3

The skin of a tomato lies outside the garden, and Adelaide kicks it over in the dirt. The barricade of branches has been disassembled and flung across the landscape. At her side, Henry perches atop the thickest one.

Inside the garden, Adelaide spots more devastation. She steps over the tomato plants, now ripped at their roots and splayed across the path. Her garden thief has tested the pumpkins, gouging the skin as though attempting to tear its way through with only its claws. One is smashed upon the ground, its guts strewn across the bed like sticky spiderwebs.

Outside the garden, the chickens have dispersed. Aside from a curious inspection of the stones and the bugs beneath, they are keeping their distance.

Adelaide fetches an onion from the dirt. Upon its flesh are the same unusual gouges found on the pumpkin, and she traces the pattern with her fingers.

Many years ago, Adelaide heard whispers of mountain lions in these woods, but those were usually dismissed by a wave of the hand and the suggestion of a myth. She’s lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains for decades, and she’s never seen a single shadow or paw print. And if there are big cats in her woods, surely there is more appetizing prey than melons and tomatoes. She scans her property, spotting Henry and the girls by the woodpile. Something must be done. And soon. Before her thief grows tired of vegetables.

She stares at the bizarre markings on the onion, imagining the lithe body of a mountain lion digging in her soil, rolling across the mulch, watching her chickens and waiting. Yes, she can see it now.

But how, Adelaide wonders, does one outsmart a mountain lion?

Once dark falls, Adelaide waits beneath the overhang of the roof. She tucks into the blackest part of the shadows and grips her flashlight, ready. At her feet is a metal bucket from the storage shed, half full of stones. Adelaide doesn’t know if she will throw rocks at the cat or shake the bucket and let the racket scare him off. She must make her decision in the moment.

Adelaide can still recall how quiet it was, her first night under the stars. That was a long time ago—before finding the cabin, before the garden, before chickens—when her only shelter was a leaky orange tent, beneath the infinite swirl of the Milky Way. It was so quiet that she couldn’t hear. Like a vacuum around her skull, vibrations through her brain. And a baritone hum that assaulted her ears for hours until she wept into the leaves, trying desperately to break the spell. She thought she had a bug in her ear, or a brain tumor, or some terrible disease that no one had ever heard of because no one would be as stupid as she, to go so deep into the Blue Ridge Mountains alone, where no one would ever find her body should she die right then.

She knows the truth now. It is a rare gift, an experience most will never know—the sound of true and utter silence. It is anything but quiet, and in the unprepared, it can inspire madness.

Adelaide squints into the darkness, but the harder she peers into the shadows, the less she can actually see. Certainly not the ideal conditions for stalking a night predator. Adelaide brings her fists to her eyes to buff away the gloom, and the metal flashlight bashes against her skull. Blood trickles down her face.

“Goddammit,” she curses under her breath.

Adelaide places the flashlight at her feet and dabs the blood with her nightgown.

She’s really losing it.

Here she is, in the middle of the woods, facing off against a mountain lion with nothing but a pail of rocks, and she can’t even hold a flashlight without hurting herself. This is why she took a pocket full of pills to the river. It had been the right choice.

Now her garden is destroyed, her head is bloodied, she’s sleep-deprived, stressed to high hell, and now her favorite nightgown is stained. And where’s the goddamned flashlight?

She searches the dirt until her fingers touch metal and she wrangles the flashlight closer, slowly—slowly. She can’t give away her position.

A noise from the garden. A growl? Maybe.

Adelaide presses the flashlight button and the path before her illuminates into a narrow golden rod.

Something moves through her garden.

Adelaide yelps, and the flashlight slips from her fingers once more, spinning across the dirt.

It’s watching her, she knows it. She can’t see it, but she can feel it, and she’s learned not to doubt her instincts.

How fast can she run? She knows the answer before the thought is fully formed in her mind—not fast enough.

The rolling flashlight comes to a stop, shining against the corner of her wattle fence, small bits of light careening into the garden.

Dirt whirls through the air as the flashlight flickers—once, twice—before going dark.

Adelaide bangs it against her palm. Shakes it. Nothing.

And then she hears the growl.

A little like a hurricane, a little like a child wailing, a little like two rocks being ground together.

The growl is unwavering, surging toward Adelaide. Growing louder, or perhaps closer.

Adelaide has been spotted; she should run. But not yet. She wants to see the beast that has been ransacking her garden. She needs to see it, will not leave until she sees it.

Adelaide pushes away from the cabin—just a little—peering into the garden that once had a gate, and into the shadows. But then blood drips into her eye and she can see nothing at all. Adelaide stumbles forward and her foot catches the handle of the bucket. She collapses to the ground as stones spill from the pail with metallic clangs loud enough to rival her racing heart. The dirt, like small fragments of glass, tears at her fingertips.

The growl ceases. Adelaide swipes at the blood, looks all around, but her eyes burn, and her vision is muddled. A shadow rushes from the garden, pausing to appraise the old woman who is now panting and stumbling to her feet.

The wattle fence creaks with the weight of the beast. The moon is eclipsed by the height of the beast.

Adelaide does not throw a stone into the night. She does not look back to the garden, nor examine the wounds on her knees.

Adelaide runs.

Two nights pass before Adelaide can bring herself to stray far from the cabin.

The morning after the incident, she delivered a snack to the chickens, but then scampered back to the safety of her home. She has not gone outside to feed them since, but that was mere ceremony anyway—they get all they need from the forest.

This morning, Adelaide is relieved to see they’ve survived another night.

She had not seen the cat, not exactly, but she had felt it. Adelaide has no desire to leave this world in a torturous battle of tooth and claw.

“Keep watch over our girls, Henry,” she whispers. “There’s danger about.”

The rooster chortles a whittled response. He, too, is hesitant to announce his presence.

The breeze carries a scent of something dewy and sweet, and Adelaide breathes it in. A little bit of decomposing leaves, a little bit of damp and compacted soil. And, today, a little bit of wood smoke—somewhere, a fire is burning.

Here, in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains, her neighbors are few. There is a man who lives south of her, and brings mail to and from the nearest town for all the mountain folk. Just north of her, a young couple has begun building their vacation cabin—Adelaide will occasionally watch a shiny new pickup truck teeter past her cabin and up the road that skirts the mountain, hauling lumber and supplies.

And a few miles to the east is a small colony of people she tries to forget. They run the kind of farm that only thrives far from the watchful eyes of authorities. When the sun is hot and the wind is strong, Adelaide can smell the marijuana all the way down into her valley, as though with their stink, they have marked the forest as their own.

That’s it!

Adelaide must get back to her garden right away. Why hadn’t she thought of this earlier? She can’t claim her territory with rocks and a flashlight. She has to speak the cat’s language. Scent.

She knows now what must be done.

“Don’t you judge me.”

Henry, Zelda, and Moffit watch with curiosity as Adelaide lifts her dress and squats against the fence.

“You must understand,” she continues, as her urine stains the soil, “this is the only way to talk to it.”

She clenches midstream, and though her bladder demands release, Adelaide is a willful woman and will not allow for discourse, no matter how strong the argument. She squats against the nearest gatepost and splashes more of her scent.

“You don’t want to be eaten by a mountain lion, do you?”

Moffit scampers to the post and kicks around in the moistened dirt, as though Adelaide may have dropped a few insects while she was at it.

The second post finely dusted, Adelaide moves from bed to bed, lifting her dress and dribbling her scent across the garden.

When she has finished, Adelaide looks to her chickens and shrugs. “At least you can say I’ve tried everything.”

Henry bobs his head in agreement and saunters into the weeds by the compost pile. The girls follow, leaving Adelaide alone in the garden, surrounded by evaporating puddles of her own piss.

Night rolls in quickly, and Adelaide stands in the kitchen, staring at the little bottle of pills on the window ledge.

It was not so long ago that Adelaide fell while mending the fence. Maybe ten years ago, or eleven. She remembers the pain and the sound of her leg snapping when her ankle was caught beneath a tree limb. She remembers the long, torturous walk to her nearest neighbor, now long gone. And then the beeping of the monitors in the town hospital’s surgical wing. The limp bag dripping god-knows-what into her bloodstream, and the monochromatic meals served under plastic. But she ate their food and said, “Yes, sir,” and, “I will, ma’am,” and, “Of course I have insurance,” and she took their crutches and slipped out the exit doors, disappearing into the night, a bottle of pills rattling in her pocket.

The bed is cold and Adelaide’s joints ache as she slips beneath the sheets. Somewhere in the forest a coyote begins to yip. Others join his song and she stays awake for as long as she can, listening to their ballad.

Adelaide thinks of her garden and all the vegetables lost, of her chickens and what might become of them should she leave this world before the garden thief has been banished, and the sound of the river when she dips her head beneath the surface.

Tonight, she does not think about the box under the floorboard.

Adelaide could have reassembled the garden gate before the sun went down, but that wouldn’t be an accurate test of her scent theory. And there is a part of her, buried just below her fear of the animal’s intentions and her anger over a trespasser in her garden, that wants to see if she can win.

The morning wind is chilly and carries with it the fetid smell of waste. Adelaide walks toward her garden with her hands held out before her, as if by blocking the breeze she can spare her nose the stench.

Smeared down the wooden post of the garden is the dark smudge of excrement.

“My god.”

Adelaide creeps closer toward the smear, hand pressed to her mouth so she doesn’t have to taste its odor. As soon as she crosses the garden perimeter, Adelaide sees the true havoc wreaked by the animal. Feces have been smeared across the garden beds, flung against the wattle fence, and even deposited directly onto her very last untouched pumpkin.

The animal must be nearby. The smell is fresh, the texture soft and not yet hardened by the morning sun. Adelaide takes a step back, her heel slipping on something slick and oily. She squeals, nearly tumbling to the ground, but it is a tomato. That’s it. Only a tomato—the last of her crop.

Adelaide sprints out of the garden and into her cabin. The stink follows.

An idea germinates in Adelaide’s mind. She tries to suppress it, but it takes root and flourishes, and simply cannot be ignored. There is a trap in the garden shed—one of those nasty metal ambushes with teeth like the devil coming up from the ground to swallow you whole. She used it once, a long time ago, when a bear was stalking her cabin in the night, killing her chickens and tearing at the wood siding. She had no choice. It was her or the bear. And no animal is going to run her from her home. She found its paw the next morning still clinging to the trap, chewed clean off at the ankle.

She’d tossed the paw into the river, and the trap into the storage shed. Never again, she said. But the trap had worked. The bear did not return.

The steel trap is an option, but a brutal and violent one. Surely there are less extreme solutions.

But it’s reassuring to know that if things get ugly, she can always dig the trap from its resting place and take care of the beast once and for all.