Part 7
Five years later, Nathan returned to Mowana in the back seat of Naledi’s Land Cruiser, with Leah beside him and thirteen-year-old Emma complaining that no one had warned her how much delta sand could enter a closed shoe.
“It is an advanced sand,” Kabo told her from the passenger seat. “It trained under your grandfather.”
Nathan had returned twice as a visiting adviser, always on dates Naledi approved. In Colorado, he lived three blocks from Leah, and Sunday dinner had become ordinary enough that missing one required an explanation. This was Leah and Emma’s first visit. They had booked it months before a southern camera caught a broad-faced lioness with two half-seen cubs. The angle was too poor for identification, and no camera had found her again. Pula herself had last appeared on Mowana’s western cameras three years earlier, before her trail passed beyond their range.
Mowana had changed without asking Nathan’s permission. The old storeroom was now a genetics lab, four young Batswana researchers filled rooms that had once stood empty, and Naledi’s searchable archive had replaced his boxes. His old bedroom belonged to the visiting hydrologist. Naledi gave him the narrow guest room beside the kitchen and seemed disappointed when he did not object.
The dry season had tightened around the station. Most shallow pans east of the channel were bare, but the water beside Mowana’s firebreak remained, fed by the last retreating flood. Antelope came in nervous groups at dusk. Elephants used the deeper eastern edge after dark.
On the third evening, Emma and Kabo returned from replacing camera batteries while it was still light. From inside the fenced service yard, Kabo spotted movement in the southern grass and guided her onto the screened veranda.
An adult lioness stood beyond the firebreak.
She was nearly invisible until she moved. Two cubs followed, old enough to travel but still spotted along their legs and bellies. They bunched behind her as she tested the air, then spilled around each other on the path to the water.
Nathan and Leah were already on the screened veranda with Naledi. No one opened the outer door. Naledi reached for the long-lens camera kept beside the observation log.
The lioness approached the pan at an angle, giving the station a wide berth. One cub stopped to attack a dry stalk; the other pounced from behind and sent both rolling into the dust. Their mother looked back once but did not interrupt them.
Nathan saw the tail when she turned. The last inch bent slightly to the left.
He did not say the name. Kinks could occur in more than one animal, and five years could turn certainty into whatever a person most wanted to see. He waited while Naledi took a sequence of profile photographs.
The lioness drank. When she lifted her head, one cub remained beside the water while the other rubbed its face beneath her jaw. She touched her nose briefly to its forehead, then looked toward the dark rectangle of the veranda screen. Nathan remained behind it.
“Is it her?” Leah whispered.
“Maybe.”
Naledi transferred one photograph to the laptop kept on the veranda and opened Pula’s restricted clinical file beside it. Whisker spots formed an individual pattern that did not change as scars faded and bodies grew.
Kabo leaned over her shoulder. “Upper incomplete row—two close together, one set low against the first complete row.”
Naledi checked both images once more, then sat back.
“Pula,” she said.
Emma looked from the screen to Nathan. “The cub from your story?”
“The same one,” Nathan said.
Outside, Pula moved away from the pan. The cubs followed until the smaller one became distracted by a grasshopper and fell several yards behind. Pula stopped at the edge of the firebreak and gave a low contact call. The cub abandoned the grasshopper and ran to her.
Leah’s fingers closed lightly around Nathan’s sleeve. He covered her hand with his.
“Do you think she remembers you?” Emma asked.
Nathan watched Pula listen to the station. Her ears turned once toward the murmur of the solar pump and then toward the cubs. She might remember the route, the water, or Zara’s smell beyond the wire. She might remember nothing he would recognize.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Pula crossed into the grass without approaching the veranda. One cub vanished first. The smaller one lingered broadside for a moment, all oversized paws and round ears, before following her west.
Nathan opened the red-lined field notebook Naledi had brought from the archive. In the next clear space he entered the date, the water level, one adult female, and two cubs estimated at five to six months. He noted the direction of travel and the matching whisker pattern.
From beyond the mopane, a cub called once. Nathan did not answer. Leah’s hand remained in his as the grass opened farther west, then closed again behind the lions.