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By Root 6902 0

neoprene cat bibs. He claimed that a cat wearing one of these bibs could do any frolicsome outdoor thing it pleased, from climbing trees to batting at moths, except pounce effectively on birds. He said that putting a bell on a cat’s collar had been proven to be useless in warning birds. He added that the low-end estimate of songbirds daily murdered by cats in the United States was one million, i.e., 365,000,000 per year (and this, he stressed, was a conservative estimate and did not include the starvation of the murdered birds’ chicks). Although Walter seemed not to understand what a bother it would be to tie a bib around a cat every time it went outdoors, and how silly a cat would look in bright blue or red neoprene, the older cat owners on the street did politely accept the bibs and promise to try them, so that Walter would leave them alone and they could throw the bibs away. Only Linda Hoffbauer refused a bib altogether. Walter seemed to her like one of those big-government liberals who wanted to hand out condoms in the schools and take away people’s guns and force every citizen to carry a national identity card. She was inspired to ask whether the birds on his property belonged to him, and, if not, what business of his it was if her Bobby enjoyed hunting them. Walter replied with some bureaucratese about the North American Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which supposedly prohibited harming any non-game bird that crossed the Canadian or Mexican border. Linda was disagreeably reminded of the country’s new president, who wanted to hand 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