Part 5
Ada carried the coat home on her lap. At each familiar turn she let Denise steer without advice. The plastic bag rustled whenever the car went over a frost heave.
Back at the house, Denise built up the stove and brought in their bags. Ada remained at the table, still wearing her outdoor shoes.
Her daughter picked up the pendant box.
“Can we get this ready?”
Ada watched her thumb rest beside the sealed flap. A refusal came easily to her mouth; she held it there a moment.
“No fastening it on me like a dog tag.”
Denise’s smile was brief. “You can handle that part.”
She charged the device and hung it beside Ada’s outdoor coat. The next morning, Ada tucked it under her sweater before going for the mail.
Ben brought news once or twice a week. At first the reports concerned medication, swelling, and the fracture. Then the bandage came off, and Nook began using the larger enclosure.
He still shortened his stride after hard exercise. Lena watched that carefully.
Ada listened for the other details. Nook hid when staff approached. He waited until they left before eating. A vehicle near the enclosure brought him up against the far wall, hissing. Later, he began stalking live prey in the brush pen.
When Ben described a day when nobody had managed to get a clear look at him, Ada asked him to repeat it.
The cracked saucer went behind the serving bowls in the cupboard. No more meat appeared on the porch.
Some nights a scrape against the mudroom still brought her out of bed. She would find herself at the door with her hand around the latch, listening. After a while she would go back for her slippers and return to bed.
Denise fitted a new catch to the storm door, working around the scratched wood without touching it. For the rest of that winter she came every other weekend, but no more housing forms landed on Ada’s table.
One Sunday, Ada reached into the coffee tin above the refrigerator and brought down the spare house key.
Denise held out her hand but waited.
“This doesn’t make you superintendent,” Ada said.
“I don’t want the job.”
“You let me know before you come through the door.”
Denise closed her fingers around the key. “If the emergency service calls me, I’m coming straight in.”
Ada considered that, then pushed the tin back onto its shelf.
“All right.”
Ben visited after the charges were filed against Gordon. Ada had saved the newspaper without reading the short account more than once.
Unlawful trapping, trespass, and an attempt to possess a protected animal were among the charges. Gordon maintained that the steel trap had been intended for a coyote and that the crate showed he had meant to rescue the lynx.
Ben would not predict what the court would do. The photographs, seized equipment, video, and Gordon’s statements would be available to the people deciding the case.
Ada asked whether there was any wire left on her land.
“We checked it all,” he told her. “Every device we found is out.”
She folded the newspaper and set it beneath the kindling basket.
The telephone rang one afternoon in late April while Denise was visiting. Ada had flour on her hands, so her daughter lifted the receiver and held it out for her.
Lena was calling herself.
Nook had passed the hunting assessments. He stayed out of sight when people entered the service area. His injured leg had lost a little extension, noticeable when he tired, but he could take snowshoe hare without assistance.
Wildlife staff at both the state and federal level had approved his release.
Ada sat down, leaving a white thumbprint on the telephone.
The site was a broad stretch of managed forest connected to the country behind her house. It would give Nook familiar habitat without putting the porch immediately in his path.
“Is it very far?” Ada asked.
“A good distance from you. Still the kind of forest he knows.”
Lena explained that Ada could watch from a closed vehicle, well behind the release team. Or she could remain home. There would be no contact with the animal either way.
After the call, Denise put the receiver back.
“Would you like me to drive?”
Ada brushed the dried flour from her fingers.
“Yes. I’d like to be there when they let him out.”
Two mornings later, they traveled into the forest on a road the crews had recently reopened. Meltwater ran beside the gravel, and pockets of old snow remained beneath the thickest trees.
Ben met them at a landing. He helped Ada into the front passenger seat of his truck, where she had an unobstructed view across a small clearing. Denise climbed into the back.
Ada settled her cane between her knees. Nobody asked her to pose for a picture.
The covered transport crate arrived in another vehicle. When the cover came away, she could see Nook behind the grille. He had filled out through his shoulders and chest. A light tracking collar lay mostly hidden in his ruff.
He turned within the crate, and she caught sight of one enormous foot against the floor.
Lena took her position behind the truck and raised the door with a line.
Nook stayed inside.
Ada watched the dark opening. A bird tapped somewhere above the clearing. Meltwater dripped from the underside of a fallen branch.
His head appeared first. Each ear turned toward a different sound. He tested the air, waited, then stepped down onto the ground.
The left front foot landed slightly short. He shifted forward, and it held him.
Ada drew breath to say his name. She shut her mouth before any sound came out.
Nook crossed the clearing at a steady trot. He did not turn toward the trucks. At the first thick cover, he passed behind a trunk and was gone. One low branch trembled after him, then stilled.
Ben left the engine off for another minute.
“Ready, Mrs. Mercer?”
Ada kept her eyes on the trees while she adjusted the cane between her knees.
“Yes, Benjamin. Let’s go.”
During the summer, the collar showed that Nook was ranging north and west through good hare country. He avoided roads. Ben shared broad reports, never enough detail to send Ada looking for him.
By the time Ben told Ada about Nook’s October travels, the collar was placing him north again. For a while he had followed a wooded corridor south into the forest behind her land.
She let Ben finish without asking for the crossing point.
By the following November, a handrail ran beside the porch steps. The emergency pendant stayed charged. Denise’s spare key traveled back and forth from Duluth on the same ring as her car keys.
The scratches around the mudroom door had weathered pale.
A year after the storm, the first lasting snow arrived while Ada slept. Before dawn, a brief scrape brought her awake.
She waited for the branch to knock again. It did not.
This time she put on her glasses and slippers before crossing the kitchen. She left the light off.
Nook stood outside the storm door.
For a moment she could see only the shape of him. Then he moved his head, and the collar showed beneath the long fur of his neck. He was leaner than the animal she remembered from the clearing, taller than the small creature her hands still expected.
He did not scratch again.
His ears turned toward the old hare trail. As he shifted his position, the left front foot came down with its familiar shortened reach.
Ada laid her palm over the latch. The brass was cold against her skin.
She kept it lowered.
Nook looked toward the woods, stepped off the porch, and crossed the yard. She watched him go between the firs without saying his name.
His tracks ran from the bottom step to the trees. Here and there, the injured foot had barely broken the new crust.
Ada remained until she could no longer distinguish him from the spaces between the trunks. Then she went back to the stove and moved the kettle away from the heat before it could whistle.