Part 7
They spent most of June in the study.
It went slower than either of them expected and faster than he had feared. Some days they did one shelf. Some days Beth left after an hour and came back the next evening, and he did not call to ask why. In the closet they found Ruth’s seed jars, sixty or seventy of them, each labeled in green ink with the year and the bed she’d grown them in. They planted a row from each of the newest jars behind the garage, and the ones that came up stayed.
Ruth’s calendar went into the top drawer of her desk. A new one went on the nail beside the window, and on the first of July Martin saw a hummingbird at the feeder Beth had hung, and he took the green pen out of the drawer and wrote it down, with the time.
The collar reported every four hours all summer. K-31 stayed in the basin through June and killed hares and red squirrels on the slopes below Cinder Point. On the sixty-first day after the release, Doug Hailey sent an email that said only Good. In August she left. The points marched south over Stony Pass and down through the San Juans and across the state line into New Mexico, a hundred and forty miles in nineteen days. Mai called it a dispersal and said young lynx did it all the time, and that it meant nothing bad. Martin looked at the map on his laptop every morning. In early November, on schedule, the collar dropped off in a spruce stand near Chama. Owen drove down to retrieve it, and sent a photo of the empty collar lying in the snow beside a set of tracks going away.
After that there was nothing. Martin went back to Colorado for six weeks the next summer and five the summer after, always in July, always with a return date Beth had seen. He taught a field course on the basin floor and showed the students the bare rock on the upper bench where the plots had been and made them count every stake they put in the ground and every stake they took out.
Three years after the release, on a Sunday in October, Beth came over for dinner.
She brought a casserole dish and complained about a parent. Martin had made pot roast, badly. The furnace kicked on for the first time that season. They were clearing the table when his phone buzzed on the counter.
It was Owen, who was in his fourth winter at the station and had stopped bothering with greetings.
Willow flat cam, 2:47 a.m. last night. Mai says it’s her. LEFTY’S BACK.
There was a video attached. Martin wiped his hands on the dish towel, and then, instead of taking the phone to the window, he brought it to the kitchen table and sat down next to his daughter and held it where they could both see.
The clip was gray and grainy. A lynx came out of the willows below the upper bench, full-grown, long-legged, her ruff thick with fall fur. She walked into the middle of the frame and stopped and listened. On her left foreleg, just above the paw, the white ring caught the infrared and glowed. Her stride was a little short on that side. Nobody who hadn’t watched her for seven months would have noticed.
Two kittens followed her. They were the size of house cats, all ears and feet. One of them pounced on a willow stem and missed it and fell over. The other one bumped into its mother’s legs. The female waited until both were close, then went on across the flat and into the spruce, and the kittens went after her.
The clip ended.
Beth was quiet for a moment. “Play it again,” she said.
He played it again. He handed her the phone and let her hold it, and she played it a third time by herself while he finished the dishes.
Then he picked the phone back up and typed a reply to Owen. Don’t go looking for the den. Leave the camera where it is. He looked at it and added: Thank you. He sent it.
The green pen was in the drawer by the window, where Ruth had kept her pens. He took it out and went to the calendar on the nail and found Saturday’s square. He wrote, Lynx, with two young, willow flat, and stopped.
Beth had come up behind him. She read over his shoulder.
“Mom always put the time,” she said.
He uncapped the pen again and added it in small, careful numbers, the hour he used to sit awake in a dark room in Del Norte with his coffee going cold, watching a gray shape on a gray screen learn to stand.
2:47 a.m.