Imprints

In July, the children arrived. Two buses descended upon the camp, bumping along a mile of rutted dirt road through the Michigan woods before releasing them at the lodge, boys and girls of middle-school age, let out like insects from yellow jars. Maria, braced against her dread, was grateful for the college students rounding them up, grateful that her own contact with them would not amount to much. This was the second group of week campers to invade her temporary home, the long, rickety lodge that sprawled like a broken arm on a cushion of pine needles. Before July, she'd lived in it alone, contending with day groups or the occasional weekend group but otherwise going about her work in pleasant solitude.

From the lodge window, she watched the swarm and estimated the numbers: twenty-odd girls, the same number of boys, three counselors for each. At most, it worked out to eight children per counselor. That seemed adequate. She wished, nonetheless, that each one would marshal his or her eight into a line, make some visible claim of responsibility. Only Percy, the one counselor she knew because he was a local and hung around between camps, had his group stilled and waiting. Maybe the children recognized him from past summers, with his ubiquitous straw cowboy hat and molasses gestures. A few words, a crook of a finger, and they came running, while the college kids hollered. From across the yard, Percy caught Maria watching and gave her a wink over the tops of his orange-tinted sunglasses.

The kitchen, normally empty, resounded with the clatterings of the camp cook, Shirl. Her husband, Jacob, the handyman, power-fully heavy in his lumberjack attire and long yellow beard, hauled boxes from his truck to the kitchen. He offered no answer to his wife's shouted questions about where was the griddle and how many eggs—opened his mouth, in fact, so rarely to speak that Maria thought of the beard as having grown uninterrupted over his mouth like a fine-stranded moss.

She said hello to Shirl as she passed through toward the Staff Only door that opened into the greenhouse, her wildlife hospital. "Hey there, honey," Shirl greeted her. She wore a flowing muumuu and had three chins. Maria was certain she was treated to Shirl's endearments because Shirl didn't remember her name.

"You still got those animals off my kitchen?" She was only half teasing. "I tell you, the health inspector's gonna show up one of these days and shut us all down on the spot."

"I know," Maria said, smiling, thinking would you like me to pick up the greenhouse and move it? "Talk to the director," she said. "He tells me where the animals go, and that's where I put them."

Shirl leveled a jocular glare. "Somebody oughta be ashamed of this place, honestly. All falling apart, ramshackle rooms tacked on every which way, full of animals. I can't say I'd want to send my kids here."

"Me neither," Maria said, as if the speculation applied. Leaving Shirl to her kitchen, she shut the door and descended the steps.

In the greenhouse it was almost as bright as daylight. Old wooden tables laden with boxes lined the near wall of a narrow passage to the outside door, followed by a set of double-tiered, stainless-steel hospital cages. Along the opposite wall, ceiling-high cages full of squirrels and opossums and long flights full of fledgling songbirds had been cheaply constructed from various gauges of wire stapled to plywood frames.

Her education birds—a crow, a kestrel, and a great horned owl—sat tethered out in the open gravel between the flights, perched on Astroturf-covered stumps. They greeted her as she entered: the crow with a low, begging caw; the kestrel with his nervous, bell-like alarm; and the owl with a placid blink of yellow eyes and the pattering clack of her beak. Maria peeked into one of the lower hospital cages to see if her sickly fawn was still alive. (Wouldn't eat, wouldn't eat, until Maria had...