Part 2
At the answering call, the patrol commander allowed one brief reunion attempt. Nathan opened the canvas, lowered the cub into the shade of the blackthorn, and backed away.
He and Kabo returned to the Land Cruiser while the two officers withdrew behind the second vehicle. The police investigator stayed near the road, watching the country through binoculars. For several minutes, nothing moved except vultures circling higher on the warming air.
The lioness called again. The cub pulled one foreleg beneath her body and tried to stand. She managed two steps toward the reeds before her hindquarters folded, and she lay panting with her chin in the dust.
“We give the adult room,” Nathan said. “She may come once she can’t see us.”
“She can smell us,” Kabo replied. “And the dead lions. And whoever was here last night.”
They waited inside the closed vehicle with the windows raised. Twenty minutes passed. The cub stopped answering. Through the long lens Nathan saw flies gather at the corners of her eyes.
The patrol commander made the decision Nathan had been resisting. “We take the cub. We leave a camera. If the female comes back, we know where to start.”
Nathan wanted another ten minutes, although he could not have said what those minutes would change. Kabo started the engine. The sound settled it.
This time they placed the cub in a ventilated transport crate and covered three sides. Nathan rode beside it in the back of the vehicle, not touching the mesh. Once, when the truck dropped into a sandy rut, a spotted paw slid across the floor toward his boot and remained there until the road leveled.
Dr. Naledi Moagi arrived at Mowana before noon in a wildlife department aircraft with a veterinary technician and enough equipment to turn the station’s storeroom into a temporary treatment room. She was forty-six, compact, and exact in her movements. The silver beginning at her temples had not been there when she left Mowana eight years earlier, but the expression she gave Nathan was familiar.
“How much contact did you have with her?” she asked while listening to the cub’s chest.
“Only to remove her.”
“And in the truck?”
“No.”
Naledi glanced at the torn sleeve of his field shirt. “She did that from a distance?”
“She caught the fabric at the site.”
“Then change your shirt before you go near the holding room again.”
The cub was dehydrated and overheated, with abrasions on two paws and bruising along one shoulder. There was no bullet wound or obvious fracture. The technician cooled her gradually while Naledi placed an IV line and began fluids. Under brief sedation, Naledi examined the shoulder, cleaned the abrasions, drew blood, and took the samples required before any reunion attempt. She also photographed both sides of the cub’s face for the restricted identification file. Nathan assisted only when asked and recorded dosages and times in a clean notebook.
As the sedation wore off, the cub snapped at the IV line. Naledi’s mouth shifted at one corner.
“That’s better,” Nathan said.
“Write it down. Don’t congratulate her.”
By midafternoon the cub could hold up her head. They moved her to an old quarantine room at the far end of the equipment shed, where a narrow service chute allowed food and water to be delivered without a person entering. The windows were covered. A camera above the door carried a silent feed to the office.
Naledi taped a sheet to the wall outside.
FEMALE LION CUB F-3. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. NO VOICES. NO DIRECT FEEDING. NO PHOTOGRAPHS FOR PUBLIC RELEASE.
“F-3?” Nathan asked.
“Third cub indicated by the tracks.”
“That isn’t a name.”
“Good.”
They had once spent an entire wet season disagreeing over whether darting a snared lioness would save her or kill her from the stress of pursuit. Naledi had been a newly qualified veterinarian then; Nathan had still been introduced at conferences as the man who knew the delta’s lions better than anyone alive. She had been right about the lioness. She rarely mentioned it, which made Nathan remember it more clearly.
The regional wildlife warden joined them by satellite call that evening. Tebogo Masilo’s face froze every few seconds on the office monitor, but his decision came through without interruption. Mowana could provide emergency care while the team assessed the possibility of immediate reunion. It was not licensed to raise a large predator.
“If there is no adult known to accept her and no approved plan within seventy-two hours, the cub goes to the rehabilitation center,” Masilo said. “That is not a punishment. It is the safe option.”
“Safe may mean permanent captivity,” Nathan replied.
“It may. What I will not approve is a famous retiring biologist raising a lion in his backyard because the newspaper likes the photograph.”
Naledi leaned closer to the screen. “There will be no press, and I’m directing the assessment.”
Masilo looked from her to Nathan. “I know. That is why the cub is still at Mowana.”
After the call, Naledi closed the laptop. “You can object to his tone after you finish packing your office.”
“The handover is next week.”
“The handover started when the board appointed me. Next week is when you get on an airplane.”
Nathan turned toward the banks of file boxes along the wall. Naledi had worked at Mowana from the age of twenty-four, first as a research assistant and later as the veterinarian who rebuilt its field protocols. She knew which roof panel lifted in an east wind and which freezer needed a kick after a power cut. She also knew that only three of Nathan’s twenty-seven years of field notes had been fully digitized.
“We have a lioness to find,” he said.
“We do. And if we find her, you are not making the decision alone.”
They reviewed images from the North Channel cameras. Eleven days earlier, the collared lioness Nala had rested beside the pan with two daughters and three cubs. Nala’s other daughter was missing from the bodies: Zara, a broad-faced lioness with a torn left ear. In the photographs, she lay on her side while all three cubs nursed or climbed over her. The smallest had a kink at the end of her tail.
That did not prove maternity. Lionesses in a pride often nursed one another’s cubs, and the cub could belong to either dead female. It did prove something nearly as useful: Zara had accepted her before.
The camera left at the kill site transmitted its first image shortly after midnight. Zara stood at the edge of the trampled pan, ribs visible beneath her dusty coat. A dark graze marked one shoulder, but she bore weight on all four legs. In the next frame she sniffed the ground where the cub had lain.
The final image showed her leaving the pan along the paired grooves made by the Land Cruiser. The tracks pointed north, toward Mowana Station…
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