Part 4
“Yes.” I said it while the cub was still leaning against my boot. Nolan repeated the plan once, and I made myself hear it all the way through. If his mother did not come or the return failed, the officers would take him to the wildlife facility. I said yes to that too.
Over the next days he became a troublesome patient. He dragged a heel of bread under the stove and objected when I took it away. He found a gap in the lining of my father’s coat and pulled out a ribbon of padding. I hung the coat beyond his reach, thinking of how many winters it had survived without a mark and how quickly he had changed that.
Claire spent less time on each visit. She watched him walk across the boards, inspected the wound, and watched him walk again. When she said he was improving, I asked whether she meant to change anything about the return date. She knew where the question was going before I finished it.
“An extra week would be easier for you,” she said. “It wouldn’t necessarily be good for him.”
I gathered the discarded dressing for her bag. She reminded me that a center had been available from the beginning, and that I had kept asking for a chance to put him back with the mother. It was true. I had simply imagined I’d feel differently when the day arrived.
One morning, three weeks after the sack had appeared, I woke to daylight and an empty bed beside the stove. I called for him, pulled open the door, and found him digging at the edge of the remaining snow. I was barefoot. He had managed to lift the loose latch I’d kept meaning to fix. He hurried back to my voice and collided with my shins, then began smelling one cold foot as if it were an unexpected visitor. I checked the leg before picking him up.
He pushed against my hands with a strength he hadn’t had before. Later, when Claire examined the closed wound and watched him move, she called Nolan. The scar might leave some stiffness. It did not justify another stretch indoors. The mother had continued to appear along the clearing, so they agreed on a morning to try the return. Claire described what would happen if the mother failed to show. I asked her to go over that part twice because procedures were easier to hold in my head than an empty place by the stove.
That night I repaired the door latch. The cub slept on the pillow I’d given him, making soft sounds in his sleep. My father’s damaged coat lay across my knees; I pushed the stuffing back under the torn lining but could not thread a needle in the poor light. For weeks, waking in the night had meant listening to make sure he was still alive. I listened now and knew that the sound would soon be gone.
I told him he had a whole forest to return to. He opened an eye, watched me for a second, and fell asleep again.
In the morning I carried him to a patch of exposed grass near the pines. The cabin was partly screened from there. Nolan and Garrett had closed the access road and waited well back; they wanted no human voices or vehicles in the clearing. I spread the familiar blanket, set the cub down, and stepped away. He followed. I carried him back, waited until he became interested in a fold of cloth, and withdrew behind a tree.
He called once.
I had my palm against the bark and very nearly went to him. The radio was in my pocket; Walt was at the station, Claire and the wildlife staff knew our timing, and none of them could do this part for me. I stayed where I was while the light moved slowly across the clearing. When he lay down, I wondered whether I’d made him wait too long.
Nearly an hour passed before a dark shape separated from the pines.
The pale scar across the mother’s muzzle came into view. The cub lifted his head. He crossed the grass in an uneven rush, and she bent to meet him, nosing him around and licking the fur beside his eyes. He squeezed beneath her chest, came out, and pressed against a foreleg while she inspected the healed leg.
I dug my fingers into the bark. She raised her face toward the tree where I stood. Perhaps she had smelled me from the start.
She lowered her muzzle again, turned, and walked into the woods. He followed. At the edge he paused and looked across the clearing. I raised my hand without believing he understood it.
Then the two dark shapes were out of sight.
I stayed until my hand hurt. The blanket had one wet corner; I folded it badly and carried it home, letting that corner brush my boot. Walt came over after my radio call and sat on a stump by the cabin with his pipe cupped in his hand. He asked whether both bears had gone. I nodded, and he shifted so there was room beside him.
We watched the place where the trees had closed. When he finally asked what I would do next, I said I didn’t know. He suggested we go inside, and I followed him past the quiet bed beside the stove.
Claire arrived near supper with an apple pie. She cut two pieces while I kept finding tasks in the room that did not need doing. I said there was fur beneath the cot. A slice landed beside my elbow; she waited until I picked up the fork. The fur, she said, could wait.
“I could use another pair of hands at the clinic,” she said. “Kennels, feedings, cleaning, helping us hold patients. You’d have a lot to learn.”
I looked up from the pie. She said the pay wasn’t much, but there was an empty room over the clinic. Then she waited while I tried to picture my clothes in that room, my father’s coat on a different hook, and the cabin here without me.
“Would you consider coming into town?” she asked.
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