Part 5
“I know,” Beth said.
The words didn’t make sense to him. He waited for them to rearrange into something else, and they didn’t.
“She called me right after she called you.” Beth’s voice was very steady, which was how he knew it cost her something. “She said, your father’s going to go finish his plants, and when he gets here late you are not to be angry at him. She made me say I wouldn’t be.” Beth looked down at her folded glasses. “She knew you, Dad. She knew you better than anybody alive. She knew exactly what you’d do and she’d decided ahead of time to forgive you for it.”
Martin found he couldn’t speak.
“I wasn’t angry at you for it,” Beth said. “I promised her. I was angry at you for everything after. And I was angry at her, a little, for making me promise, which is a horrible thing to say about your mother when she’s dying, and I’ve never said it to anybody.” She laughed, a short, wet sound. “So. Now we both have one.”
He reached for her hand on the rail of the bed, missed it because of the IV line, and found it the second time.
They didn’t talk much more. Beth stayed until the four hours were up and the nurse came to help him sit, and she drove him to the room he’d rented near the hospital and made him eat a sandwich, and she flew home in the morning. At the curb she said, “April,” not as an accusation this time, but as if she were writing it down.
He was back on the night shift in Del Norte by the first of February. K-31 tried for hares six more times that month and caught two. Martin wrote down every attempt. He wrote failed four times and success twice and, under each failure, the same note: L fore collapse on landing or L fore slipped on turn. In March she tried twenty times and caught seven, and he wrote down every miss the same way.
In early April, Mai sat down beside him in the observation room with his log in one hand and her laptop in the other.
“I’m meeting Doug on the twentieth,” she said. “I went back through everything. I want to show you something.”
She pulled up a clip from the night of February nineteenth. Martin remembered it. K-31 had flushed a hare from the brush pile and chased it along the back fence. At the corner the hare cut left and the kitten went to turn after it, and her left front foot slid out on the ice, and she went down on her shoulder. The hare reached the brush. He had written, 22:51, attempt, failed, L fore slipped on turn.
“Watch after,” Mai said.
The kitten got up. She shook herself. She went back to the corner where she’d fallen and stood there for a moment, looking at the ice. Then she walked the length of the fence again, slowly, and at the corner she turned with her weight shifted onto her right side and the left paw set down flat, braced, a little wide. She did it three times. Then she went and lay down near the brush pile and waited.
Twenty minutes later the hare came out, and she caught it at the same corner on the same turn.
Martin had logged that one as a separate entry. 23:14, success.
“You logged the miss,” Mai said. “And you logged the catch. You didn’t log what she did in between.”
“I didn’t think it was relevant.”
“It’s the most relevant thing on this card.” She closed the laptop. “She figured out how to turn on that foot. She practiced it. You have nineteen failures in this log, Martin, and every single one of them has a note about the paw. You don’t have a single note about her getting up.”
He looked at the dark monitor. In the run, K-31 was asleep in the den box, a gray shape against gray straw.
“Doug’s going to read nineteen failures,” Mai said. “And then he’s going to call the zoo.”
That night, at the end of his shift, he sat in the truck outside the feed store in the dark and called Beth. It was six in the morning in Ohio. She answered on the second ring sounding alarmed.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Nothing’s wrong with me.” He didn’t explain the zoo or the log. He said, “I think I’ve been writing it to keep her,” and heard how it sounded out loud.
Beth was quiet for a while.
“A good enclosure,” she said. “Big. Heated den. Somebody watching her every minute so nothing can happen to her. Vet on call.”
“Yes.”
“Somebody to drive her to her appointments. A room on the first floor so she doesn’t have to do stairs.”
He closed his eyes.
“Now you know what I sound like,” Beth said. “I had a whole guest room set up for you in October. I bought one of those shower chairs.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just know it.” She paused. “What are you going to tell them?”
On the twentieth he sat at a folding table in the facility’s break room with Mai and Doug Hailey and a state biologist who’d come down from Gunnison. Doug had read the log. He started, kindly, with the zoo.
Martin had brought a second page. He’d written it the night before in the observation room, going back through every clip from February and March, and it ran to four pages, and he had signed it.
“The log I gave you is incomplete,” he said. “I recorded each failed attempt and noted the paw. I didn’t record her corrections. Of nineteen failures, she returned to the site of the failure and repeated the movement in fourteen. In nine of those, she caught the next hare at the same site.” He slid the pages across the table. “I wrote it that way because I wanted her to be safe. That’s my problem. It isn’t hers.”
Doug read the pages. He read them all the way through, which took several minutes. The biologist from Gunnison read over his shoulder.
“I’ve put two rehab lynx back out with a bad foot,” Doug said at last. “One of them we found in March under a spruce. Eleven pounds.” He set the pages down. “If we put her out and she starves in February, that’s on this recommendation.”
“Yes,” Martin said. “It is.”
Doug looked at him for a long moment, then at Mai.
“Collar her,” he said. “GPS, drop-off after a year. Release in the natal area in May, before the snowpack goes soft. If she’s not hunting in sixty days, we go get her.”
After the meeting Martin sat in the truck and called Beth again, and this time it was the middle of her school day and she picked up anyway, standing in a hallway with bells going off behind her.
“May fourteenth,” he said. “Up at the basin. I’d like you to be there, if you can. I’d like that very much.”
The bells stopped. He could hear her breathing.
“I’ll come,” Beth said. “And then you’re driving home with me. In the car. Not flying back to Colorado for the summer two weeks later. Home, Dad. To the study. To her calendar.”
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