Four miles of back roads, crossing and recrossing a creek on rattling bridges, brought me to the outskirts of Emmetstown, where a homely stencilled sign pointed the way to the humane society. I had been here a few times with my mother, delivering trapped cats. The society had lent her two galvanized Havaharts a dozen years ago. She would bait them with liver pâté. On various weekend visits I had helped her lug her awkward catch. Tomcats and new mothers were the hardest to carry, as they made the long cage pitch back and forth in their terror, hurling their bodies against the dropped doors and trying to bite and claw their way through the wire mesh. We set them on the humane-society counter and a stocky, pale teen-age girl would take them away and ten minutes later, looking slightly paler, would bring them back empty.

In the years since I had been here, there had been some refinements. From the concrete-floored rear of the complex there still drifted animal smells and yowls, but the front room looked more like an office, with framed certificates and prints of wildlife. The high bare counter was gone and a walnut desk occupied the center of a shag-carpeted floor.

Here sat a broad-shouldered bland woman with “big” bleached hair, inflated and teased with an out-of-style stylishness. Her pale face lifted to me when I came in. Before I could introduce myself, she said, “I was sorry to read about your mother, David. She was a real nice lady. Such lovely manners, even when you could tell she was upset.”

Falling in with this intimacy, I asked, “When did you see her upset?”

“Oh, with the cats. Having to bring them in to be, you know, disposed of, when they were a lot like pets to her. She would say goodbye by name, sometimes. She used to say it was the tamest that trusted her enough to take the bait—the really wild ones never got caught.”

“It was horrible, the way they multiplied.”

“Well, they will, if you feed them.” She added, as I grappled with this Malthusian truth, “That’s the nature of the beast.” Seeing me still baffled, she said, “It’s hard.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Hard. Do you have any ideas as to what I should do?”

“About the cats?”

“Absolutely.” What else? My other problems—dealing with Evelyn, selling the European canon to students with attention spans the length of TV commercials—were out of a humane society’s range.

She thought and said, “Well, do you still have the traps?”

“I haven’t looked, but I guess they’re still in the barn.”

“I ask because your mother hasn’t been in for a couple of years at least.”

“She got too weak to do it. A trap with a fighting cat in it isn’t so easy to handle.”