A few months ago, London saw a cougar. She was walking Bruno along the high side of the Kam River and suddenly this thing came out of the trees and sat down and began licking its paw and London looked at it and thought, “That’s a big cat.” A second later she thought, “Oh,” and crossed the street to turn around and head home. Then the cougar crossed the street, too, and Bruno started whining and London walked very fast until she was back at Victor Street.

“I just saw a cougar,” she told her mother.

“No, you didn’t,” her mother said. She was busy doing something else, like she always was. London went and found Hamish, who was in the backyard testing samples of his whisky, which he made in these big barrels in the woodshed.

“I just saw a cougar,” she said.

“Rawr,” Hamish said, tipping some amber liquid into a beaker. “What was she wearing?”

“Gross,” said London. Inside, her sisters were playing with Ross, trying to get him to eat disgusting things off the floor, like a Cheerio they found under a cushion or a rotten raisin they found behind the TV. But she didn’t even want to talk to them. They were young and stupid and only talked to each other. If Uncle Shawn was there, she would have told him, and maybe he would have told her a story about a time when he lived in the woods and he wrestled a cougar for a sandwich or something like that, Uncle Shawn had all these really great stories. But Uncle Shawn wasn’t there. And Papa was away, like Papa always was. She even thought about texting Aunt F, but she was probably super busy with her awesome new life in Toronto and wouldn’t care about something so stupid as seeing a cougar in dumb boring Thunder Bay. So London went into Nana’s room.

London had been avoiding her grandmother ever since the Around the Track incident. Besides, Nana was just so different now, like she couldn’t always focus her eyes on you anymore, or maybe her mind was just far away. London missed the old Nana, who knew secret things about the world, like why there was a trap door in the basement or what would have happened if London had been born a boy. But everyone else was busy, or stupid, and so London went and found her grandmother, who was in bed already, doing a crossword on a little folding table that opened over her lap, a cup of tea on the nightstand, a Magic Bag hanging around her neck.

“Nana, I saw a cougar!”

“Oh, dear,” Nana said, wrinkling her forehead. “What’s a cougar? It sounds familiar.”