The Bobcat

She’d torn up everything around her—the brush, the bark on the trees, the ground itself. Everything was burning with ruin, and so the whole site glowed, as if consumed in pale gray flames. She glowed too. A ghost on fire.

That’s the way I remember it, the way it felt then as I approached her quietly, fearfully—the way one is meant to approach a holy place. Bear, my Lab-Dane mix, was with me. Well over a hundred pounds, he was silent and quavering, his head drooped below his broad chest.

She began to pace when we came closer. She limped as he paced and yet she moved with an impossible equanimity, her pale, naked silhouette passing back and forth through the trunk of a large, black cottonwood tree. I could hear the cold chirp of the chain attached to the trap. When we got within a dozen feet of her, she stopped, crouched down, and pressed her body against the cold earth. Under the leaves, I could feel the low thunder of her outrage.

Bear whined, at the limit of his courage. I knew he was staring at me but I could only stare at her. She did not have the look of anything around us, or any face or body I had seen that whole, run-of-the-mill day. Every hair and whisker and cell of tissue looked as if it had been cut from a star. Every part of her seemed to tremble—every part except the trap.

I could see it there: one of my father’s, a jump trap with nine iron teeth. Boiled in a black grease to smother up any trace of human scent, it was meant to lie down on the earth as a shadow, inert, seemingly beyond life and death—a thing almost from another dimension. When tripped, it was designed to leap up and to gore into the leg high above the foot.

And now it was a part of her, and yet it wasn’t. It hadn’t quite done its work. She must have had uncanny reflexes because I could see the spiked jaws biting down on just the tip of her big paw, on three bloody toes skinned to bone. One desperate pull, she could be loose. A cold thrill passed through me as I squatted there. She could be free any second.

But she wasn’t. A question occurred to me then: how could any creature have an instinct to cope with such a prison? To be held night and day? Doesn’t a fly have a right to succumb quickly on the web of the spider? Strange, I think now, that I’d never considered that before.

So I had to become the good spider. That’s what I told myself. I could have left her alone and hoped that she might chew away her own toes to save herself. She could live well enough with seven. I knew many animals had this impulse, and I’d been a witness to it: so many bear, coyote, beaver, skunk, and muskrat paws and toes surrendered to my father’s traps. But I also knew that many animals assumed every fine point of their radiance essential; they would die of exposure held by a single claw.

I really don’t know why I couldn’t leave her. I was trapped too, I suppose, and yet, unlike her, I had no patience at all. I found myself picking up a long, firm stick and stepping toward her; she spit and lunged. Bear yelped and cringed back. I crept as close as I dared and swung the stick down, but I was still too timid and noncommittal, and she was alert and lightning quick.

She dodged the blow and the club slammed on the trap, twisting her mutilated foot. Enraged with fear and pain, she screamed and exploded directly at my face. I fell flat on my back, sprawling and completely exposed.

Bear, my loyal boy, split for the river and I knew I was, for the first time in my life, in...