Late in the following winter, when the snow was beginning to melt, Walter showed up again on Canterbridge Court, this time carrying a carton of brightly colored neoprene cat bibs. He claimed that a cat wearing one of these bibs could do any frolicsome outdoor thing it pleased, from climbing trees to batting at moths, except pounce effectively on birds. He said that putting a bell on a cat’s collar had been proven to be useless in warning birds. He added that the low-end estimate of songbirds daily murdered by cats in the United States was one million, i.e., 365,000,000 per year (and this, he stressed, was a conservative estimate and did not include the starvation of the murdered birds’ chicks). Although Walter seemed not to understand what a bother it would be to tie a bib around a cat every time it went outdoors, and how silly a cat would look in bright blue or red neoprene, the older cat owners on the street did politely accept the bibs and promise to try them, so that Walter would leave them alone and they could throw the bibs away. Only Linda Hoffbauer refused a bib altogether. Walter seemed to her like one of those big-government liberals who wanted to hand out condoms in the schools and take away people’s guns and force every citizen to carry a national identity card. She was inspired to ask whether the birds on his property belonged to him, and, if not, what business of his it was if her Bobby enjoyed hunting them. Walter replied with some bureaucratese about the North American Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which supposedly prohibited harming any non-game bird that crossed the Canadian or Mexican border. Linda was disagreeably reminded of the country’s new president, who wanted to hand over national sovereignty to the United Nations, and she told Walter, as civilly as she could, that she was very busy raising her children and would appreciate it if he wouldn’t knock on her door anymore.

From a diplomatic perspective, Walter had chosen a poor time to come around with his bibs. The country had stumbled into a deep economic recession, the stock market was in the toilet, and it seemed almost obscene of him to still be obsessed with songbirds. Even the retired couples on Canterbridge Court were hurting-the deflation of their investments had forced several of them to cancel their annual winter retreats to Florida or Arizona-and two of the younger families on the street, the Dents and the Dolbergs, had fallen behind on their mortgage payments (which had ballooned at exactly the wrong moment) and seemed likely to lose their homes. While Teagan Dolberg waited for replies from credit-consolidation companies that seemed to change their phone numbers and mailing addresses weekly, and from low-cost federal debt advisers that turned out to be neither federal nor low-cost, the outstanding balances on her Visa and MasterCard accounts were jumping up in monthly increments of three and four thousand dollars, and the friends and neighbors to whom she’d sold ten-packs of manicure sessions, at the manicure station she’d set up in her basement, continued to show up to have their nails done without bringing in any more income. Even Linda Hoffbauer, whose husband had secure road-maintenance contracts with Itasca County, had taken to lowering her thermostat and letting her children ride the school bus instead of delivering and fetching them in her Suburban. Anxieties hung like a cloud of no-see-ums on Canterbridge Court; they invaded every house via cable news and talk radio and the internet. There was plenty of tweeting on Twitter, but the chirping and fluttering world of nature, which Walter had invoked as if people were still supposed to care about it, was one anxiety too many.

Walter was next heard from in September, when he leafleted the neighborhood under cover of night. The Dent and Dolberg houses were standing empty now, their windows darkened like the call-holding lights of emergency-hotline callers who’d finally quietly hung up, but the remaining residents of Canterbridge Estates all awoke one morning to find on their doorsteps a politely worded “Dear Neighbors” letter, rehashing the anticat arguments that Walter had presented twice already, and four attached pages of photographs that were the opposite of polite. Walter had apparently spent the entire summer documenting bird deaths on his property. Each picture (there were more than forty of them) was labeled with a date and a species. The Canterbridge families who didn’t own cats were offended to have been included in the leafleting, and the families who did own them were offended by Walter’s seeming certainty that every bird death on his property was the fault of their pets. Linda Hoffbauer was additionally incensed that a leaflet had been left where one of her children could easily have been exposed to traumatizing images of headless sparrows and bloody entrails. She called the county sheriff, with whom she and her husband were social, to see whether perhaps Walter was guilty of illegal harassment. The sheriff said that Walter wasn’t, but he agreed to stop by his house and have a word of warning with him-a visit that yielded the unexpected news that Walter had a law degree and was versed not only in his First Amendment rights but also in the Canterbridge Estates homeowners covenant, which contained a clause requiring pets to be under the control of their owners at all times; the sheriff advised Linda to shred the leaflet and move on.

And then came white winter, and the neighborhood cats retreated indoors (where, as even Linda had to admit, they seemed perfectly content), and Linda’s husband personally undertook to plow the county road in such a way that Walter had to shovel for an hour to clear the head of his driveway after every new snowfall. With the leaves down, the neighborhood had a clear view across the frozen lake at the little Berglund house, in whose windows no television was ever seen to flicker. It was hard to imagine what Walter might be doing over there, by himself, in the deep winter night, besides brooding with hostility and judgment. His house went dark for a week at Christmastime, which pointed toward a visit with his family in St. Paul, which was also hard to imagine-that such a crank was nonetheless loved by somebody. Linda, especially, was relieved when the holidays ended and the crank resumed his hermit life and she could return to a hatred unclouded by the thought that somebody cared about him. One night in February, her husband reported that Walter had filed a complaint with the county regarding the deliberate blockage of his driveway, and this was somehow very agreeable for her to hear. It was good to know he knew they hated him.

In the same perverse way, when the snow again melted and the woods again greened and Bobby was let outside again and promptly disappeared, Linda felt as if a deep itch were being scratched, the primal sort of itch that scratching only worsens. She knew immediately that Walter was responsible for Bobby’s disappearance, and she felt intensely gratified that he’d risen to her hatred, had given it fresh cause and fresh nourishment: that he was willing to play the hatred game with her and be the local representative of everything wrong with her world. Even as she organized the search for her children’s missing pet and broadcast their anguish to the neighborhood, she secretly savored their anguish and took pleasure in urging them to hate Walter for it. She’d liked Bobby well enough, but she knew it was a sin to falsely idolize a beast. The sin she hated was in her so-called neighbor. Once it became clear that Bobby was never coming back, she took her kids to the local animal shelter and let them pick out three new cats, which, as soon as they were home again, she freed from their cardboard boxes and shooed in the direction of Walter’s woods.

Walter had never liked cats. They’d seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy countries fetishize their militaries, saluting the uniforms of killers as cat owners stroke their animals’ lovely fur and forgive their claws and fangs. He’d never seen anything in a cat’s face but simpering incuriosity and self-interest; you only had to tease one with a mouse-toy to see where its true heart lay. Until he came to live in his mother’s house, however, he’d had many worse evils to contend against. Only now, when he was responsible for the feral cat populations wreaking havoc on the properties he managed for the Nature Conservancy, and when the injury that Canterbridge Estates had inflicted on his lake was compounded by the insult of its residents’ free-roaming pets, did his old anti-feline prejudice swell into the kind of bludgeoning daily misery and grievance that depressive male Berglunds evidently needed to lend meaning and substance to their lives. The grievance that had served him for the previous two years-the misery of chain saws and earthmovers and small-scale blasting and erosion, of hammers and tile cutters and boom-boxed classic rock-was over now, and he needed something new.