slink

“It’s a little bit like herding cats sometimes,” Kramer said of keeping volunteers from trying to slink away.

Exhausted and sick, he had slunk back to England to recover, to think, and to scheme.

Then she slunk away, disappearing into the shadows as if she had never been in the doorway at all.

Cars in their assigned parking spots; a stray cat, the one Michael had secretly named Tuxedo, slinking around the bushes; Mr. Mosley, the maintenance man, hefting a can of paint toward a vacant apartment.

Afterward, with the help of remaining friends, he slunk off to the U.S. in 1876, where he taught in Massachusetts for a while, then took up as a freelance newspaper writer in Chicago.