Part 4
For himself. The answer reached Elias before he could arrange a more respectable one.
He opened the laptop fully. In the outside run, F-27 dropped from the high stone, crossed the grass, and disappeared behind the den box without looking toward the building.
“For me,” he said.
Nora did not reward the admission by softening. She sat beside him and waited.
“I keep thinking one more week will turn risk into certainty,” Elias continued. “It will not.”
The field radio crackled before Nora could answer. Sarnai had checked the forecast. A clear forty-eight-hour window would begin the following afternoon, with low wind and no new snow expected. She wanted to perform the final examination and prey trial at dawn.
Elias looked at Nora. “You called her tonight?”
“No.”
For once, the world had moved without either of them arranging it. F-27 passed the second hunting trial in eleven minutes. She missed her first pounce, backed into cover, and waited instead of chasing. On the next attempt, she adjusted for the weak hind leg and struck from the side.
Sarnai watched the recording twice, paying more attention to the recovery after the missed jump than to the successful one. The final examination showed a sound joint with reduced flexion. The leg would never move exactly like the other three, but it bore her full weight and did not appear painful. Sarnai photographed the healed scar, recorded the pattern of dark bars along the cat’s flanks and tail, and fitted a lightweight VHF collar designed to release after roughly a year.
“There are no guarantees,” she told Elias as the sedative began to wear off. “The collar tells us where she goes. It does not keep her alive.”
“I know.”
This time Sarnai let the words stand. They drove to Black Ridge before sunrise the next morning. Temuulen took the truck only as far as the hard ground below the station; from there, they carried the covered transport crate on a frame between him and Sarnai. Elias walked behind with Nora.
The sky was clear enough to show stars over the western hills, and the temperature hovered near eighteen degrees. At the lower slope, Elias stopped beside the rusted stake for Plot T-19. He had removed the cord weeks earlier, but the stake remained because frozen ground had held it fast. Now the thaw after the storm had loosened the soil.
Elias gripped the metal with both hands and pulled until it came free with a dark plug of earth. Nora took it from him without being asked and slid it through the straps of his pack.
They climbed to a sheltered shelf above a maze of rocks and abandoned marmot burrows. Camera traps had recorded adult Pallas’s cats using the area, but no active den was close enough for the release to intrude. Sarnai positioned the crate so its door faced the rocks, then everyone retreated twenty yards and she pulled the release line.
Elias had imagined this moment too often. In some versions, F-27 vanished before he could focus his eyes. In others, she paused and recognized him in a way no wild cat had reason to do. He distrusted both pictures now.
The crate door lifted. For almost a minute, nothing happened. Then a broad gray face appeared in the dark opening. F-27 tested the air with her nose. She stepped out low, belly close to the ground, and froze beside the crate.
The wind pressed her dense fur flat along one side and lifted it on the other. Her head turned toward each sound: a pika calling under stone, Nora’s sleeve brushing her coat, the faint click of Temuulen’s camera. Her eyes passed across the four humans without settling on any of them.
F-27 took three slow steps. The right hind leg swung outward, but it held. At the first boulder she stopped, gathered herself, and jumped. Her rear paws landed together on the ledge.
She remained there long enough for Elias to see the healed leg beneath the fur. Then she slipped down the far side and became a gray movement among gray rocks. The receiver in Sarnai’s hand began to pulse. The signal moved uphill, paused once, and continued toward the broken crest.
F-27 did not look back.
Elias kept watching the place where she had disappeared. The old disappointment rose before he could prevent it—not because he expected gratitude, he told himself, but because nearly six weeks of disciplined distance had still occupied a human heart. Knowing the correct explanation did not stop the loss.
Nora stood beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched through their coats. She did not say the cat had loved him. She did not tell him he had done the right thing. She simply stayed until Sarnai lowered the receiver.
“She has entered a burrow,” Sarnai said. “We leave now.”
Elias nodded. He turned away first.
On the descent, Nora slipped on loose stone. His usual impulse was to catch her arm and tell her where to put her feet. Instead, he planted his walking pole and asked, “Do you want my hand?”
She looked at him, surprised enough to be irritated. Then she held out her hand.
Back at the station, Elias packed the black notebooks, two shirts, Helen’s photograph, and less than half the field equipment he had once considered essential. He gave Sarnai a written schedule for the unfinished seed work. He did not give her instructions about F-27 beyond the monitoring plan they had already agreed on.
Nora found him at the east window that evening. Black Ridge was invisible in the dark.
“The flight can still be changed,” she said.
“It won’t need to be.”
“You’re coming home?”
Elias ran a thumb over the worn leather on his binoculars. “For the winter. For the procedure. After that, I want us to decide what comes next without pretending only one of us gets a vote.”
Nora folded her arms. “That sounded almost reasonable.”
“Don’t spread it around.”
Her laugh was brief and wet at the edges. Elias had not heard it in the station before.
For the next fourteen months, F-27’s collar drew an irregular map through forty square miles of steppe. She survived her first winter. She shifted dens after a fox entered her hunting range, crossed a frozen basin, and established a smaller territory north of Black Ridge the following spring. The signal sometimes vanished for days inside rock, then returned.
Elias followed the reports from Boise. He did not call Sarnai between scheduled updates, though the restraint cost him sleep more than once.
In November of the next year, the collar transmitted from the same point for three straight days. Sarnai hiked in expecting to find a dead cat. Instead, she found the collar beneath an overhang, its release seam open exactly as designed. Fresh Pallas’s cat tracks led away through a dusting of snow.
After that, there was no signal to follow…
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