Part 5
For almost four years, absence was the only honest answer Elias could give when anyone asked what became of F-27. There were possible sightings: a broad female on a winter camera twelve miles east, a track with an uneven right print near Black Ridge, two blurred frames that Nora insisted looked promising. None showed enough of the face or flank pattern for Sarnai to confirm an identity. Elias learned to say, “It could be her,” and stop there.
His own life became less easy to summarize. The heart procedure in Boise steadied the worst of the rhythm problem, but medication and age imposed limits he resented. He rented a small house nine minutes from Nora instead of moving into her guest room. On his first Thanksgiving home, he lasted through dinner and nearly left while everyone cleared the table.
Then he saw Nora alone at the sink, washing the roasting pan Helen had used, and picked up a towel. They spoke little that evening. The next year, Nora asked him to make the gravy.
Elias spent part of each summer in Mongolia, never through winter and never without a return ticket booked before he left. He helped redesign field plots with biodegradable markers, trained students to close old sites, and became tedious about counting every length of cord that went out and came back. The rest of the year he worked in a university herbarium, where the plants stayed dead, labeled, and exactly where he placed them.
Nora did not forgive him all at once. Sometimes she brought up Helen at an inconvenient moment, and sometimes he answered a question she had not asked because it was safer. Their progress was made of smaller corrections. He learned to call when a flight changed. She learned that a six-week field season was not the same as disappearance.
One February, Nora brought over the last unopened box from Helen’s sewing room. Elias recognized his wife’s handwriting on the lid and reached for a knife. Then he stopped and asked Nora whether she wanted to open it with him. Inside were fabric swatches, three unfinished birthday cards, and a bundle of letters Elias had sent from Mongolia before satellite calls became ordinary.
Nora read none of them aloud. Elias did not explain the man he had been when he wrote them. They sat on the floor, making two piles and changing their minds whenever they needed to. The box took an entire afternoon.
Five years after the storm at Black Ridge, Sarnai called him on an August morning. Her face filled the screen above the station desk he remembered, though the wall behind her had acquired a long crack.
“The foundation shifted again,” she said. “The old station closes at the end of September. The new building is ready near the southern camp.”
Elias had known the closure was coming. Still, he looked past her at the iron stove, the plant press, and the east window where the eagle had first entered his binoculars.
“What happens to the generator shed?” he asked.
“We remove the equipment. The shell may remain until spring, if it survives. Your original transect maps are in the steel cabinet. I can ship them.”
He heard what she was not asking. “You want me to come sort them.”
“I want you to decide which maps matter before one of my students decides they all do.”
After the call, Elias opened an airline website and stared at the route through Seoul and Ulaanbaatar. The old habit would have been to buy a ticket and inform Nora later. Instead, he called her.
“Sarnai is closing the station,” he said. “I would like to go for the handover. I would also like you to come, but I don’t know whether you want to.” Nora was quiet long enough that he thought the call had dropped.
“I want to see the place that beat me in every argument for nine years,” she said.
“It had an unfair advantage.”
“What was that?”
“No phone service.”
They reached the station in the first week of September, almost five years to the day after Elias had carried F-27 through the snow. The drive north took most of a day. Late-summer grass lay gold against the dark rock, and clouds moved in enormous shadows over the open land.
The station looked smaller to Elias than it had in memory. One side of the porch had dropped two inches. The east window no longer closed without lifting the frame, and the iron stove smoked until Temuulen warmed the chimney with a twist of paper.
Nora walked through the single room without speaking. She touched the scarred table where Elias had kept his notebooks and looked beneath the cot as if some part of the old story might still be hiding there.
“You lived here all winter?” she asked.
“Six of them.”
“I’m angry all over again.”
“That seems fair.”
The generator shed stood twenty yards behind the station. Its outside run had been left in place for occasional emergency rehabilitation, though wind had torn part of the reed screening away. The feeding drawer was rusted shut. Inside, the old den box still sat against the wall with one corner gnawed by rodents.
Sarnai stopped at the threshold. In the dust beside the box were four round paw prints, wider than those of a domestic cat. A second set, much smaller, crossed the first.
“When was anyone last inside?” Elias asked.
“Ten days ago.”
Sarnai crouched without entering and studied the floor. More small prints marked the dirt near a gap where the foundation had pulled away from the wall. A tuft of pale underfur clung to a splinter.
“Manul?” Nora whispered.
“Yes. Female with young, perhaps. They use abandoned structures when they offer a cavity and no people.” Sarnai stood. “We have not slept here this season. The building has been quiet.”
A motion camera had been mounted outside months earlier to document foxes taking rodents around the empty station. Sarnai removed its memory card and carried it to the main room. Elias shut the shed door without latching it, leaving everything as they had found it.
The first hundred recordings showed wind, grass, and an occasional pika crossing too close to the lens. Then, at 3:42 on the previous morning, a gray female Pallas’s cat stepped into the frame.
She was heavy with summer fur, her face broad and alert. Three nearly grown kittens followed her through the gap beneath the shed. One climbed over another. The mother turned, waited until the smallest emerged, and moved them toward the rocks behind the station.
No one in the room spoke as Sarnai advanced the video one frame at a time. The female crossed the open ground with a slight outward swing of the right hind leg. On her flank, five dark markings rose in an uneven ladder beneath the dense coat. Sarnai pulled up the release photographs from five years earlier and set them beside the new image.
“Elias,” she said quietly. “Look at her right leg…”
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