Part 6
Naledi’s voice came through the earpiece before the patrol vehicle reached the northern holding point. “Pula is outside. Zara is grooming her.” There was a pause filled with radio hiss. “They are moving west together. Keep going.”
Naledi and Kabo joined him at the holding point twenty minutes later. Nathan let the replay wait. They remained inside their vehicles until Zara and Pula had put enough distance between themselves and the boma, then returned to Mowana by the northern route.
At dawn, the team went back to document the site. Pula’s tracks crossed the gate in a cluster of hesitant turns. She had moved toward Zara once, doubled back to the threshold, then followed the lioness away. Beyond the rain trees, the smaller prints repeatedly disappeared inside Zara’s larger ones.
They followed the trail slowly from the Land Cruiser for several hundred yards. After scanning a sandy hollow, Kabo stepped out long enough to photograph where Zara had lain down and Pula had pressed against her belly. He marked the coordinates and stood.
“Enough,” he said.
Nathan wanted to continue until he saw them. He wanted one clear frame not flattened by infrared light, one visual confirmation that the cub had not merely followed but been accepted. The desire was so immediate that he had already chosen the route ahead in his mind.
He looked at Kabo, then at Naledi. “Enough,” he agreed.
They secured the boma, and the rehabilitation vehicle returned empty. For the next two days, the cameras showed nothing. Pula’s treatment room was scrubbed, the temporary screens came down, and the quarantine sign curled at the corners in the heat.
On the third morning, a camera near the North Channel transmitted six images. Zara crossed first. Pula walked close behind her, belly rounded from feeding and tail kink plain against the pale grass. In the final frame, both animals disappeared into the same stand of reeds.
Naledi filed the photographs in the restricted archive without printing one for the office wall. Nathan entered the observation in the red-lined notebook: Pula with Zara. Condition improved. Traveling west.
He started to write successful reunion, then drew a line through the words. Three days was too soon, so he left the status field blank.
The confirmation did not close the larger case. Police took Nathan’s time-and-bearing note, the camera files, scene photographs, casts, and samples collected along the service track, while patrols increased along the eastern boundary. The two other cubs, possibly taken alive, remained missing. No one at Mowana softened that fact because one had survived.
Zara did not return to Thato’s cattle post. The borrowed panels stayed until permanent materials arrived, and the community trust added the eastern posts to its night-alert route.
On Nathan’s last full day at Mowana, he and Naledi worked through the office shelves. She kept the raw field notebooks, the camera logs, Ruth’s plant surveys, and every map connected to the station’s research. Nathan kept personal letters, one broken compass, and a photograph of the original three-room outpost before solar panels and radio masts crowded its roof.
At the bottom of a drawer lay the unsigned renewal form he had been moving from pile to pile for months. The board had offered him another year as resident senior adviser. He had never told Leah.
Nathan photographed the form and called her.
“There’s something I should have told you months ago,” he said. “The board offered me another year.”
After a pause, Leah asked, “Do you want it?”
Nathan looked through the office window at the firebreak, the channel beyond it, and the roof Ruth had once helped him patch before a storm. “Part of me does.”
“I know. You built most of your life there. I’m not asking you to pretend it means nothing.”
“It doesn’t mean nothing.” Nathan looked down at the form. “But I’m coming home. I wanted you to hear about the offer before I answered it.”
“All right,” Leah said. “Call me after you tell the board.”
Nathan wrote DECLINED across the page, signed it, and placed it with the outgoing mail.
Naledi saw him do it. “You could stay in Maun and consult without living here.”
“Is that an invitation?”
“It is a boundary with a guest room attached.”
He laughed. “I’ll visit.”
In the morning, Kabo drove him to the airstrip. Nathan climbed into the little aircraft, fastened his belt, and called Leah before the pilot closed the door.
“Where are you?” she asked. “In my seat.” There was a pause, then he heard her turn from the phone. “Emma, he’s on the plane.” Nathan looked through the window toward the strip of green marking the channel beyond Mowana. The pilot closed the door while Leah was still talking…
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