Part 3
For twelve days, F-27 carried the injured leg as if it belonged to another animal.
Sarnai came every third morning to change the bandage and assess circulation under light sedation. The wounds closed cleanly, but the tendons had tightened while the cord held the joint backward. Recovery would depend on whether the kitten began using the leg before the weakness became permanent.
“We cannot explain exercise to her,” Sarnai said. “We can only build a place where moving is worth the effort.”
They rearranged the pen while F-27 slept. Elias placed flat stones at different heights, a hollow log between the chambers, and a den box with two exits. Food would no longer arrive beside the hiding place. Each night the feeding drawer opened in a different corner, forcing the kitten to cross the pen if she wanted to eat.
The first time she put weight on the foot, it lasted less than a second. Elias saw it on the camera and wrote only “partial contact, 03:14” in the log. He did not add that he replayed the clip nine times.
By the fourth week, she could spring onto the lower stone, though she landed unevenly and turned at once to face the camera. Her fur had filled out until her body looked almost round. The low ears and broad cheeks gave her a permanently severe expression that made every clumsy jump seem like a personal insult.
Elias began calling her Ash in his thoughts because the dark tips of her paws looked as though she had crossed a cold fireplace. He never wrote the name. The log remained F-27, and when he spoke with Sarnai, so did the cat.
He spent the daylight hours walking the abandoned transects. Snow melted from the south slopes, exposing blue cord, plastic flagging, rusted staples, and two aluminum tags that had worked loose from their stakes. Some belonged to studies older than his. All of it went into a canvas sack on his back.
The work was slower than he remembered. He stopped when his pulse misbehaved and rested where the ground was dry. Temuulen joined him twice, and Sarnai came once with wire cutters. She did not let Elias turn the cleanup into private penance.
“If you collapse on the ridge, Nora will blame me,” she said.
“Nora has enough blame for both of us.”
Sarnai clipped a loop of faded line from the roots of a shrub. “If it were only blame, she could have stayed in Boise.”
At the end of the fifth week, they opened the gate to the roofed outside run. It enclosed a patch of broken rock and coarse grass beside the shed, screened from the station by reed panels. F-27 smelled the cold air and remained inside for six hours. At dusk, she stepped over the threshold and vanished so completely among the stones that Elias had to use the thermal camera to find her.
For the first live-prey trial, Sarnai released a small rodent into the outer run while F-27 was secured inside. Then both humans withdrew to the station. They watched on a delayed monitor, not wanting their presence to become part of the hunt.
F-27 waited for twenty-three minutes. The rodent moved beneath a shelf of rock. She lowered her body, crept forward in short bursts, and pounced. Her right leg slipped on the landing, but she recovered before the prey reached cover. Sarnai stopped the video after the kitten carried her catch into the den box.
“Again in three days,” she said.
“She nearly lost her footing.”
“She did not lose the prey.”
“On level ground. Black Ridge is not level.”
“Nothing here is level.”
Elias wanted another month. Then he wanted spring. He made his arguments in the language of weather, muscle strength, and prey density, but Sarnai listened to what lay beneath them.
“Keeping her through winter would make you feel safer,” she said. “It may not make her safer. She is avoiding us, hunting, climbing, and using the leg. Soon the risks of captivity begin to grow while the risks outside remain what they have always been.”
He looked toward the covered window of the shed. “The mother may have left the territory.”
“At this age, F-27 must learn to live without her mother anyway.”
“Another ten days.”
Sarnai considered him. “One more prey trial. Final examination. If both are good, we release during the next stable weather window.”
Nora arrived two days later in a dust-coated project truck, wearing city boots ruined by the road and Helen’s green wool scarf knotted under her chin. Elias had not seen the scarf since the winter after the funeral. The sight of it struck him harder than the sight of his daughter getting out of the passenger seat.
She looked older than she had on the phone screen. There was more gray at her temples, and tiredness had settled around her mouth. She hugged him carefully, as though he might break or resist. Elias put one hand between her shoulder blades, then stepped back too soon.
“You look terrible,” she said.
“Four airports improve no one.”
“I meant you.”
Temuulen carried her bag inside. Nora ignored the tea Elias offered and placed a folder on the worktable: airline confirmation, hotel information, the name of the cardiologist expecting him in Boise. She had arranged their departure for the day after F-27’s proposed release.
“You coordinated with Sarnai,” Elias said.
“She answers direct questions.”
He felt betrayed, which was unreasonable and therefore difficult to dismiss. “My work is not finished.”
“Your contract ended last month.”
“The station inventory—”
“Can be done by the project staff. I’m not asking you to retire from knowing things. I’m asking you to stop talking about your body as if it belongs to someone else.”
They ate supper with the quiet hostility of people who knew each other’s table manners too well. Nora broke bread into exact pieces before eating it, the way Helen had. Elias disliked himself for noticing only after so many years.
While he cleared the table, Nora found the corroded T-19 tag beneath a paperweight. Elias had kept it where he would see it each morning. She turned the little rectangle over in her fingers, tracing the faded blue fibers still caught in its hole.
“Mom would have told you to stop staring at this and clean up the rest,” she said.
“That is more or less what Sarnai said.”
“Mom would have used more words.”
Elias almost smiled. “Many more.”
Nora set the tag down carefully rather than throwing it away. For a few seconds, grief occupied the room without sending either of them toward the door.
Later, he showed her the camera feed from the recovery pen. F-27 sat on the highest stone in the outside run, forepaws together, thick tail wrapped around her feet. She stared past the camera toward the open steppe.
“She’s smaller than I thought,” Nora said.
“Mostly fur.”
“Does she know you?”
“She knows the feeding drawer. She knows my boots make noise outside the wall. That is all she should know.”
F-27 rose and paced the fence, turning at the same point each time. She did not limp until the fifth circuit. Then the right hind leg swung slightly wide.
Nora watched Elias watch the cat. “You never go in there?”
“Only for veterinary procedures, after sedation.”
“You sit six feet away from that screen and make yourself invisible so she can decide what to do.”
“That is the protocol.”
“When Mom died, you decided I needed space. You packed your bag before I even knew what I needed.”
Elias closed the laptop halfway. “We have had this argument.”
“No. I have had pieces of it. You usually lose the signal.”
The station creaked in the wind. From the dark screen came one thin scratch as F-27 moved across stone.
“I thought staying would make it worse,” Elias said. “Every room in that house was hers.”
“It was my house too.”
He had no answer that did not arrive six years late. Nora opened the laptop again. F-27 had returned to the highest stone and was pushing her flat face toward the seam where cold air entered.
“Sarnai says the cat is ready,” Nora said.
“Sarnai says she may be ready.”
“And you keep finding one more reason to wait.” She looked at him now, not at the screen. “Are you waiting for her to be ready, Dad, or for you to be…”
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