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you want a lawsuit.”
    Oh, don’t, Kit thought , don’t argue. Let them take care of you. But then she realized that Lucinda, in her anger, sounded so much stronger that Kit had to smile.
    But stronger or not, Lucinda didn’t prevail. Kit didn’t know what the medic said to her, speaking so quietly, but soon she went silent and lay back again on the gurney, as if she had given up, yet Kit knew she wouldn’t do that. She knows I’ll call Clyde and Ryan, Kit thought . She knows I can take care of myself. She watched them wheel Lucinda to the van, her tall, thin housemate straining up against the safety straps, trying to look up the cliff. Lucinda was so upset that Kit thought to race back down and into the van after all, but before she could try, before she knew what was best to do, they had shut the doors, two medics inside with Pedric and Lucinda, and the other two in the cab. The engine started, the van turned around slowly on the narrow and perilous road, and moved away down the mountain, heading for a strange hospital where no one knew Lucinda and Pedric, where there was no one to speak for them.
    Two black-and-whites followed them. The other two sheriff’s deputies remained behind, one car parked on either side of the rockfall. Kit watched them walk the road in both directions, setting out flares, and maybe waiting to meet the wrecking crew that would haul away the truck and pickup, maybe to wait for the tractors and heavy equipment that would arrive to clear away the tons of fallen rock from the highway.
    When those earthmovers start to work, when they start grabbing up boulders with those great, reaching pincers—like the claws of space monsters in some old movie—I’m out of here. Again she punched in the Damens’ number. Come on, Clyde, come on, Ryan, will you please, please answer! Crouched in the night alone, she looked behind her where the forest of pines stood tar-black against the stars. The coyotes were at it again, two of them away among the trees yipping to each other. When the machines come to move the wrecked trucks and clear the road, I’ll have to go higher up in the woods away from the sliding earth, I’ll have to go in among the trees, where those night runners are hunting. She looked up at the pines towering black and tall above her, and she didn’t relish climbing those mothers. The great round cylinders of their trunks had no low branches for a cat to grab onto, only that loose, slithery bark that would break off under her claws. And what if she did climb to escape a coyote, only to be picked off by something in the sky, by a great horned owl or swooping barn owl? This was their territory and this was their hour to hunt. She thought of great horned owls pulling squirrels from their nests, snatching out baby birds with those scissor-sharp beaks. The world, tonight, seemed perilous on every side.
    She called the Damens seven more times before Clyde answered. “We just got in. I guess the tape ran out.”
    A temperamental machine was one thing. A run-out tape was quite another. Now, on the phone, Kit didn’t say her name, none of the cats ever committed their name to an electronic device. They might use man-made machines, but they weren’t fool enough to trust them. Anyway, Clyde knew her voice. She pictured him in his study, his short brown hair tousled, wearing something old and comfortable, a frayed T-shirt and jeans, worn-out jogging shoes. She started out coherent enough, “Lucinda and Pedric are hurt,” but suddenly she was mewling into the phone, a high, shrill cry this time, in spite of herself, a terrible, distressed yowl that she couldn’t seem to stop.
    â€œI’ll get Ryan,” he said with a note of panic. She heard him call out, and then Ryan came on, maybe on her studio extension. Kit imagined them upstairs in the master suite, Rock and the white cat perhaps disturbed from a nap on the love