjusted the binoculars with a thumb that would not stay steady. The young cat held its paw against its chest while its mother paced the narrow space on the other side of the wire.
She moved the binoculars along the windows. Through the next opening, a tall, long-legged cat turned inside an enclosure, and a second followed so closely their spotted bodies briefly overlapped. In the last stall, beneath a window with its entire lower sash gone, a large tawny shape lay on the floor.
Beth knew what it was before she brought the binoculars into focus again. The animal had a broad head and small rounded ears. Its long tail stretched past an empty bowl, with a dark tuft at the end.
She called 911 from the car.
The dispatcher made her repeat the address and the words “African lion,” then told her to remain outside the gate. Beth explained the farm lane, the turn past the trailer, and the locked chain on the pasture gate. She gave the number of animals she could see without pretending she had seen them all.
Only after the dispatcher said help was coming did Beth realize that she was gripping the steering wheel hard enough to hurt.
Frank’s pickup appeared behind her a few minutes later. He climbed out with two capped water containers in the bed, saw the binoculars on her passenger seat, and stopped. His feed-store cap was pushed too high on his forehead.
“What are you doing up here?”
“Looking at my barn.”
He glanced toward the windows. Beth had known him thirty-four years and had never seen him calculate an answer quite so visibly.
“The hydrant’s down,” he said. “I’ve been hauling water.”
“There’s a lion in there.”
“I know what’s in there.”
He unlocked the pasture gate. Beth stayed by her car while he carried the containers to a line of white funnels mounted outside the siding. Water ran from the first funnel through a pipe. Inside, a metal bowl scraped, followed by such urgent drinking that Beth could hear it from the road.
Frank had built a way to fill the bowls without entering the cages. He had brought water. For one foolish second, she wanted that to settle something.
Then the lioness tried to get up. Through the missing pane, Beth watched her lift her chest, hesitate, and sink down with her foreleg folded awkwardly beneath her.
Rachel’s truck came over the ridge with its headlights on. She parked beside Beth, stepped out in brown coveralls, and looked first at her mother’s hands, then toward the barn. A hard medical case remained on the back seat.
“Any contact since the porch?”
“No.”
Frank set down the second container. “Rachel, hold on. Let me show you what we’re dealing with.”
She used Beth’s binoculars without acknowledging the invitation. Then she took out her phone and gave a short report, her eyes staying on the missing window. Beth caught the words “unable to stand” and “large-cat transport.”
Frank came back toward them, wiping his wet palms on his jeans.
“You’ve already called somebody?” he asked.
“Dr. Foster. The state officer is on the way.”
“Damn it, Rachel. I was getting this straightened out.” She lowered the phone. “That animal can’t get up.” “I know. I know that.” He looked at Beth, then back at Rachel. “I had until Friday. Your mother said so…”
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