He had spent each day working to clear paths, salting the edges of the enclosures in an attempt to clear the fence lines. The snow was too thick to use the blower, too thick and too heavy, and so most of the work had been by shovel and after two days he was so tired and weak that he could not fathom how he could keep up with it, so he had stopped doing all but the most necessary clearing: the doors, some walkways, nothing more than that. He had called a snowplow service earlier in the week and they had come and plowed from the trailer to the parking lot and all the way down to the turnoff to the main road, a span of just over a mile, and despite the plow scraping nearly to the gravel surface of the road, it was already close to impassible. Each winter he took the pickup down to Naples, parking it in a gravel lot near the railroad tracks and thereafter using the snowmobile to span the mile between the rescue and town. That shift usually came well into December, when the snows were heavy enough to close the road between the creek and the rescue, but this season it was already apparent that the days he would be able to drive the truck from town to his trailer were numbered.
He had called Grace on Wednesday and talked with her for nearly an hour, standing in the relative warmth of the office, the kerosene heater he had finally repaired sending an invisible stream of hot air blasting into the room. In confirmation of his concerns about the road, she had told him that she and Jude had driven up to see if they could get to the rescue but the big snowplows had just come through, revealing the snowpack on the rescue road to be nearly two feet deep. Had Jude not been with her, she said, she might have skied up the road, but the route was a full mile and she worried about the boy and so they turned back to Bonners, their progress slow and steady amongst cars spun everywhere into the drifts. She sounded happy to hear from him and he thought that maybe, just maybe, things could still move back to the way they had been before Rick had arrived.
A few minutes later, as if in confirmation of his desire, the phone rang as he was still seated at the desk.
Bill Reed, the voice on the other line said. Glad I caught you. This is Judge Harper up at the First District Court.
Yes? he said, his chest a flurry of electric lines.
I guess you’ve got a problem up there.
A problem?
With Fish and Game, the judge said.
Oh, Bill said, relief flooding through him all at once. Do I ever.
Yeah, Sheriff Baxter was telling me about it. Asked if there was anything the court could do.
Yeah, Bill said, Earl mentioned he might talk to you.
Well, no guarantees what this will do in the long run, but I got a lawyer friend to file an injunction on your behalf.
What’s that mean?
Means Fish and Game can’t do anything until we work it out in the court. It’ll just be temporary but maybe it’ll buy you a month or two. Hell, with this storm it might buy you a lot longer than that.
Dang, he said. Thank you so much.
Well, you should thank Earl, really. I owe him a bunch.
I’ll certainly do that.
The judge told him the name of the lawyer who would call him. They spoke for a few more minutes about the severity of the storm and then Bill set the phone down slowly and stood there in the new silence. It had stopped snowing momentarily but the sky roiled with ash-gray clouds. Through the tiny window in the trailer, the snow seemed to glow with a faint luminescence that flowed backward into the trees. From that pale light came a stunned silence that descended everywhere around him, as if falling from the sky and rising from the earth all at once, and when he tried to dial Grace at last, the phone emitted no dial tone and so he came outside again, the generator chugging away at the base of the hill, powering heaters for Cinder and the raptors and Katy the fox and the trio of raccoons. For a long while he stood in front of the office, wondering what he should be doing, wondering if he should be doing anything at all, finally walking up the short rise to where Majer sat just inside the overhang on the concrete interior of the enclosure, as if waiting for him.
Hey buddy, Bill said to him. I got some good news.
The bear cocked his head, dipping his long snout twice, three times, as if nodding in response.
We’ve got a judge on our side, Bill said. He sat on the stump in the little vestibule and leaned forward to open the aperture in the zookeeper door, thinking of lighting a cigarette even though he never smoked inside the rescue and especially not near Majer, who had lived too long to have to breathe in the aftereffects of his keeper’s bad habits.
The bear nosed at the opening, asking for a treat. Oh buddy, he said, and inexplicably his eyes filled with tears. His fingers had come through the opening in the door and the bear touched them with his nose, so gently. The bear’s great grizzled head. Those milky eyes. We might be OK after all, he said.
He sat there for nearly an hour, talking slowly, quietly, watching the bear, his friend, in that moment his best friend in all the world, sitting in the cage he had built for him, the animal nodding slowly as if understanding every word he said and then pressing its great head up to the wire and emitting a long, low moan.