The Woman Who Believed in Jaguars.(Short Story)

On the drive back home from her mother's funeral, Ruth Welborn thinks of jaguars. She has seen one once in the Atlanta Zoo and admired the creature's movements--like muscled water--as it paced back and forth, turning inches from the iron bars but never acknowledging the cage's existence.

She had not remembered then what she remembers now, a memory like something buried in river silt that finally works free and rises to the surface, a memory from the third grade: Miss Carter tells them to get out their History of South Carolina textbooks. Paper and books shuffle and shift; some of the boys snicker, for on the book's first page is a drawing of an Indian woman ...