Part 3
He called her before he could think better of it. She picked up on the first ring, the dispatch room murmuring behind her, and he had the true sentence ready until she said, “She looked for her, Dad,” so gently that he put it away again.
“Yes.”
“Thank you for sending it.” She was quiet a second. “Send me the rest. All of them. Even the raccoon.”
He did, every evening after that.
Curtis’s dozer cut the new deck on the ridge road the following Tuesday, and his crew hauled white oak off the upper slope for two weeks while the slash pile sat untouched at the edge of the old landing. Dale paid the rock bill at the quarry office with a check from the well account and didn’t mention it to Dana, then mentioned it to her that same night on the phone, which surprised them both. He went on priming the pump every morning, and twice Dana drove up after a shift and held the milk jug for him without saying a word about it.
The camera kept filling up. The mother hunted, slept, and moved the three kittens deeper into the pile when the log trucks ran. On a Thursday Marisol called to say the bandage was off and seventeen was walking on the foot, sliding a little on the outside where the toe used to be, and biting anyone who tried to admire it.
“Saturday night,” she said. “If her mother’s still using that pile Saturday, we try.”
Saturday afternoon she set a carrier with a sliding door in the brush at the edge of the pile. She ran a length of cord from the door to an old hunting blind Dale had dragged down from the barn and showed him how little it took to lift the door.
Cell phones didn’t work in the bottom; they never had. So Dale went to the hall closet and brought out the two handheld radios he’d carried for the cooperative, which he had kept charging for no reason he could have explained.
Dana had worked the night before and slept four hours before driving up. She took one radio, turned it over, and keyed it.
“Unit one, this is base. Radio check.”
“Base, you’re loud and clear,” he said into the other, standing four feet from her, and for the first time in two weeks she laughed.
At dusk Marisol’s phone rang. She listened, asked for a mile marker, and hung up already reaching for her keys. A bald eagle had been hit by a semi on the highway outside Mountain Grove and was alive in the ditch. She was the only rehabber with a permit for raptors in three counties.
She walked Dale to the blind first.
“Mother comes, kitten calls, mother stays at the door. Then you pull,” she said. “She hisses at the kitten or walks off, you sit on your hands. And no talking. A voice out here at night sounds like a gunshot to her. I’ll be back by dawn.”
Then she was gone, and Dana was swaying where she stood.
“Go to bed,” Dale said. “I’ll raise you when she comes.”
Dana looked at him for a long moment. Then she held up her radio, the way she must have held up her pen a thousand times at work. “Repeat it back.”
“When she comes, I’ll raise you.”
“At work, when somebody says that, I log the time next to it,” she said, and went up the hill toward the house.
The blind smelled of mildew and old deer seasons. The carrier sat forty yards off, a pale square against the dark brush, and now and then something inside it shifted. Dale sat on an overturned bucket with the cord looped around his hand and the radio on his knee.
Around one o’clock he started thinking about the chair.
It had been a ladderback from the dining room, set beside the rented bed. Carol’s breathing had been changing all evening, long and then short, with gaps he’d learned to count without wanting to. At ten past three it changed in a way that brought him all the way awake. He knew what it meant. He knew Dana was on the couch in the next room, and he knew she would want to be woken. He held Carol’s hand and thought, After this breath. Then he thought it again. Getting up meant letting go of her hand, and by the time he let himself understand that he wasn’t going to, there was no breath left to wait for.
He had sat there until five. Then he had gone and touched his daughter’s shoulder and lied to her.
At ten past two, the mother came.
She came along the creek, not from the pile, gray in the starlight and nearly impossible to see until she stopped. Two kittens trailed her, then a third. She went to the slash pile first. Then she lifted her head and turned toward the carrier, and from inside it came a high, cracked call that Dale had last heard from the gully.
The mother went to the carrier. She circled it once, sniffing the ground where Marisol had knelt. Then she pressed her face to the door, and the kitten inside threw herself against it from the other side.
Dale looked down at the radio on his knee.
Marisol had said a voice would sound like a gunshot. The mother was forty yards off and the night was dead still. If she bolted now, she might not come back to this pile, or to this kitten, ever again. He could pull the cord, watch it happen alone, and tell Dana in the morning exactly what he’d seen. He would be good at telling her. He had practice.
He picked up the radio, pressed it against his mouth, and keyed it.
“Dana,” he breathed. “She’s at the carrier. Come down the fence line. Slow.”
Out by the carrier, the mother’s head snapped around toward the blind…
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