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