I drove her to school. In the car line, waiting behind a minivan with a stick-figure family on the back window, she said, without looking at me, "The cameras will show it wasn't you, right? That's the whole point of the cameras."
"That's the whole point of the cameras," I said.
"Then it's fine."
"Then it's fine."
She got out and walked up the sidewalk with her backpack bumping on her hips, and I sat there until the parent volunteer in the orange vest waved her flag at me twice, and then I drove to work and taught three periods of cell structure on autopilot and did not, at any point, look at my phone, because I was afraid of what I'd find on it.
I said I'd tell you why I had six cameras and a network recorder and a pan-tilt-zoom dome that cost more than my first semester of graduate school. Here's why.
The spring after I moved in, a pair of eastern screech owls took up residence in the old wooden box on the back post. Hildur Engstrom had put it up decades before, and I'd assumed it was long abandoned, until one evening in March I saw a small gray face, about the size of a softball, filling the round hole and glaring at me with yellow eyes like a disappointed librarian. Pippa named them Pinecone and the Admiral. The Admiral was the male; he had a way of standing on the box roof with his chest puffed out that seemed to call for a title.
I teach seventh-grade life science. I do not get many chances to show kids something that is actually happening, right now, in the real world, and not on a worksheet. So I wrote a small grant to the county education foundation, got eleven hundred dollars, added a good deal more of my own, and set up what my students came to call Owl Hours. The dome camera on the post could see into the box entrance and, zoomed out, the whole backyard where the owls hunted at night: the lawn, the fence line, the shed roof, the edge of the wetland. Every morning first period we'd scrub through the night's recording on the classroom projector and log what we saw. Prey deliveries. Hunting attempts. Weather. Moths. A barred owl, once, that made Pinecone flatten herself into the box like a cat under a couch. The kids kept a data sheet. By May they could tell you the Admiral's average number of prey deliveries per hour, and two of them had started a club.
You need resolution for that. Infrared at night eats detail, and an owl with a beetle in its beak at forty feet looks, on a cheap camera, exactly like an owl with nothing in its beak at forty feet. The difference between counting deliveries and guessing at them was 4K. So I bought 4K.
Then, in April, a gray fox moved in under my shed.
I found out when I went to get the mower and saw a hole, neat as a doorway, dug under the back corner where the ground slopes. A week later the trail camera I bolted to the shed corner caught her: a slim vixen, salt-and-pepper back, red flanks, a black-tipped tail as long as her body. Pippa named her Marigold. By late May there were four kits, which my students named after the four nucleotide bases, because I had apparently raised a classroom of monsters. Adenine was the bold one. Thymine was the one that kept falling down the slope.
Gray foxes can climb trees. They are shy and they eat mice and voles and an astonishing quantity of grasshoppers, and they also, I would learn, have a habit that the wildlife biologist I emailed at the state university called "opportunistic collecting." They carry things back to the den. Gloves. Dog toys. A child's sock. Soft things, mostly. Things that smell like people.
I knew that by late summer. I just didn't connect it to anything.