Reaching the riverbank, she cut straight through the brush for some yards before heading back toward the trail, so that when they did break onto it they were already a few yards along. She stopped then, they both did, their heads turning in unison to locate the intruders once more.

If they hadn’t looked at just that moment they would have missed the cat, for it was loping back toward the ferns from which it had come. Laurelie’s relief at seeing the threat reduced by half faded as she watched the cat move away. At that distance its beauty overwhelmed its risk, but also conveyed clearly that something was wrong. For one step of every four was out of rhythm with the rest. The cat was limping—badly.

The boy had lost interest in the cat. He’d spied their shoes at the head of the trail and was trotting back for them. “No!” Laurelie said, reaching out to stop him. When her hand closed on air she gasped and hurried after him.

Already he was sitting down, preparing for her to put his shoes on. But his attention was fixed on the hiker, still crouched by the water’s edge, who had turned away now, and was gazing after the cat. Distantly, she thought, he looks like a dropped marionette, with those long thin legs folded and the arms and shoulders arcing over them. The corners of his mouth were pointing down and the space between his brows was deeply furrowed. He looked worried, she realized, and in the next instant, she said, “I think its leg’s hurt,” startling herself as much as him.

He rose then, all jostling towering limbs, swamping her again with the peril of him. She took an involuntary step back. But now he froze, just like the cat, and stood there looking off at the ferns from which they’d come. No ear swiveled, but still she sensed a kind of invisible field around him, trembling, listening. His hands were pushed deep into the front pockets of his pants, claws sheathed. She could hear his breath coming fast and shallow, saw his mouth was open and his nostrils were flared, pushing at their skin so hard the edges had gone white.

“A hunter shot her,” he said, and then after a moment, answering her unspoken question, added, “Not here. Up near Bangor, on Barren Mountain.”

Bangor, Maine. That was three hundred miles north. She wondered how they’d gotten here and decided they must have walked.

“She can’t hunt, so she won’t den. Just keeps running.” A ripple traveled over his shoulders then. “Kittens’ll be coming soon,” he said.

“Caa,” said the boy. She looked down at him. Next to him on the forest floor was a pile of tight green pine cones. He was opening and closing his hands and regarding them with an intent expression. In the same instant she realized they were covered in sap, he put them on his cheeks, first one, and then the other. He smiled at this, until he tried to pull them off again. She sank down then and gently peeled them free, and wiped them off as best she could with her T-shirt.

When she looked up again, the hiker was gone.

from The Bobcat by Katherine Forbes Riley (Arcade Publishing, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.)