Part 2
He sat down.
It was not courage and it was not strategy. His legs simply stopped consulting him, and the rock came up under him harder than he expected. The knife was still open in his right hand. He laid it flat on his thigh and put his left hand palm down on the cold stone, because the stone at least was not moving.
The mother lynx did not come closer. She lowered her head, and the growl dropped into a register he felt more than heard. The kitten answered with a high, thin mew that was nothing like the hiss it had given him. The mother’s ears swiveled toward it, then back to Martin.
His pulse was going so fast it felt like a moth trapped in a lampshade. He knew the drill the cardiologist in Columbus had taught him: bear down as if lifting something heavy, hold, release. He did it twice. The rhythm stumbled, kept stumbling, and the edges of the world went gray and grainy, like the camera footage.
He thought about the button on the satellite messenger, the one under the rubber flap. He thought about a helicopter trying to land on this bench in a snowstorm with a lynx in the willows, and about the size of the bill, and about Beth getting the phone call in a motel room in Lake City. He did not press it.
The snow thickened. The mother paced three steps to her left and three back, never taking her eyes off him. Once she went to the kitten, stepping wide around Martin’s outstretched leg, and licked its head and the swollen leg, and tugged at the line with her teeth. It did not give. Polyester rated for marine rigging did not give to anything.
He had specified that. He remembered the student assistant who’d suggested cotton twine, and how he had explained, patiently and at some length, that cotton rotted.
Martin did not know how long he sat there. Long enough that snow collected in the folds of his shirt. Long enough that the light flattened into the even gray of late afternoon. When he heard the voice calling his name from below the bench, he thought at first he was imagining it.
“Martin! Martin, sing out!”
The mother lynx heard it too. Her head snapped around. A second voice, a second body, a second shape coming up through the willows was apparently more than she would accept. She gave the kitten one last look and went into the krummholz without a sound.
Owen came over the lip of the bench at a half run, breathing like a bellows. He had his town jacket on, not his field shell, and snow in his beard. He took in Martin on the ground, the open knife, the crate, the kitten, and his face did something complicated.
“You’re sitting in the snow,” he said.
“I’m aware.”
Owen crouched beside him and pressed two fingers to the inside of Martin’s wrist without asking. He held them there a long time. “Jesus.”
“It’s settling.”
“It is not settling.” Owen let go. “Mai called me. I was at the bottom of the second switchback on the county road and I looked at your dot and I watched it go up the bench trail and stop. Then it didn’t move for twenty minutes.” He looked at the willows. “Was that her?”
“Yes.”
“Is she coming back?”
“Not while there are two of us. Probably.”
Owen sat back on his heels. For a second he looked about fifteen years old. Then he looked at the kitten, which had pressed itself so deep into the angle of the rock that only its face showed, and at the line, and he made a decision Martin could see happen.
“Tell me what to do,” Owen said. “And don’t do it yourself.”
Martin opened his mouth to say he was perfectly capable, and his hand, when he lifted it, was shaking so badly the knife blade flickered. He closed his mouth. He held the knife out handle first.
“Coat first,” he said. “Over its head and shoulders. Then pin the body with your forearm, not your hand. The paws will come at you. Find the line two inches above the loop. Not closer. Mai needs the loop where it is.”
“Two inches.”
“Cut toward the stake, away from the leg.”
Owen took Martin’s wool coat, shook the snow off it, and moved in slowly on his knees. The kitten spat and struck, and its claws caught the wool. Owen dropped the coat over it and leaned in with his forearm, murmuring something Martin couldn’t hear. The kitten fought under the coat with a strength that made the whole bundle jump. Owen found the line by feel. He looked at Martin.
“Two inches,” Martin said.
The knife went through the braid in three strokes. The line slackened and dropped against the rock like something that had died.
They got the bundle into the crate between them, Owen guiding, Martin holding the wire door. The kitten bit through Owen’s glove before the door latched, and Owen swore with such sincerity that Martin nearly laughed. Owen threw the tarp over the crate. In the sudden dark the kitten went silent.
Owen pulled the rebar stake out of the rock with both hands and shoved it into the side pocket of his pack, the stub of line still knotted to it. He did not ask whether he should.
“Can you walk?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Can you walk without being a hero about it?”
Martin thought about it honestly. “Slowly.”
“Slowly works.” Owen shouldered the crate by its handle and took Martin’s elbow with his free hand, and Martin let him.
They came down the switchbacks in the last of the light, Owen breaking trail, Martin following in his tracks with one hand hooked into the strap of Owen’s pack. Halfway down, the gallop in Martin’s chest snapped back into ordinary rhythm as suddenly as it had left, the way it always did, as if a door had closed in another room. He told Owen. Owen said, “Good,” and didn’t slow down.
At the station they put the covered crate in the empty bunk room at the back, the one with no window, and set the thermostat on the wall heater to fifty. Mai called while Owen was still stamping snow off his boots. She asked about Martin before she asked about the kitten, and she didn’t let him change the subject until he had given her a pulse number.
Then she asked about the leg, and he described it, and she was quiet.
“Don’t feed it,” she said finally. “Don’t look at it. Don’t let Owen look at it either, he’ll want to. I’ll be up behind the first plow.”
Owen made soup from a can and slept on the couch in his clothes, because the road was closed behind him now. Martin did not sleep.
At midnight he sat down at the kitchen table with a legal pad and wrote a report to the state wildlife agency. Nobody had asked him to. He wrote the date the plots were installed, the material, the length of line per stake, and the date he had stopped work on the upper bench. He wrote, I did not complete removal of plots 14 and 15 at the end of that field season, and I did not return to the site in any of the six seasons that followed, although I was employed at this station for all of them. He wrote the GPS coordinates of fifteen. He wrote, The line is my specification. He read the page twice and signed it.
At 2:40 a.m. he got up and stood outside the closed bunk room door. He didn’t open it. Through the door he heard the kitten shift inside the crate, one scrape of claws on plastic, and then nothing. He stood there until his feet got cold.
The plow came up at eight-thirty with Mai’s state truck behind it, chains on all four tires. Behind Mai’s truck came a small white rental SUV that had no business on that road, sliding on the last turn and correcting.
Martin was at the window when the SUV’s door opened and his daughter got out.
Beth was forty-six and had her mother’s square shoulders and her mother’s way of standing with her weight on one hip when she was assessing a situation. She had flown into Montrose the day before to drive him home to Ohio, gotten as far as Lake City before the county closed the road to the basin, spent the night at a motel, and apparently followed the first truck with state plates up the mountain at dawn. She stood in the snow in a city coat and looked at the station, and then at the man in the window.
Mai came in first with two hard cases. She looked at Martin’s face for a full three seconds and said, “Sit,” and he sat. Then she went into the bunk room with Owen and shut the door.
Beth came in, stamping her shoes. Her eyes went around the room: the soup pot, the blankets on the couch, the legal pad on the table, the bloody glove on the counter. They came back to him.
“Owen texted me,” she said. “At ten last night. He thought somebody should know.”
“He shouldn’t have worried you.”
“He should have texted me at four in the afternoon.” She did not sit down. “What happened to your color?”
“It came back.”
Mai came out of the bunk room forty minutes later peeling off her gloves. She had sedated the kitten, cut away the loop, and cleaned the wound. The kitten was female, eighteen or nineteen weeks old, underweight but not starved. The line had cut down through skin and into the tissue on the front of the leg just above the wrist. She had chewed at it, which was what lynx did, and made it worse.
“The swelling I can work with,” Mai said. “The tendons are probably fine. What worries me is the nerve. If the paw doesn’t wake up, she can’t hunt on it, and if she can’t hunt on it, she doesn’t go back out.” She looked at Martin. “You understand that’s how this works.”
“Yes.”
“She’s coming down to the rehab facility in Del Norte with me today. It’s three hours. She’ll be in a run there all winter no matter what. Kittens this age need their mothers until spring, and she doesn’t have one anymore.”
Beth had picked up the legal pad while Mai talked. Martin watched her read it. Her face didn’t change, but she read it twice, the way he had.
Martin looked at his daughter holding his confession in both hands, at the boxes he had packed for the trip east stacked by the door, at the closed bunk room. He had told Beth on the phone in September that he would come to Columbus for the winter. That he was done.
“Beth,” he said. “I’m not leaving on Saturday.”
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇