“Suck egg mule,” he whispered reverently, as though such a find needed the awed respect of Uncle Aaron’s expressions instead of the forceful punch of old Henry’s curses. “Three little baby bobcats all by theirselves . . . suck egg mule.” He picked up the nearest kitten and began to fight and tear at the vine until he had made a space large enough to turn around in. He headed back the way he’d come, reasoning, without even consciously thinking about it, that the mother would most likely pick a route that he hadn’t used, she would most likely steer clear of a tunnel with man-smell in it. He found he was being slowed by holding the hissing and snapping kitten in his hands so he took the scruff of its neck between his teeth. The kitten became immediately calm and swung placidly from the boy’s mouth as Hank sped through the blackberries as fast as elbows and knees could carry him. “Beat it out; beat it!” When he emerged from the thicket he was scratched and bleeding from a score of places on his hands and face, but he didn’t remember any pain, he didn’t remember any of the scratches; all he could recall was the soft flutter of panic beneath his chest. What would have happened had that old bitch bobcat suddenly run smack dab into a boy toting one of her offspring in his mouth? A boy pinned down and practically helpless under fifteen feet of blackberry vines? He had to sit down and breathe deeply before he could manage the ten more yards to the empty blasting-cap crate where he put the kitten. Then, for some reason, instead of securing the box and beating it back to the house as he advised himself, he hesitated to inspect his catch. Carefully he slid back the lid and bent to look into the box. “Hey you. Hey there you, Bobby the Cat . . .” The little animal ceased its frantic scurrying from corner to corner and lifted its fuzzy face toward the sound of the voice. Then uttered a cry so tragic, so pleading, so frightened and forlorn, that the boy winced with sympathy. “Hey, you lonely, ain’t you? Huh, ain’t you?” The kitten’s yowled answer threw the boy into an intense conflict, and after five minutes of reminding himself that nobody no-body but a snotnosed moron would go back in that hole, he gave in to that yowling. The other two kittens had fallen asleep by the time he reached the nest. They lay curled about each other, purring softly. He paused for an instant to catch his breath, and in the silence that descended, now that the brambles were no longer scratching and resounding on his oilskin hood, heard the first kitten crying from its box at the edge of the thicket; the thin, pitiful wail penetrated the jungle like a needle. Why, a noise like that must carry for miles! He grabbed up the next kitten, clamped his teeth over the fur at the back of the neck, thrashed quickly around in the little turning space that was already beginning to take on a smooth, used appearance, and once more sprinted on elbows and knees for that opening to safety that lay an ever farther distance away through an ever smaller tube of thorns and terror. It seemed to take hours. Time got snagged on a sticker. The vines hissed past. It must have started to rain, for the tunnel had grown quite dim and the ground slick. The boy squirmed through with eyes straining, that bobcat’s child swaying and swinging in his mouth, keening a shrill plea for help, the other in the box echoing and relaying the plea. The tunnel got longer as it grew dimmer, he was certain of it. Or the other way around. He gasped for breath through the fur in his teeth. He battled the mud and vine as though it were water drowning him, and when he broke into the clear at the end of the tunnel he drew a huge breath like a swimmer coming after many minutes into the glorious air. He placed the second kitten in the box with the first. They both hushed their yowling and became quiet and drowsy against each other. They began to purr quietly along with the soft swish of rain through the pines. And the only other noise, through all the forest, was the brokenhearted wailing of that third kitten, alone and frightened and wet, back in that nest at the end of that tunnel. “You’ll be okay.” He called assurance toward the thicket. “Sure. It’s rainin’ now; mama’ll be hustlin’ back from huntin’, now it’s rainin’.” And this time even went so far as to pick up the box and walk a few yards toward home. But something was strange; safe as he knew himself to be— he had picked up the .22 from the hollow log where he always stashed it during his forays into the thicket—his heart still pounded and his stomach still heaved with fear, and the image of that mother cat’s wrath still burned in his head. He stopped walking and stood very still with his eyes closed. “No. No sir, by gosh, I ain’t.” Shaking his head back and forth: “No. I ain’t such a dummy as that, I don’t care what!” But the fear continued to shake against his ribs, and it occurred to him that it had been shaking that way constantly from the moment he’d found the three kittens playing peacefully in their nest. Because it had known—it, the fear, the being-awfulscared-of-something—had known the boy better than he knew himself, had known all along from that first glance that he wasn’t going to be satisfied until he had all three kittens. It didn’t make any difference if they were baby dragons and mama dragon was breathing fire on him every step of the way. So it wasn’t until he emerged the third time with the third kitten between his teeth that he was able to sigh and relax and peacefully start toward the house, triumphantly shouldering the explosives box as if it were spoils of a mighty battle. And when he met the old coon waddling toward him on the muddy path he saluted the inscrutable animal and advised him, “Maybe you better leave off the thickets t’day, Mister Jig; it’s fierce in yonder for a old man.” Henry was in the woods. Uncle Ben and Ben, Junior—a boy called Little Joe by everyone but his father, shorter and younger than Hank and already showing his hell-raising father’s heavenly good looks—were staying at the house while Uncle Ben’s present woman cooled off enough to take them back into her home in town. They saw the kittens and Hank’s scratched and bleeding condition and both arrived at the same conclusion. “Did you really?” asked the boy. “Did you really, Hank, fight a wildcat for ’em?” &ldquo............