Nen was resting in the living room, as ordered. Maybe resting more than recommended. It hadn’t been that long. The cast was still on her arm. She was reading a detective novel she had read and reread maybe every six months since she had been a freshman in high school. She had the mystery memorized and yet from time to time would identify a delicious clue she’d missed. Plus, she had a crush on the detective. The air held a crackle of early smoke. It was dry, not especially hot, but dry, dry, dry. Her sinuses were scratchy; she felt her skin catch against the pages of the book. She could almost feel the ink, like Braille.

She looked up and there it was. In the living room. Just inside the sliding door. The animal—golden, elegant, paused and careful—was liquid movement, smooth and low to the ground, its paws padded and vast. Tawny face, white muzzle (just the bit below the nose, around the whiskers, under the chin) and pointed, black-tipped ears. It carried its long, heavy tail in a wide, shallow U.

She smothered her gasp with a fist, the strangled scream like a blow to the gut, wind knocked right out of her. She might never breathe again without gasping, a prey animal soft-furred and panicked. She needed to scurry away, hide in a hole. It was important not to scare the cat, not to draw its attention, or was it that she needed to draw herself up? Get loud, get angry. Raise her left arm in its cast like a banner or a club. She was as large as the cougar, surely. Not as strong. Then there were the claws, not so hidden in those paws the size of pancakes. She had read that cougars will make daybeds somewhere to rest after a night of long-distance stalking. And there was Nen, occupying the daybed framed by the picture window. Now there were two of them, two animals in the same place and yet separate, each of them looking for refuge.

Make yourself big; make noise. That was the advice to hikers, what to do if you met a cougar on the trail. But she didn’t want to make noise. A blanketing quiet settled like weighted wool over the room. That was how she tried to describe it later, wool-felt—a weight absorbing sound and motion and momentum.

“Shoo,” she said softly, when she could breathe again. “Go back outside.” 

The door to the deck was open. They were usually careful about that—careful to keep out ground squirrels, houseflies, yellow jackets. Bears. The hills came right to the doorstep, summer gold now, the color of the cougar itself—beige, a deeper brown, then golden; a true lion, crossing the sunbeam that crossed the room. Thin, it moved quickly, the patent definition of stealth. Nen thought the big cat might slump onto the warm wood like a housecat following the sun, but then the cougar took another step, and another, and as it stepped into the shadows, it became shadow.

Cougars hunt at night, at dusk or twilight. Nen wondered for the first time where deer slept, if they slept. Were deer another animal that dozed but did not slumber, resting always with one eye open? And where was Lady Fluff, the cat her brother Douglas had adopted, then left behind as he moved away to college and its no-pets-allowed dorms, then moved on to the real world and a no-pets apartment? 

Finding itself in a full-length mirror, the cougar paused. Nen thought she could hear it breathing, but that might have been her own heartbeat, newly loud in her ears. The big cat swung its head in her direction, then began to knead the rug. Nen’s first impulse was to scold, quash the destructive turn they were always trying to restrain in Lady Fluff.

“Shoo,” she whispered. “Kitty, go home.” She was shooing it like a pest, but she wanted it never to leave. She tried to focus, prepared to remember this day for the rest of her life. The cougar gave off a warm, clean smell, as if it had been rolling in dust. Its ears bore the stiff velvet bristle of a teddy bear’s muzzle. It kneaded, kneaded again, lowered its haunches. If she called Animal Control, they would tranquilize it. Worse, they might panic and kill it. 

Her father had been hit by a car while trying to help a deer that had been hit by a car. Nen imagined the cougar pulling a deer down, pulling a deer aside. She had imagined her father pulling the deer into the woods—for safety or delicacy or respect. But a cougar would be saving it to eat. Her father had had no such practical purpose, only an impulse to protect.

Hiking, they had often looked for cougar tracks, said to be the size of baseballs. No claw marks, unlike the tracks of wolves and other dogs—one way to tell what you were seeing. Nen had heard the eerie wails in mating season, like a child crying or a person in unbearable pain.

She had never seen tracks, but she had seen scratching posts. Once, her mother showed her claw marks high on a tree trunk, six or seven feet up, deep, vertical scratches. “That’s how we can tell it was a cougar,” her mother had said. “Because it’s so high. A bobcat would be lower, two or three feet off the ground.” 

“Unless it was a cougar kitten,” Nen had said. 

Nen wasn’t tracking now. The cougar was right there across the room, asleep on the floor. She remembered a brochure from the Fish and Wildlife office: cougars make their living by not being seen. But houses were built right up into the hills, and what was left for the cougar and the bears and all the other creatures out there was less hospitable than ever when the summer got dry. 

There was a pond in the yard, a small one, more of a bird bath. Perhaps the animal had stopped to drink. Early July, the hills were already parched. The banana tree in the living room might have confused the cougar, a blur of leaves through the window, the lure of green forest where it didn’t belong. All those earth tones, meant to bring the outdoors in, had done just that.  

Through the window, Nen saw her mother’s blue cooler on the deck. Margaret volunteered at the foodbank Thursday nights. She had heard rumors of families—two, perhaps three—hiding in the woods outside of town. Close to the reservoir, or higher up in the hills. The children were citizens but the parents lacked papers. One day, Margaret met one of the mothers at the edge of her garden (she never grew much, deer were a problem, but she couldn’t stop trying). Margaret didn’t ask how she got there, if she’d walked, if her car had broken down. She offered the woman fruit, some cash. She started leaving food on the deck. Picnic food—cold cuts, tomatoes, oatmeal cookies. 

“You’re treating them like animals, feeding them that way,” Nen complained.

“They’re living like animals, that’s how afraid they are,” had been the answer.  

Margaret knew from the foodbank what people took first. She knew it was important to leave food people liked. She wanted the food itself—beyond the calories on offer—to be welcoming. But she didn’t know if they had anywhere to cook. If they owned a camp stove, they’d need to buy fuel. And if they were cooking over a fire, they’d have to worry about fire season burn patrols and smoke watchers and the real, right there on the ground beside them, risk of spreading flames.

Nen watched the cougar sleep, lying on its side, front paws curled. Big yawn, what big teeth you have, what a pink tongue. Three wishes for the fairy godmother: Don’t let it attack. Let it get out of here safely. Let me hear the big cat purr.

She heard a thump of house cat jumping off a counter before Lady Fluff padded into the room, a regal, magnificent animal in her own right. Nen felt her chest contract. Lady Fluff froze, fur puffed nose to tail, doubled in bulk but still snack-sized. The cougar lifted its head. It was resting, not hunting. The smaller cat was no threat. Wisely, Lady Fluff retreated the way she had come.

The cougar slept for hours. Later, there were reports Nen had failed to take her family’s safety into account, privileged the wild animal above all else, tried to hypnotize it with incense and crystals and a small flute. She who had been so driven, methodical and motivated, felt ridiculed. 

But also furious. It wasn’t that she knew where her mother was, knew not to worry. She had become wholly absorbed in watching the cougar, listening to it breathe, hoping it might purr. And, yes, worrying it might pounce, those huge furred paws landing silent and lethal. Cougars are known for their ability to jump.

She didn’t make a video. She thought about it, thought about the movement she might miss, watching at that remove. And of course she told people what had happened, what she’d seen. First her mother, unbelieving but intrigued and worried about her foodbank family, however far away; relieved for Nen and, naturally, sorry. That most of all, it seemed—the thought of Nen alone, something they hadn’t shared, another moment Margaret hadn’t seen up close. 

Word slipped out—her mother, obviously, or Nen’s own careless excitement. She wanted her secret and wanted to brag. Someone said something to a neighbor, a friend of a friend. It was a small town—a lost deer in the supermarket aisles had been big news the year before. Nen remembered a checker semaphoring with a broom, the animal bewildered but stately. Like the cougar, the deer didn’t break anything. It left when it was good and ready, but not before browsing the bouquets in the floral department, sampling a few of the tulips bunched for Easter.

“I had no plans,” Nen answered, when asked how she could take all afternoon, letting the animal rest, then softly encouraging it to leave.

“Weren’t you worried about your family?” people asked. “Wasn’t there anyone else at home?”

“I didn’t think so. So there was no reason to check. I didn’t want to scare the animal.”

“I’d have been terrified, I’d have screamed,” one neighbor said.

“Is it true you used telepathy to make it go?” That was Barry next door, always on edge.

“I don’t think it worked,” Nen said. No one laughed. She said, “I’m looking at this cat, I’m thinking, please go outside, go back outside, go back to your home. Is that telepathy, or an attempt at it?”

Naturally, that was the only thing anyone repeated. Telepathically-conveyed maps to the exit, to the hills behind the house. Feline-style eye-blinking to send a message.

What her mother picked up on was, I had no plans. Margaret pounced, quicker than a cat; a too-careful framing crept into her questioning when she obviously wanted to scream. “No plans at all?” 

“Well, I didn’t have plans,” Nen objected. She heard her voice rising, tried to drop the tone. “Nothing better to do than watch a cougar napping. Not that afternoon.” What she read on her mother’s face was, not ever. “I planned to protect the animal, to do no harm,” Nen suggested, but the offering was inconsequential. Beside the point.  

What she told no one was how she had imagined swimming against the cougar, meeting it in a race in open water. She knew cougars were strong swimmers. They’d swim between islands in pursuit of prey, head above the surface, ears alert. All the ways humans were taught not to swim, sacrificing speed to sight, when the first lesson of competitive swimming was to keep underwater as much as possible, don’t break the surface, don’t magnify drag. But she wasn’t imagining an attempt to get away. She imagined the cougar accepting the race. Taking her as an equal. A peer, not a meal. Would the cougar have chased her, or let her swim by? Would it have let her win? Deer were strong swimmers, too, but maybe not strong enough.

Her last race had been a short one the previous summer, island to island in a mountain lake, the kind of pristine setting that made her wonder if they should be there at all—so many people, footprints, and trash. At dusk, once the other swimmers had packed up and left, Nen and a friend had stayed, canoe on the shore, pup tent under the trees, their skin prickling with the tickle of water droplets they’d shaken off like dogs safe on land. Her friend’s admiration was a ballast, proof she belonged. But what if there had been a cougar then? Would they have jumped in after it, felt themselves privileged inhabitants of that borrowed wild? Would they have frozen in fear? 

When the cougar woke, it met Nen’s eye—she thought she might have dozed off, too, sitting there stiller than still, just staring—then looked away. It didn’t recognize her, didn’t need to. It padded out to the deck and into the yard, pausing for a long drink from Margaret’s pond. Nen could hear the splash of its lapping tongue, drops like bells in the still air, not even an insect hum. Just the cougar drinking, so long, so noisily, the pool might have been empty when it left.

Nen waited until she was sure it must be gone before she went outside. She refilled the pond with the garden hose and waited for her mother to get home so she could tell her all about it. Once, she might have wanted to see it again. Now she knew she’d seen enough. The cougar had been with her all afternoon. Better not to risk it becoming a so-called problem predator with even the silent hope of a new encounter. Better for it to stay far, far away.

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Amalia Gladhart is a writer and translator in Oregon. Her short fiction has appeared in The Common, Leon Literary Review, Portland Review, Cordella Magazine, and other journals. Published translations include the novels Jaguars’ Tomb (by Angélica Gorodischer) and The Potbellied Virgin (by Alicia Yánez Cossío). She is working on a novel about jigsaw puzzles, climate change, and stolen art.