The way my grandmother told it, we were walking in the woods. I was at an age below language, a toddler, but I could already identify several plants that we gathered along the way. I’d watched Grandma’s wildcrafting from my very first days.

Squatting next to a wild raspberry bush, Grandma said she’d noticed that the birds had gone quiet, but assumed that it was because they were sizing us up—reacquainting themselves with our presence in the woods. But then there came the sudden sharp cry of a jay and Grandma leapt up from the raspberries, scanning the surrounding woods with her sharp green eyes.

Meanwhile, I’d dashed ahead, having spotted something bright along the path. I imagine it was a berry, bird, or flower (I say imagine because I don’t remember this, and only parts of what happened next). I didn’t even cry out when a streak of silver, gray, and claws arched out from the rocky ledge above and struck right into me.

Every time she told me this story, my grandmother would describe how the lynx snarled as it held a death grip on my little neck. But all I have is the memory of pain, and the feeling of being unable to breathe from the shock that hadn’t yet turned into fear. I don’t remember the predator, just the way its claws dug deep as my world flipped over and I was dragged toward the underbrush.

I can also remember my grandmother’s voice, rising loud through the surrounding woods. It wasn’t a wail or panicked scream, but a deep, resounding roar that formed three words: LET HER GO.

And the lynx did. Grandma said that she also hurled a couple of stones at him, but I didn’t see or can’t quite remember. My face was still pressed into the earth. As the animal retreated into the bush, my grandmother scooped me up and ran with me in her arms all the way back to the village. I remember peering over her shoulder and seeing spots of blood following us along the trail. It wasn’t until later that I realized the blood was my own.

There were deep gashes near my throat that had to be sewn shut, the scars from which I still wear on my skin today. Grandma said that the only time I made a sound through the whole ordeal was as they stitched my neck back together at the hospital, when I let out an ear-splitting scream at last.

A child nearly mauled to death by a wild animal—the story is harrowing, and far from commonplace in the twenty-first century. But this isn’t the way that my grandmother told it to anyone else. She never mentioned the lynx. Instead, she blamed my injury on one of the rare stray dogs that lurked around the edges of town. The lynx version was something that we kept secret between us for most of her remaining years. 

I was twenty years old when I finally asked her why she told others the story of the stray dog and kept the lynx just for us. It was a winter afternoon, and I was on holiday from university. Grandma was sitting by the window, weaving together strands of red and green cloth. She drew a long breath before replying.

“I saw that lynx,” she said. Her voice had grown raspy in recent years. “People would’ve said he was rabid, but he wasn’t. He was just skinny as dried bones, half-starved. If I’d told, they’d have hunted him down and put a bullet through his skull. This is his home. For all I knew, maybe he was the last of his kind around here.”

I reached over to help her put a new spool of thread on the spindle. “But he almost killed me.”

Grandma paused in her weaving, and her gaze drifted to the window. Snow was falling across her winter-bound garden. Then she turned her green eyes on me.

“When I told him to, he let you go.”

When I told my practical mother this story—the real story, about the lynx—she laughed outright.

“She’s forgetting things, making up legends. There isn’t any such thing as lynxes around here. Honey, a stray dog’s a stray dog and you’re lucky you didn’t get some terrible disease—let alone your head bitten off.” 

As life led me away from the woods, and away from my grandmother, her cabin was the place I thought of when I most longed for escape. I visited when I could. Sometimes she would phone me in the evenings as I worked overtime in my urban cubicle, and I knew that she had gone all the way to town just to use the general store’s payphone for the call. She would recount in great detail the animal tracks she had recently followed through the muck or snow: snowshoe hare, black bear, white-tailed deer, coyote. Then she’d drop her voice to a hoarse, secretive whisper: “and lynx. When you come, I’ll show you.”

I humored her, knowing it was our thing—our theme, our story, a thread weaving together the lives of grandmother and granddaughter that I was unwilling to sever. But the tracks would be long gone before I had the chance to visit her, of course, and I’d long since done my research. There are no more lynxes in that part of the country.

In the winter of the year I turned thirty, Grandma died. She’d turned ninety a few months prior. After the small funeral in the village, I went alone to her cabin at the edge of the woods. I walked through the door and breathed her in. Everything was just the same: her loom waited in the corner, lined with colorful cloth that wasn’t quite finished. Garlic from her garden hung in bunches from the ceiling above the woodstove. The table was even set—for two, although Grandma had lived alone for well over a decade.

I couldn’t linger inside. Grandma’s snowshoes were propped up near the door, where she liked to keep them handy. I strapped them to my boots, and after stumbling around for a few minutes I found a steady stride. The rhythm was a relief. I headed across the clearing, toward the familiar trail that led into the woods. It was narrower than I remembered, slowly being reclaimed by wildness after years of minimal use. As Grandma had aged and maintaining the trails had become more difficult, her range was reduced to the little clearing around the cabin—her garden, the well, the outhouse. I steadied my breathing and sidestepped over a tree that had fallen across the way.

As my movements grew sleeker, I started noticing the creaking of branches as they rearranged themselves under the snow. There was a sudden swoop of wings that may have been a startled owl. I caught sight of a northern cardinal and heard the single-note call-and-response of its mate, along with the buzzy exclamations of chickadees. I passed the great oak that Grandma always pointed out when we walked the trails together—it was her favorite tree, with a trunk so vast that the two of us could wrap our arms around it and our fingers still wouldn’t meet.

As the trail wound down toward the river, I wondered if I’d be able to hear the water running below the ice. A snowshoe hare bounded out of the shrubbery and we both froze at the unexpected crossing of our paths. Then he bounded along ahead of me, leading the way. I picked up my pace, breathless and already starting to sweat under my coat.

The path ended abruptly at a rock ledge, overlooking the frozen river. The hare hesitated, then hopped down to the bank and across the ice before pausing again. I closed my eyes for a moment, listening for running water. Yes, there it was—faint yet distinct, like the sound of muffled laughter.

As I turned to head back up the trail, there came a snarl from below. I looked back just in time to see a sudden flurry of claws and fur. I made a sound in the back of my throat—a strangled gasp or cry—and then there was nothing but a spot of blood in the snow. I scanned the bank, but the hare and its unseen predator were gone.

How long I stood out there on the rock cliff after that, I couldn’t tell you.