"'Scuse me, I just gotta get a stretch."

The rookie opened the door of the cruiser and stepped out into the night. It was cold and wet, with a dampness that cut to the bone. This was the killer fog that took away infants and the aged.

"I gotta pee too," called his partner. "I can hold it till you get back, but shake a leg."

Dan stood relieving himself by the side of the road. He reflected on the long hours and low pay that were a policeman's lot—food that came in paper bags, and eighteen hour shifts on lonely country roads trolling for the occasional drunk.

The force was shorthanded. Hence, a recruiting push. Hence, Dan sitting out hour fifteen of this particular detail.

Dan was the new guy.

The seat of his uniform trousers and the flesh beneath carried a semi-permanent impression from the seams of the cruiser's upholstery. At home and off shift, Dan had checked his naked rear end in the mirror.

Finished, he slid back into the cruiser. "Why'd you join the force?" he asked his partner.

Dan was working out his field training under a senior constable. His preceptor had in twenty years and counting. And still a constable. Promotions were hard to come by.

"The action, the glory, the pay."

It seemed Dan's partner had a sense of humor, after all. "Actually, it was the dental plan." The constable gunned the engine. "Lunch break."

The cruiser spun toward the nearest friendly oasis, a flashing snarl of pink fluorescents that spelled EAT, a break from the ennui of night patrol. They left the cruiser in the road, engine running, radio on.

"Two, Vondelle, we're double-parked."

"Coming up." Vondelle, the counter girl, returned her Number Five Cop Special—the lingering smile that promised much, but not too much.

Dan's hands cupped the blistering hot container. The paper cup itself smelled of musty storage and fried foods. A connoisseur of highway fare, the officer detected spicy overtones of disinfectant wafting from the steaming brown fluid. Only diner coffee, long neglected on the fire, could achieve this plateau.

"Bold, bitter, but not entirely unprepossessing," said Dan. His constable was not amused. Vondelle smiled.

A summons from the open hailing frequency called them to the cruiser. As the officers trudged out into the damp, sideways drizzle, the counter girl hung in the doorway and gave them a small, regretful wave. To her #5 smile, she added the slight lift of an eyebrow, a nuanced gesture bestowed on those answering the call of duty. There would be no tip.

Vondelle closed the door. It was not well advised to linger overlong, standing about in the freezing fogs of early winter.

"God damn it, another one!" the constable swore.

Dan's partner whipped the car onto the road with a jerk that spilled coffee over Dan's lap. Dan rummaged through the glove box for leftover paper napkins. He had almost had a hot dinner in his grasp. Almost.

The responding officers were hungry, tired and ill at ease as they pulled to a stop beside a rural bridge abutment. Neither was about to admit this to his partner.

"Another one. Mud and blood, no corpse, just those tracks." The constable suppressed a shudder.

Dan shivered and pulled his head down deeper into his uniform shirt.

"It's freezing, damn it. If there is a body, it'll be well preserved." He stamped his feet to keep warm. "When we come back in the morning?" Dan looked hopefully at his partner.

Valerie Johasek cursed Vernon Dudley as she struggled with the set of vise grips and a big mechanic's screwdriver. She knew the muskrat trap was off Vern's trap line without checking the tag.

The cat had been a twenty-pounder, but now you could read a magazine right through him. He hadn't been around for a couple of weeks, and Val figured he had tackled something out of his league: a bullet, traffic on the state road, or some upcountry coyote with a taste for feral cats.

The cat watched as the woman worked, his gaze steady and unflinching. There was none of a wild creature's furtiveness, as though a mask had been set aside, displaced by the deeper urgency of survival. Wide and quiet, his great green eyes invited her to share a secret knowledge, intimating she was trusted, but not yet ready for a full revelation. Her species would have to mature.

A January thaw had freed the trap and he'd dragged it home, chain and all.

To her.

Their destinies—hers and the cat's—had crossed one more time. If she'd come upon him in the woods and hadn't known him from before, she could have killed him in the trap, and gladly, an act of mercy. But here he was, coming to her in his pain.

The cat was a wild citizen who had taken up with her around Labor Day, hiding out under a seasonal neighbor's summer house to heal after a run-in with some dogs. The cat had crawled out from under the porch when she returned from her job at the mill. When an animal, a wild animal, singles out a human being for trust there is an exchange of obligations.

The big yellow tomcat was patient and trusting, his eyes never leaving the woman who was trying to get the trap off his leg with as little damage as possible. But the damage had already been done, his flesh cut right to the bone and worried about by the metal jaws. From his constant licking, the flesh had peeled back from where hair and congealed blood were matted on the steel jaws of the trap, and there was an exposed circle of gray bone, bordered by translucent, angry pink. He would lose the paw, maybe the leg.

Val damned Vern and kept up a stream of calming reassurances. She pried gently; the cat made no sound as the jaws slowly opened.

Covered with mud and ice melt from the January thaw the cat, the trap, and the woman sat on a braided rug just inside the door. Val held a piece of cedar shake from the kindling box in her teeth, her hands busy with screwdriver and pliers. Lowering her head to the trap to get the wood between the open jaws she got a good smell of the wound. He had kept it clean and there was no gangrene as yet, but a sickly pink collar of spreading infection surrounded the exposed bone.

"Gently, gently now, there's a good fellow." He must have been in the trap the whole two weeks.

She dangled the trap by its chain, the Levitical 16 inches. A short tether, that had been attached to a staple in the frozen ground. If it hadn't been for the sudden thaw, the cat would have starved in the trap. She flexed the spring release with the heel of her hand, testing the small, powerful jaws. Residue smeared on the bait tray released a miasma of peanut butter and rotten fish, the trapper's magic lure.

Freed, the cat tended to a dish of milk while Valerie cleaned the wound with hydrogen peroxide, then injected him with half an ampule of antibiotic she had left over from the year she had raised goats.

A sixty mile round trip to the vet's and the leg had come off.

"Traps, traps, traps," the veterinarian clucked sadly.

It cost Valerie almost a week's pay. Val cursed Vern again. If he had tended his traps like the law demanded, he would have found the cat and put it out of its misery. A quick clip with a trapper's blackjack would have done the job

Ralph Arsenault, the game warden, had taken her call and said he'd come by when he found the time. There was a law about checking a trap line regularly—two, three times a week.

Ralph found the time a week later; pet cats were not a priority with the Fish and Wildlife Service. They knew one another, had been in the same class in high school. It was a small town, and they discarded familiarity and slipped into the postures of officialdom, he the Law, she the aggrieved taxpayer.

Ralph pried loose the brass tag crimped over one of the links in the wire chain. "Vern Dudley. I'll talk to Vern."

From Ralph's tone, that was as far as it would go. No fine, no offer to have Vern pay the vet's bill. Val bore Ralph no ill will. Here in Willipaq, Maine, they were isolated enough to be a tight little island with complex interdependencies. Vern was a selectman, and Ralph's salary was paid out of local levies. Val understood.

"While you're there, check Vern's freezer for jacked moose, at least."

That broke the ice. Ralph smiled, Val smiled, and the warden left, forgiven.

The cat stayed close to the house, healed, and Val Johasek marveled as she watched him learn to navigate on three legs.

Early in October he brought her the first ermine.

Val was out on the porch, belatedly tightening her house up for the winter. She had just unstapled her screening and was setting the hinges of the wooden storm door when the ta-bump ta-bump of Tom's gait announced his arrival on the porch. The cat laid his prey at her feet, sat and watched her, his wide, deep, secret eyes again a pathway open just this once, and only for her, inviting her to join him in a different place if she knew the language.

Valerie sat cross-legged in front of the cat, the ermine between them. It had been a clean, quick kill, the back broken where its neck joined long, supple racer's shoulders. It lay so still, appearing even in death vibrant with life and stealth. The black tip of the tail was flecked with white hairs, a start on the winter coat. Rictus had opened the jaw, exposing polished, curving incisors.

"Thank you, I mean, really thank you!" Val felt foolish as she noticed she was crying. "I have never, ever been given such a splendid gift."

After that there was an ermine a week, sometimes two.

Vern Dudley belatedly came by. He drove his pickup into her yard, leaving ruts in the mud where her starveling crop of grass, having given up all pretense at becoming a lawn, was preparing to freeze and die.

"Heard your cat's been raiding my traps. Guess he'll stay close to home with a foot off, though."

Tom picked that moment to run across the yard to the porch, another ermine twitching in his jaws.

Vern was some pissed. In their winter pelts, the short-tailed weasels were prime fur. Reaching down to the floor of his cab, he picked up an unopened can of Pepsi and chucked it at the cat, clipping him alongside the ear.

Hissing, his green eyes ablaze and his fur shot out stiff and blown up to the size of a soccer ball, the three-legged cat turned to stare at Vern Dudley.

"Honest, Vern, I don't know where he gets them," said Valerie. "But it's sure as hell not your traps. You still using rotten fish for bait? Peanut butter? How dumb do you think ermine are? Try lobster."

"Just keep your pussy off the road, honey, or it might get squished."

Popping into reverse, Vern threw a tsunami of mud and sere grass into the air and peeled off toward the county road.

As it turned out, Valerie Johasek was one of the last people known to have seen Vernon Dudley alive.

The Warden Service made inquiries. No one had seen him dead, but he was presumed so, presumed drowned. There was a section of guardrail freshly torn out on the bridge near the junction with the state road, and Vern's truck was wedged in the hole with the windshield out. They figured Vern had swerved suddenly and violently, avoiding something. The conjecture was he had catapulted through the glass, caught the river at high tide, and been washed out to sea.

"He should have kept on going. Less paperwork."

The scene resembled an evisceration rather than a roadside collision, death resulting. Dan's constable smiled a smile of large, yellow teeth—this was his little joke. He set the hand brake and exited the cruiser, leaving the emergency flashers on.

They were the last to arrive. This time there was evidence, lots of it. At the far end of a line of blood and chalk where two officers were measuring and photographing, pulped remains lay steaming. Dan poked at a hunk with his toe and regretted it at once. He wiped the bloody splotch off his boot on the inside of a pant leg.

The darting beams of flashlights combined with the alternating blue strobes of the emergency vehicles to give the accident scene the look of a crisp, midnight hell.

Tonight, for one trucker, there had been something in his way. Wrapped in blankets, he was trembling with shock, but coherent.

"Big and ugly as sin, three legs and green eyes. I mean, you wouldn't believe it. All of a sudden, there it is in the middle of the road. Carrying something."

And that something was now littered over the landscape. The constable nodded to a medic, who administered an injection. The driver calmed considerably and Dan's superior officer squatted in front of him, trying to radiate fraternal concern.

"Strange doings, eh buddy?"

The driver attempted to speak, found he could not, and dipped his head in assent.

"The official proceedings will show misadventure due to an unavoidable mechanical failure. You will confirm this?"

The commissariat of police wanted these bizarre happenings to remain transparent. Answers were those big, sticky things that brought down careers. The cops cleaned up the mess; the bureaucrats lost the papers.

The constable put away his notebook, clicking shut its metal cover and stuffing it down into an already overfull uniform pocket. This was the trucker's third repetition of his story.

"Nothing out of the ordinary happened here tonight. Got it?"

The trucker nodded like a sleepwalker. A few weeks of therapy and he would remember nothing. A second injection was given and he was led away.

The constable caught himself working at his teeth, polishing his long, curving incisors with the tip of his tail, a habit when he was nervous or bored.

Tonight, he realized, I am a bit of both.

He examined his tail. Competitive exams were coming up and maybe he'd try again this year. Personal grooming counted as highly as the scores. Successful candidates for promotion brushed their tails into the silky inflorescences that denoted good hygiene and the idle hours to indulge it. His tail was decidedly ragged; its black tip was flecked with white hairs, the start of a new winter coat.

He waved Dan back to their cruiser and stuffed the end of his tail into a rear pocket. Extracting a clasp knife from his shirt, he worked at his talons, wishing that he had something to chew. The constable sighed and watched his breath condense in the chill air.

Vondelle should have some fresh coffee on by now.