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, powerfully 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 finally passed a tube into the animal's stomach and force-fed it, but the formula only gave it diarrhea.) The fawn lay curled, head flat on the towel, eyes half open, wet black nose pumping breath. The bones formed a painful angle at the tiny behind, where the fawn's damp tail was tucked. Nothing much more she could do there. In the cage above, a pair of skinny raccoon kits yowled and paced.

Maria turned to a long table of cardboard boxes—because there were always, always, animals for which she could do something. As she touched the first box to slide it forward, eight yellow mouths— belonging to partly pin-feathered robins and jays—bobbed upward. Vying for space, they opened and cried. From a Tupperware bowl, she pinched bits of softened dog kibble and poked the food with an index finger down the silk tube of each long throat.

One of the jays squatted in the back, sleepy, glaring resentment when Maria tapped at its beak. "Aw, baby, come on," she murmured. She lifted it from the box and dribbled a little water into its nostrils until it swallowed. After more tapping got her nowhere, she forced its mouth open and inserted a lump, then another, both of which the bird swallowed with difficulty, trying to sleep. She placed it in a private incubator box. Maybe it would perk up. But sometimes they weakened and failed for no reason. Each morning, her first task was to check the boxes and collect what had died overnight, a handful of small corpses.

The other birds delicately downed each bite and opened their mouths again, crying louder, as if they were starving, as if they would never be full. Every forty-five minutes, during daylight hours, Maria passed along these boxes, stuffing the mouths of songbirds. With the mammals, it was formula every three to four hours, day and night, when they were very young. In between, she cleaned cages, administered medication, took in the new arrivals—these surprise boxes brought to her door by local citizens and state game officials, in which she might find any sort of wild animal in any state of health or trauma.

She reached the last box, which contained six fat, soot-colored starlings, their cries as grating and mechanical as buzz saws. "Monsters," she grumbled. If she'd had a choice, she wouldn't have raised this non-native pest, offspring of the vast flocks that colonized the habitat and ousted less aggressive natives like bluebirds and orioles. From an ecological standpoint, she might as well water kudzu, feed feral cats. But with its murky church affiliations, the camp refused such discriminations and took in all God's creatures, whatever wild thing arrived. (One of Maria's jobs, in fact, was to produce a monthly newsletter on the animal program called "All God's Creatures.") And starlings arrived by the crate, tough and voracious, consuming more than all of the other birds combined. Their mouths were comically oversized, edged in rubbery yellow, and Maria filled them dutifully with hunks of food twice as big as the other birds could swallow. Their gulps were rapid, muscular; Maria felt the suction on the ends of her fingers, as if, given a chance, they would swallow her too.

Before Maria's arrival, the birds had been fed mainly by a waif-ish blonde volunteer named Lily. Five months pregnant, she had agreed to continue on a few weeks while Maria got adjusted. Lily had never seemed to question the camp's directive that starlings must be fed, though she'd once told Maria wearily, "I keep dreaming that I give birth to my baby and it comes out this way—it's this eight-pound starling. And I just feed it and feed it, but it's always squalling for more."

In the morning, on her way to the kitchen, she now had to pass through a dining room full of campers. Even at 7 a.m., they were rowdy, shouting, a chaos of noise and sunburned limbs. She shared her bathroom with the girls, who didn't know what to make of her, scattered when they entered in the evening and found her washing her face at the sink. To them, she was The Lady at the Back of the Lodge. She was like the deep night woods, the sounds that walked the roof and issued from the basement after dark.

She dreaded introducing herself, losing her power over them. But on the second full day, she was scheduled to present the first of several wildlife programs for the camp. The children gathered in a fidgety cluster, seated on the lawn beside the lake, just downhill from the lodge. Maria glanced around in vain for Percy's cowboy hat. The trio of pep-squad girls in charge in his stead were long-haired and long-limbed, only a few years younger than Maria, but they seemed so young in their tie-dyed shirts and Birkenstocks and woven bracelets, their casual stances, chatting together while here and there in the crowd, children rose, shuffled, crept to new positions with giggles and sly, sidelong, unheeded glances. Behind the group, the sheeted water of the lake sparkled.

"I'm Maria," she told the children, with her broad program smile. "You've probably seen me around. I live at the back of the lodge. Today we're going to get to see some animals. All of the animals we'll see today are cold-blooded. Who knows what that means?"

She brought out from her boxes and bags first a pond turtle, for warm-up, and then a bullfrog. Most of the children were round-eyed, rapt, responsive, though a freckled boy at the back edge, already bored, crawled toward her largest unopened box with the intent to steal an advance look. Other children began watching the boy's efforts with curiosity. Maria frowned at the counselors, who didn't seem to notice.

Talking still, she shifted the box farther from the boy's reach, and then lifted a canvas bag, the next exhibit. As always, the snake drew gasps and shrieks as it emerged from the bag, big and bright, mottled in autumn colors—red-orange and gold and brown— coiled loosely, placidly, around her hand. After she had done her best to convince them that a corn snake was nothing to fear, she allowed a few of the braver, quieter, front-row children to stroke the body with a fingertip. "See, it's not slimy. It's just like your fingernails."

She saved the mysterious box for last, for shock value: a snapping turtle big enough to require two hands and some muscle. It was the murky gray-green of algae, with a head the size of a softball and prehistoric hooked jaws that gaped open in perennial foul-tempered surprise, as if for each program she extracted it directly from the Mesozoic mud and offered it blinking to the twenty-first century. "No," she told the children doggedly, in response to the usual excited questions, while she gripped the snapper by the back of its horny shell and the rudder of its tail, "you can't pet this one. No, you couldn't tame it. Not ever. You couldn't teach it tricks like a dog. You couldn't teach it anything."

She had once babysat for a boy named Stephen Albright, whom this summer she'd been thinking about more than usual, maybe because her counselor-friend, Percy, had the same last name. Albright.

A leech-child, he had clung to her from the moment she walked in the door, before his parents even left the house. His sister, too— Melanie, two years younger. They fought over Maria's attention, grasped her hands and dragged her in opposite directions until the joints of her fingers ached and she had to tell them firmly to stop. She sat on the sofa, and they snuggled up on both sides, whining her name—Stephen the instigator, Melanie copying him. Maria, look, Maria, look at this. Watch this. See? See? (See me, love me.)

They were unattractive children, with large, crooked, discolored teeth. Damp to the touch, noses running, their smiles strained and gaping, benign and stunned, like the expressions she'd expect on normal children in the instant that, without warning, they were struck in the back of the head with a bat. Stephen's laugh was as discordant as a donkey bray, as loud and uncontrolled. Both these kids, she imagined, would have a hard time fitting in, already, always.

She counted the minutes until she could put them to bed. Then she'd have the house to herself. She would search out hidden goodies in the Albrights' pantry, settle in with a movie on their premium cable. Children were tolerable, any children. Maria as a teenager was the trusted sitter for half the neighborhood, and she told parents she'd been named for Maria in The Sound of Music, which was true. But she loved children less than the luxurious privacy of other houses, once the kids were safely stashed away.

Now, looking back, she couldn't help wondering if maybe she hadn't watched Stephen carefully enough. An illogical notion, it nagged her nonetheless. And what about his parents—had they ever suspected? Had they glimpsed the end coming before their teenaged son returned home one day, fresh from murdering two strangers and wounding five more in a fast-food restaurant, to shoot them both before taking his own life? Who had been on watch when that impulse was born?

A monster, they had called this boy on the news reports. A cold spree killer, without conscience, who laughed as his victims begged for their lives. Maria, working at another wildlife center in the deep South at the time, had watched it on the news—Stephen Albright—with breathless disbelief and the sense of having narrowly escaped something. None of the reports she heard mentioned Melanie, and that omission continued to assert itself and bother Maria from time to time, as if she had misplaced a child.

She'd been a careful sitter. She knew all the emergency numbers. She knew CPR. She was beloved and strict. Children bathed on her command, and even when they begged to stay up, just a few more minutes (please, Maria) in her presence, they almost always went to bed and stayed there when she decreed. Stephen, though, had been one of those flirts who couldn't help himself, would sneak out of bed just for the pleasure of being caught.

Tricked you!

Or had that been a different child? When she tried to recall the face peeking around the sofa, she could see only the pimple-specked, crooked-smiled high school photo from the news, as if the trick he'd played had been to grow up—awkwardly, badly— without permission.

When Percy had a break from his counselor duties, he would poke into the greenhouse or wander the trails from cage to cage, hawk to coyote to eagle to deer, until he found Maria. Usually, she was in the greenhouse, moving amid the hospital cages, the trained birds tethered and solemn at her feet. Percy was in love, Maria was well aware, with her birds. With her, too, perhaps, when she held the big owl on her fist, and maybe for a little while afterward.

"Want some help?" he asked, as she moved down the table of nestlings, filling each mouth from her fingers with rapid, automatic motions. Behind her, the greenhouse was raucous—squirrels scrabbling in chase over chicken wire, fledglings twittering, the jays swooping and calling in their long flight cages. He leaned against her Staff Only door, his hands in the pockets of ragged shorts, the brim of his cream-of-wheat-colored hat riding low over stunningly pale, heavy-lidded eyes. Percy always looked a little stoned, Maria thought, even when he wasn't.

"That's all right," she said. "I can do it quicker alone." Truthfully Maria trusted no one with hand-feeding—too easy to tear a baby's throat, or aspirate it, kill it that quick. There were always cages to clean, if people wanted to help.

Percy stepped down to the gravel floor and knelt to greet the tethered birds in chummy whispers, keeping a little distance as she had taught. One nice thing about Percy: he did everything exactly as she told him to. In the break between camp sessions, he had remained close by, though not too close, as if afraid to annoy her or reveal too much ardor. He volunteered to help with the animals or to drive Maria into town whenever she needed it, hoping for lessons with the birds in exchange.

Like a lover, pretending no more than casual interest, he rose from the birds and ambled to the metal cages. "Where's that fawn?"

"Died," she said.

"Poor thing." The raccoon kits yowled monotonously, and Percy offered a finger. "Aw, hungry, buddies?" The kits, still yowling, paused in their pacing to grasp it through the bars with their black, velvet-soft hands. "I love that," he said in his mellow drawl, grinning at Maria. "How they hold on that way. It's sweet."

"Sweet until the claws get you," she said, and Percy was already extracting himself with a scolding "Hey, now!" for the coons. Anything offered they patted all over with their soft, outstretched pads, feeling new objects the way the gentlest of blind children might. But present them with a finger, or anything they could get their hands around, and they gripped down to pull it through the bars.

"They need to be fed or something?" Percy asked, rubbing his finger. The kits resumed their mechanical pacing.

"I just fed them." Maria came up behind him, frowned at the kits. "God, shut up, you dopes." They never chittered like healthy coons, those two, only whined raspingly, plaintively, always demanding something even when their bellies were round with milk. She didn't like the idea of raising raccoons in the first place. On release, they would have no fear of people; they'd be pests, garbage-raiders, and probably aggressive. But, as with starlings, she found the issue was not open for discussion with the director.

"Maybe they have worms or something," she muttered. But how was she to know? She wasn't a vet. She knew the basics, had picked up some useful tricks in her travels, but she was only one half-trained, ill-equipped person. She simply couldn't do enough for all these animals.

The camp had been fed its supper, and in the falling dusk Maria could hear the children's voices rising from the lake below. "You don't have to monitor the evening swim?" she asked Percy.

"Nope. I begged off."

"So you want to take out the birds?"

Slowly, she had taught him that summer, doling out in spoonfuls what he most craved—her own oneness with raptors. She resisted teaching too much. No one at the camp, when she had arrived, had known the first thing about birds of prey, though there were plenty around—cages full of hawks and owls, mostly wing-shattered amputees. The director had taken her on tour when she arrived, displayed with some pride the baby great horned owl he had hand-raised that year. The bird whinnied from its cage and nibbled softly at Maria's fingers. Imprinted, she informed the director. Same with the kestrel, the crow. The birds are crippled, she explained—not simply tamed but mentally twisted during the critical stage when their brains had been soft enough to receive impressions; now they were hardened, permanently lost to themselves and their species. They could never be released. Raccoons might figure out the rudimentary elements of being raccoons, but the raptors could not.

With curiosity and amazement, the camp folk had watched as she purchased good leather and a grommet kit and cut a set of jesses to fit each bird's legs, as she began training them to sit quietly on the hand for a future in the education program. She became the Bird Lady, endowed with arcane powers over wild things.

She had let Percy start with the crow, such a pet that it barely needed the jesses to hold it. Full-grown, it still begged for handfeedings. After many sessions, she had let him graduate to the kestrel, which was much smaller than the crow but a true falcon. A good practice bird.

"Can I try the owl?" he asked now, hopeful as always. He donned the laughable glove he had bought himself, heavy enough for holding eagles.

"I'm still working with her," Maria said. "I don't think she's ready for a beginner quite yet." This wasn't much of a lie—the owl might have been fine, but Percy wasn't ready. He hadn't yet really even seen her handle the owl, except from a distance.

With barely a sigh, Percy lifted the kestrel's jesses over the glove, and the kestrel—a pretty thing painted in cinnamon and buff and slate blue, hooded with black stripes, dappled all over in black spots—stepped with tiny hooked talons onto the ridge of Percy's finger, shrieking continuously. Percy untied the bird's thin rope leash from the stump and wound it slowly, carefully, through the fingers of the glove.

"Hold him lower," Maria said, once Percy was standing with the kestrel on his glove. "Now closer. Right up against your body. Falcons get anxious that far away—they want to be close." As Percy got the kestrel into comfortable position, his fist six inches from his sternum, the bird's clamor quieted into whistles. "There you go, that's it. Let me see if I can get the owl, and we'll go outside."

Percy's attention was riveted as she pulled on a glove. She knelt before the owl's yellow gaze, the passive body on the stump enormous in comparison to the other birds, the feathers mottled in soft browns like a forest floor. The owl clacked her beak, a few soft pops somewhere between greeting and warning. Maria lifted the jesses over her glove and pulled them softly taut, a little tension, urging, until the owl stepped up onto her fist.

They went outside, where a lavender twilight sat on the lawn, and deepening shade approached from the woods. The shouts and splashes still rose from the water below, though the lodge blocked the swimming children from view. Every so often, one of the counselors called out over the din, scolding, correcting.

"With owls, it's opposite from falcons," Maria said. "Owls need space, distance. Your arm should be a tree branch, up and away from your body."

"How do you know?" Percy asked. "I mean, like, how does this owl know it's supposed to want space, if it doesn't even know it's an owl?"

"Well, animals are pretty consistent. That's what nice about them, I guess. Yeah, this one's screwed up in one way, but she's still hard-wired for certain behaviors, certain responses."

The owl on her fist was a solid weight, yet so much lighter than it appeared. Percy was right—there was mystery here. The bird never returned her gaze but, with circular movements of a whiskered, tigerish face, triangulated on small birds that came down to make threats ("See that," Maria said. "No one taught her that. She just does it.") or on leaves that turned out in the deeper woods. What did a hand-raised owl feel at the edge of a forest?

"Don't stare at them either," she added. "They hate that. Especially when you go to pick them up." She glanced at Percy, surprised at the steady gaze he returned, which seemed more than attentive—was that amusement? For an instant, she had the sense that her eager naïf had surpassed her instruction. He listened, the kestrel held just above his left hip in relaxed, expert position, as if in the last few minutes he had become a master falconer.

"It's best to avert your eyes," she continued, turning back to the owl. "Blink a lot."

The children knew her name now and called it out, sing-song, as she tried to pass invisibly through the dining room toward her morning coffee. In the kitchen, Shirl scraped grease from an iron griddle that stretched across the range of the enormous stove. "Morning, sugar," she said, then added with a nervous glance, "One of your birds died last night."

Maria pulled the tap on the coffee pot and filled her mug. "That's okay," she said. "They die all the time."

But Shirl had never been one to take notice of the animal program beyond her running feud with its proximity to the kitchen. "Which bird?" Maria asked.

"Hell, I don't know what his name was or nothing. Go out there and you'll see him."

Coffee steaming before her face, Maria opened the "Staff Only" door and stopped. At first she didn't know what she was looking at. There was the empty stump where the kestrel had been tethered, the leash strung out on the gravel floor, attached to the jesses, which held a pair of drumsticks.

She gasped, blinked—the leather bands hammered around two little curled-up claws, so surreal that she could not stop looking for the body, the rest of the bird. Nothing remained but feathers. She wanted to call time-out. Only the hospital patients were fair game for death. Not her long-timers, her education animals. The owl and the crow had been put up in steel cages the night before, the kestrel left out because she had run out of cages. There had been no place to put him.

In a daze, she moved through the greenhouse and checked each cage. All the others were fine—the blinking owl, the yowling kits. Even the baby birds on the table, protected by nothing but cardboard boxes, were unscathed. But in the towering chicken-wire pen, where a dozen half-grown squirrels awaited release, there was another victim. A gray body lay in the bottom of the cage, two red holes where its arms had been. No sign of the arms— she couldn't help looking for them. The remaining squirrels clung to the upper cage walls and stared down at her, or at the armless squirrel, with low, chittering buzzes or mute shock.

The wooden door to the yard was open, swinging against the bright wet green of the morning. Where the inside hook had been, there was freshly splintered wood. Pulled open, by brute force— she could picture the hands feeling into the smallest gap to grip around the lower edge of the door. A breeze floated in to stir through loose feathers on the greenhouse floor, cinnamon and slate and white, black-banded and speckled.

"There's a double lock on it now," she told Percy. "Top and bottom. Jacob put it on for me today, and it looks pretty solid."

"Raccoons, huh?" Percy shook his head. The kids had been sent off to a survival training program for a few hours that evening, and Percy had seized the opportunity to mix margaritas. He'd rather hang out with her, he said, than the college kids. They sat on the hill above the lake, sipping the slushy drinks from salt-rimmed plastic cups.

"This is exactly why no one should hand-raise those little monsters." Maria glared at the surrounding trees as if daring the culprits to come forth. "I've never seen . . ." Her voice fell away. Anything so horrible in my life, she had wanted to say. She took a swallow of her drink, caught a mouthful of salt.

Percy sighed and eased back onto his elbows in the grass, tipping his head back to take in the cloudless, deepening twilight. "Poor kestrel. I'm going to miss that little guy. He was a good little guy."

"It's my own fault," she said. "I never should have left him out

like that." "Maria, don't blame yourself. You couldn't know." She met his earnest gaze, and knew in an instant, though he still

reclined in the grass, that he was thinking about kissing her. It was the way he said her name. She wasn't sure how she felt about the idea. Percy had mentioned wanting six or seven kids, and the mere thought of a kiss attached itself, however thinly, to that claim. She shook her head. Maybe it was only a rush from the tequila, tricking her.

"It's not that," she said. "It's just, god, that squirrel. And the kestrel, too. I can't help picturing it." Her eyes teared up—she could hardly believe it, tears—and she looked away, unable to speak what she imagined. The bird who trusted everyone, who just wanted to be held close, calling out cheerfully to his killers. And tied—no hope of a startled escape. The squirrel on the wire, curious, seized by one paw and then the other, both limbs torn away as inexorably, as remorselessly, as if caught in the gears of a machine. "What good did I do for either one of them?" she asked. "All this work seems so useless."

Percy waited. Maria pressed her lips together, shook her head. "God, shut me up. Can you believe I'm getting all sentimental about this? They're animals. They're not people."

Percy blinked, baffled. "But they were your animals. They were special—the kestrel, at least."

"No, not them. The raccoons, I mean, are animals. I can't expect them to behave like anything else. To have a conscience. Or a sense of fairness and decency." She laughed without humor. "We should talk about something else."

He smiled, his expression keener than usual. "You're a puzzle, you know?" he said.

She disliked the judgment. "I'm not a puzzle. I'm simple. What do you want to know?"

His stoned expression returned, a little-boy smile. "Why is it that birds suddenly appear every time you are near?"

She frowned. "Because they're dying to be close to me. Anything else?"

"Okay, I'm kidding." He looked out toward the lake, where the light lingered. "Tell you what, seriously, I'll make you out a list sometime. I'll bet you're tougher than you think. Speaking of which—" He sat up, reached into the pocket of his tattered cutoffs. "I made you something today. I hope you like the colors. That will be one of the questions on the list, because I didn't know what colors you would like." He produced for her a band of braided string, red, green, and brown, with a knot in each end. "It's a friendship bracelet."

"Oh. Thanks."

It hung a moment awkwardly between them, and as she moved to take it, he said, "Here, I'll tie it on your wrist for you. The kids made them today, they're all wearing them. It's so cute. The boys all made them for the girls . . ." He completed the knot a little clumsily and then displayed the rainbow of string that plaited around his own wrist. "See how many girlfriends I have?"

"Thanks. It's pretty." She turned it around, studying it. "This camp is such a Be-In. You all have group love sessions and make tie-dyed shirts, now friendship bracelets."

"It's good for the kids, helps them relate to people and all that. Don't worry, we're not passing out the acid until the last night."

"How does this thing come off?"

"It doesn't. It's a friendship bracelet, you don't take it on and off. It'll rot off eventually."

He remained close beside her as she turned the knotted string, and she avoided his eyes, knowing with a queasy prescience what she would see there. Not that she didn't want to be kissed. If Percy felt uncomfortably familiar these days, it was not that he was another Albright, someone she had known before. His familiarity, if anything, was like that of someone she would know, was already bound to. When he touched her hair, leaned in to kiss her on the mouth, she didn't resist. As if she couldn't. As if they were already in love, already engaged, those counted children awaiting them.

Percy played guitar in the next room, where the children were singing. How many seas must the white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand? Their voices were sweet and clear, and Maria, listening from the kitchen as she waited for formula to warm, almost convinced herself the words meant something—as if children raised on gun-blazing video games could possibly understand these hippie songs.

As she listened, there was a distant crash. Not the greenhouse, she decided—the basement. She turned off the burner. The basement door was just beside her. The campers sang without pause in the next room. She found a flashlight, opened the door. The light from the kitchen flooded bright down the basement stairs.

She stepped down, let the heavy door seal shut behind her. There was no sound now from the blackness below, and she found herself trying to blend into the silence, careful not to make the old wooden steps creak as she descended. The beam of her flashlight revealed nothing in the first room, but the sound's source, she knew, waited deeper in the dark. Her steps did not hesitate. She was not afraid.

In the second room, she played the flashlight's beam over the shelves of feeder mice in metal boxes, each with a plastic water bottle protruding from the top. There was a tiny and constant ching-ching and scuffle that meant they were full of mice and all was normal. Her beam caught no renegades running loose along the shelves.

From over her head came a scrape of cardboard, loud and definite. Her beam flashed up the tower of cardboard boxes full of dog food. That top box. On her toes, she could just touch the bottom corners. She looked around for a tool, found a canoe paddle. Aiming the flashlight with one hand, she whacked the side of the box with the paddle and waited, breathless. Nothing happened. She hit the box again. With the tip of the paddle set against the box this time, she shoved. The side of the box bent in, the whole thing rocked violently, and something exploded out of the top. It seemed huge—a bobcat, a young bear, a gremlin dressed as a raccoon.

Maria forgot to move as the raccoon slid down the boxes and thunked onto the top of an upright freezer. Crouching there, pupils white in the flashlight beam, it let out a gruff hiss in which she counted all the things in the basement that were in danger: all the food stored for the camp, the food for the animals, the mice. She lunged forward, paddle first, and the raccoon leapt up the wall behind the freezer into the mouth of an aluminum duct.

She beat the paddle back and forth inside the opening. The duct became aluminum tubing suspended from the ceiling that wound around the basement like a giant Habitrail; in seconds, claws skittered farther along the tube. She beat the paddle against the aluminum until the basement rang. Shouting, she chased the thing up the pipe and, she hoped, out of the basement. When she could no longer hear it, she bolted back around to the stairs and up into the light, past the counselors and goggling kids who had gathered in the kitchen, drawn by the noise.

The tube ended outside, directly below Maria's own room. She ran around to the back of the lodge, where the metal grating that had covered the opening, just below floor-level, lay twisted in the grass. She looked out from the lodge, and there, in and around the camp's trash dumpster, were at least six raccoons. Each was locked in place, staring back at her. Her eyes fixed on the topmost coon, perched on a pile of ripped-open garbage bags that billowed above the upper lip of the dumpster. Its nose was in the air, sniffing.

Transfixed, Maria walked toward the dumpster. It seemed her responsibility to chase them away. The king of the trash heap eyed her with a hissing growl, while coons on the ground below slunk behind the dumpster out of range. But they were in no great hurry. She was fifteen feet, ten feet from the dumpster. The top raccoon stared her down, and when she stopped her advance it returned to pawing through the trash. Maria's eyes widened in disbelief. Even a fostered raccoon should revert to some level of wildness. It certainly ought to yield ground on approach. Instead this one lifted a stringy scrap of meat from the torn sack and chewed with smacking open fangs as it watched her. Another big raccoon slunk out from behind the dumpster and returned to a pile a scraps it had abandoned. Others peered out from the brush, and two of them returned to a bag that had fallen from the overloaded bin.

Their casual defiance infuriated her. She wanted to scream, to run screaming at them and chase them all away. But she remained rigid, not shouting, not stooping for a stone. She walked toward them in measured steps. There was a ringing in her ears that seemed only to amplify the sounds of the animals, made them seem closer and more vivid, their every movement audible and palpable in a breezing brush of fur. She was among them, moving in their midst, before each, one by one, crept slowly down from the trash heap and vanished into the weeds.

Percy, the other counselors, and most of the children had gathered just outside the lodge to view the spectacle of wildlife-on-thedoorstep. She walked back toward them, and they all watched her with hesitant smiles.

Percy broke the silence. "Hey, that's pretty amazing, huh? Is that what's been in the basement?"

At that, the children exploded into questions. "Are those tame raccoons?" "Where'd they come from?" "Can we feed them?" "Can we go see where they went?"

Maria felt herself exhale, a breath that clawed its way by degrees from the coiled knots of her chest. "Trash pick-up is late," she muttered. She was shaking, didn't trust herself to say more. She walked past them into the building.

On the day the campers were scheduled to leave, a housewife with hair tied up in a kerchief arrived at the lodge with a bucket. She was directed to Maria's greenhouse. In the bottom of the bucket, four healthy fledglings squatted on the filthy remains of their nest. Starlings. They squalled in the usual way, a grating, angry, mechanized sound. Their pin-feathers were half open, the color of incinerator ash. Maria placed a fresh paper towel in an empty box, inhabited until that morning by a lone warbler. She had never raised a warbler before. She'd never seen one up close and here was this sudden, tiny specimen placed in her hands. She wouldn't be able to identify the species until it fledged, and maybe not even then—the warblers so various, and this one could turn out to be anything, a common species or a very rare one. But it hadn't lived through the night. She scooped the starlings into the box and handed the woman back her bucket.

The full summer's fatigue settled on her the instant she was alone again. With her animals. The owl and the crow watched from their stumps. The raccoon kits were gone—moved to an outside pen, the next stage toward release. But, nature abhorring a vacuum, four more had already arrived in their place, their eyes not yet open.

The new birds glared suspiciously, old enough to know what a mother looked like and she was not it. She'd have to teach them to eat. She fed the rest of the table first—over half the survivors of the moment were starlings—then returned to the box. But she couldn't bring herself to feed them. Ten fat starlings were already being fed, not to mention the flock that strutted and shouted in the flight cage behind her. She covered the box with a towel. Maybe if she didn't look at them, they would go away.

At the end of the day, the children had departed for home. Later, Maria had a date with Percy. In the twilight, she bottle-fed the raccoons, fed the nestling squirrels and opossums with formula from a syringe, tube-fed the bunnies. She gave the fledglings a last feed, moving down the table to the towel-covered box. The four huddled inside, watching her in silence but no worse for a day's hunger. If she fed them now, they would be fine. Or she could not feed them. To starve them would have been easy: they didn't beg, didn't ask her for anything. But if she was going to do this, she would do it right. One by one, she lifted them from the box and broke their necks. She bagged the bodies along with the warbler and the other cold corpses of the morning and then, as usual, took the bag to the dumpster.

When she'd arrived for the start of baby season in the spring, it had taken her weeks to learn to sleep through the night's sounds. Thumps and scrabbles issued from the basement. Above her bed, a jack pine had grown low across the roof, pressing upon it so that any wind strained the branches against the shingles into human sounds—baffled moans or anguished squeals—of wood on wood. By July, she could leave the windows open to catch the breeze and still sleep deeply enough, in the hours between her alarm-roused night feedings, to dream. The night she chased the raccoon from the basement, she dreamed for the first time of Stephen Albright.

In her dream she was in the fast-food restaurant, standing in line to order, and she had her sister's children with her. Her niece, Louisa, her nephew, Ryan—they were four and two years old. She had taken them to get ice cream and to play in the indoor playground, but they never reached the playground. They were together in line. She held Ryan on her hip, had Louisa by the hand, both children leaning close to her, quiet and tense because Stephen was already there, the gun in his hand.

"The children can go," he said. "No one else move."

This was not what had happened in life. She didn't recall hearing anything about children being present during the shootings or what might have happened to them. But in the dream, all around her, were other customers with children. Some were as young as Ryan, a few as old as the camp kids, most somewhere in between —boys and girls in bulky winter clothing, moving with wide-eyed, backward glances toward the door as directed. "Those, too," Stephen said. He waved the gun's muzzle at Ryan and Louisa, who only clung more closely. Maria could not pry them loose.

"They won't go without me," she said. "Then you go with them," Stephen said. He waved her off, as if he didn't recognize her.

She didn't feel any particular relief, to go with the children, but she went. Her duty was to protect these two, at least, Ryan and Louisa, with whom she'd been entrusted. But when she reached the parking lot, she realized she was the only adult with this crowd of loose children, now spreading, zig-zagging, escaping over the parking lot. The busy highway was close by. She had to get to the First National Bank, which lay across two vast parking lots and a side road, where she could call for help. But she must also round up the children. Which first? She called them, but the parking lot looked like a kindergarten recess, excited children spreading out, running in every direction. Stephen had placed her in charge of this. She was responsible for them all.

Maria called her sister in Canton, to say she was coming to stay for a while, though she decided not to mention being fired from her job. Instead, she told her the dream.

"What do you think it means?" Maria asked. "What am I supposed to do?" "You stay in the parking lot," said Lindsey, the pragmatist, the über-mom. "The children need protection first."

But this didn't seem right to Maria. Because when, she wanted to know, though she didn't ask, did the child in the parking lot become the boy inside with the gun?

"Lindsey? What ever happened to Melanie?"

"Who?"

"Stephen's sister. Melanie."

"Oh, hell, I have no idea. I'm sure she moved as far away as she could get. Why do you want to think about all that anyway? It's morbid."

Another dream came the night before she left the camp, the same dream—though a sound, alive and insistent, woke her before she could finish. In the trace light, her packed suitcases sat beside the door. Her heart pounded still with the dream's fear, but she was annoyed to have been awakened. She had just been beginning to sense that her true place was not at the bank calling the police, and not in the parking lot with the children either. It was back inside, with Stephen and the others. She was supposed to conduct triage, press her hands to their open body cavities and torn organs like a battlefield nurse to stop the bleeding.

It stung to be fired after all her work, after saving so many, for simply wanting to do the right thing. She had tried to explain to the director a little basic ecology, the damage wrought by invading pest species, the way systems should balance. "Why can't you understand the idea of balance?" she said, though she had been thinking not of the ecosystem but of her table of fledglings, the monotonous drudgery of routine and all the lives that came and went through her hands. "I'm trying to set something right. What are we doing here, if we can't help restore order? Some things don't need our help!" But it was no use. He would never hear her.

Now she felt relieved to be going. She was relieved, too, that Percy had canceled their date over a sudden illness, though she could guess the real story. He must have seen her. He must have told the director—it was the only explanation. But for whatever reason, she was glad there would be nothing more between them.

Tomorrow, she would catch the bus to Canton. She would visit her sister's family for a while. At least there, she would be able to sleep through the night. Curled on her side, along the edge of the warp made by the bodies that had preceded her on this mattress, she tried to return to sleep. Outside, raccoons walked the roof. Below the window they paced, stiff-legged through the shadows, reached up with human hands to grasp the window screen.

©Copyright 2009 University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.