Part 4
She held there, utterly still, her eyes catching some scrap of light. Dale didn’t let his breath out. He thought he could see her deciding.
Then the kitten called again from inside the carrier, high and frantic, and the mother turned her back on the blind and pushed her face against the door.
The radio clicked twice on his knee. He had never taught Dana that. It was what dispatchers did when they’d heard you and couldn’t talk.
She took four minutes. He counted them. She came along the fence line in his barn coat with her bare feet in her unlaced boots and slipped through the back of the blind on her hands and knees. When she knelt beside him, her breath was coming fast and her hand found his sleeve and gripped it.
The mother was lying down now, stretched along the front of the carrier. The other kittens had come up behind her. One batted at the cord where it ran through the leaves, and Dale felt the faint tug of it travel up the line into his palm.
That was everything Marisol had asked for. He held the cord out to Dana.
She shook her head and put her hand over his. “You do it. I’m right here.”
He pulled. The door slid up without a sound.
For a few seconds nothing moved. Then seventeen came out low, the way a cat comes out of anything, and stopped on the threshold. She put her left hind foot down carefully, as if testing ice, and when it held she shot forward and crashed into her mother’s chest. The mother caught her with one forepaw and began washing her, head to tail, while the kitten squirmed and shoved and tried to climb her.
Dana’s fingers dug into his hand.
One of the bigger kittens pounced on seventeen. She rolled away, came up swinging, and missed by a mile. Then the mother rose and walked toward the creek, and the four of them went after her in a ragged line. The smallest one ran with a hitch on the outside of her stride, a slight sideways slip every few steps, and then the dark took all of them at once.
Dale sat with the slack cord across his knees and didn’t move.
They stayed in the blind until the sky went gray behind the ridge. Dana sat with her back against the canvas and her hands in the coat pockets, and after a while she said, “Thank you for raising me.”
It would have been easy to let that be the last thing said in the blind.
“I didn’t fall asleep,” he said. “With your mother.”
Dana didn’t turn her head.
“I was awake when her breathing changed. I knew you’d want to be there. I kept telling myself I’d come get you after the next one. She had my hand.” He stared at the empty carrier. “I didn’t want to let go of it. So I didn’t. And then I told you I’d dozed off, because that was easier for you to forgive than the truth.”
The birds were starting up along the creek. Dana pulled her hands out of the pockets and looked at them.
“Four years,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I forgave you for something you didn’t do.” She stood up, bent under the low roof of the blind. “I need to go up to the house for a while, Dad.”
He nodded. He didn’t follow her.
Marisol’s truck came down the drive at half past six with a crate in the bed and an eagle in it, sedated and furious. She looked at the empty carrier, then the trail camera footage on Dale’s phone, then at Dale.
“You talked,” she said.
“Once.”
She watched the clip again, where the mother’s head came around. “Huh,” she said, and that was all.
When he went up to the house, Dana was at the kitchen table with two cups of coffee, one in front of the empty chair. She had washed her face, and it hadn’t helped.
“I’m going to be mad about this,” she said. “For a while. I don’t know how long.”
“All right.”
“But you called me tonight.” She pushed the second cup toward him. “So sit down.”
The well driller came the third week of September. Dana paid for half the pump, and this time Dale let her. He wrote it in the ledger in his own hand: Dana, pump. The landing grew over with ragweed, and the slash pile settled a foot lower every month. Nobody pushed it anywhere.
On the first cold Saturday in October, Dale and Dana pulled the woven wire out of the gully together, one rusted yard at a time. Halfway through, she held up the section with the four cut strands, the ends still bright where his cutters had gone through, and he took it from her and threw it in the truck himself. They hauled the whole coil to the scrap yard that afternoon. It brought eleven dollars. Dana kept the receipt.
The camera caught the bobcats twice in the fall and once in December, too blurry to say which was which. Marisol said she’d be careful about calling any of them seventeen. Bobcats lost toes to traps, fights, frostbite, and plain bad luck, and a limp at night proved nothing.
In the middle of January it snowed four inches, and in the morning Dale walked down to the creek before the sun reached it.
The tracks came out of the slash pile and crossed the stones in a loose line. One set was large, and two were smaller. He crouched beside the smallest set and looked for a long time at the left hind print. Three toes and a pad, then another three, all the way to the water.
He stood up, his knees complaining, and took the radio off his belt.
“Base, you on?”
There was a pause long enough for him to picture her in the kitchen setting her coffee down. Dana had started coming up most Sunday mornings, before her shift or after one.
“Go ahead.”
“Bring your boots,” he said. “And come the long way, by the fence. Don’t step in anything until you get to me.”
He waited at the creek with his hands in his pockets while the sun came over the ridge and began, very slowly, to soften the edges of the prints.