There are many ways for a house cat to die outdoors, including dismemberment by coyotes and flattening by a car, but when the Hoffbauer family’s beloved pet Bobby failed to come home one early-June evening, and no amount of calling Bobby’s name or searching the perimeter of Canterbridge Estates or walking up and down the county road or stapling Bobby’s xeroxed image to local trees turned up any trace of him, it was widely assumed on Canterbridge Court that Bobby had been killed by Walter Berglund.

Canterbridge Estates was a new development, consisting of twelve spacious homes in the modern many-bathroomed style, on the southwest side of a minor water now officially called Canterbridge Estates Lake. Though the lake wasn’t close to anything, really, the nation’s financial system had lately been lending out money essentially for free, and the building of the Estates, as well as the widening and paving of the road that led to it, had momentarily stirred the stagnant Itasca County economy. Low interest rates had also then enabled various Twin Cities retirees and young local families, including the Hoffbauers, to buy themselves a dream home. When they began moving in, during the fall of 2007, their street still looked very raw. The front and back yards were lumpy and furzed over with unthriving grass, scattered with intractable glacial boulders and such birches as had been spared felling, and resembled, all in all, a child’s too-hastily completed school terrarium project. The cats of the new neighborhood understandably preferred to stalk the woods and thickets of the adjoining Berglund property, where the birds were. And Walter, even before the last Canterbridge house was occupied, had gone door to door to introduce himself and ask his new neighbors to please keep their cats inside.

Walter was a good Minnesotan and reasonably friendly, but there was something about him, a political trembling in his voice, a fanatic gray stubble on his cheeks, that rubbed the families on Canterbridge Court the wrong way. Walter lived by himself in a dumpy, secluded old vacation house, and although it was undoubtedly nicer for the families to look across the lake at his scenic property than for him to look at their bare yards, and although a few of them did stop to imagine how noisy the construction of their homes must have been, nobody enjoys feeling like an intruder on somebody else’s idyll. They’d paid their money, after all; they had a right to be there. Indeed, their property taxes were collectively hugely higher than Walter’s, and most of them were facing a ballooning of their mortgage payments and were living on fixed incomes or saving for their children’s educations. When Walter, who obviously had no such worries, came to complain to them about their cats, they felt they understood his worry about birds a lot better than he understood what a hyper-refined privilege it was to worry about them. Linda Hoffbauer, who was Evangelical and the most political person on the street, was especially offended. “So Bobby kills birds,” she said to Walter. “So what?”

“Well, the thing is,” Walter said, “small cats aren’t native to North America, and so our songbirds never evolved any defenses against them. It’s not really a fair fight.”

“Cats kill birds,” Linda said. “It’s what they do, it’s just part of nature.”

“Yes, but cats are an Old World species,” Walter said. “They’re not part of our nature. They wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t introduced them. That’s the whole problem.”

“To be honest with you,” Linda said, “all I care about is letting my children learn to take care of a pet and have responsibility for it. Are you trying to tell me they can’t do that?”

“No, of course not,” Walter said. “But you already keep Bobby indoors in the winter. I’m just asking that you do that in the summer, too, for the sake of the local ecosystem. We’re living in an important breeding area for a number of bird species that are declining in North America. And those birds have children, too. When Bobby kills a bird in June or July, he’s also leaving behind a nest full of babies that aren’t going to live.”

“The birds need to find someplace else to nest, then. Bobby loves running free outdoors. It’s not fair to keep him indoors when the weather’s nice.”

“Sure. Yes. I know you love your cat. And if he would just stay in your yard, that would be fine. But this land actually belonged to the birds before it belonged to us. And it’s not like there’s any way that we can tell the birds that this is a bad place to try to nest. So they keep coming here, and they keep getting killed. And the bigger problem is that they’re running out of space altogether, because there’s more and more development. So it’s important that we try to be responsible stewards to this wonderful land that we’ve taken over.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Linda said, “but my children matter more to me than the children of some bird. I don’t think that’s an extreme position, compared to yours. God gave this world to human beings, and that’s the end of the story as far as I’m concerned.”

“I have children myself, and I understand that,” Walter said. “But we’re only talking about keeping your Bobby indoors. Unless you’re on speaking terms with Bobby, I don’t see how you know he minds being kept indoors.”

“My cat is an animal. The beasts of the earth weren’t given the gift of language. Only people were. It’s one of the ways we know we were created in God’s image.”

“Right, so my point is, how do you know he likes to run free?”

“Cats love being outdoors. Everybody loves being outdoors. When the weather warms up, Bobby stands by the door, wanting to go out. I don’t have to talk to him to understand that.”

“But if Bobby’s just an animal, that is, not a human being, then why does his mild preference for being outdoors trump the right of songbirds to raise their families?”

“Because Bobby is part of our family. My children love him, and we want the best for him. If we had a pet bird, we’d want the best for it, too. But we don’t have a bird, we have a cat.”

“Well, thank you for listening to me,” Walter said. “I hope you’ll give it some thought and maybe reconsider.”

Linda was very offended by this conversation. Walter wasn’t really even a neighbor, he didn’t belong to the homeowners association, and the fact that he drove a Japanese hybrid, to which he’d recently applied an OBAMA bumper sticker, pointed, in her mind, toward godlessness and a callousness regarding the plight of hardworking families, like hers, who were struggling to make ends meet and raise their children to be good, loving citizens in a dangerous world. Linda wasn’t greatly popular on Canterbridge Court, but she was feared as the person who would knock on your door if you’d left your boat parked in your driveway overnight, in violation of the homeowners covenant, or if one of her children had seen one of your children lighting up a cigarette behind the middle school, or if she’d discovered a minor defect in the construction of her house and wanted to know if your house had the same minor defect. After Walter’s visit with her, he became, in her incessant telling, the animal nut who’d asked her if she was on speaking terms with her cat.

Across the lake, on a couple of weekends that summer, the people of Canterbridge Estates noticed visitors on Walter’s property, a handsome young couple who drove a new black Volvo. The young man was blond and body-built, his wife or girlfriend svelte in a childless big-city way. Linda Hoffbauer declared the couple “arrogant-looking,” but most of the community was relieved to see these respectable visitors, since Walter had previously seemed, for all his politeness, like a potentially deviant hermit. Some of the older Canterbridgeans who took long morning constitutionals were now emboldened to chat up Walter when they met him on the road. They learned that the young couple were his son and daughter-in-law, who had some sort of thriving business in St. Paul, and that he also had an unmarried daughter in New York City. They asked him leading questions about his own marital status, hoping to elicit whether he was divorced or merely widowed, and when he proved adept at dodging these questions, one of the more technologically savvy of them went online and discovered that Linda Hoffbauer had been right, after all, to suspect Walter of being a nutcase and a menace. He’d apparently founded a radical environmental group that had shut down after the death of its co-founder, a strangely named young woman who clearly hadn’t been the mother of his children. Once this interesting news had percolated through the neighborhood, the early-morning walkers left Walter alone again-less, perhaps, because they were disturbed by his extremism than because his hermitlike existence now strongly smacked of grief, the terrible sort of grief that it’s safest to steer clear of; the enduring sort of grief that, like all forms of madness, feels threatening, possibly even contagious.