Love Calculator

The couple phoned Lauren Satterfield, a cougar researcher who works in the valley. She set up motion-sensing cameras that revealed two juveniles and two full-grown cougars wandering among our forest-scattered homes. Satterfield and her crew captured one of them — not the half-grown cat I met, but an adult female. They fitted her with a GPS collar, then released her to transmit secrets about her life.

The familiar woods felt upended. I walked them now with a sense of vertigo, disoriented by these fleeting brushes with a creature of foreign compass, who navigated the serrated mountains and the tumbling tributaries of the Methow River, the small towns of Winthrop and Mazama and their Nordic skiing trails, according to experience and rules wholly its own. To recover my bearings, I called Satterfield and asked if I could follow her following cats.