Part 6
The leg held her weight, but it did not bend like the left one. Elias leaned close to the screen. The old scar itself was hidden by fur. The shortened stride was not. Neither was the pattern on the flank: two narrow bars, a gap, then three bars angled toward the belly.
Sarnai moved between the release photograph and the new frame until the markings aligned.
“F-27,” Elias said.
His voice failed on the letter. Nora pressed both hands over her mouth. Sarnai sat back, one palm flat on the table, and looked toward the dark window rather than at either of them. Elias had seen her treat animals through blood, cold, and bad outcomes without wasting motion.
Now tears ran soundlessly down both sides of Sarnai’s face. The next clip showed the female pausing beside the old outside run. One kitten swatted at a loose reed. Another disappeared under the shed and came out with dust on its whiskers.
F-27 did not approach the station door or search for food. She used the shade, waited until each youngster was in view, and led them away.
Elias replayed the clip once. F-27 was alive, able to hunt, and raising three young. He closed the release photograph and left the new image on the screen.
Sarnai closed the laptop. “They may come back tonight. We should move to the southern camp and leave this building quiet.”
Elias looked around at the steel cabinet of maps, the boxes of specimens, and the cot already made for him and Nora. They had planned two days of sorting and expected to remain until morning.
“Take only the release records and what is already packed,” he said. “The rest can wait.”
“Some of the notebooks may be damp by spring,” Sarnai warned.
Elias glanced toward the shed. For most of his life, paper had been how he made a living thing hold still long enough to understand it.
“Then some of them get damp,” he said.
They loaded quietly. Temuulen carried the sealed archive boxes. Nora packed food without allowing metal cups to knock together. Sarnai placed a second camera inside the main station window, angled toward the shed, then turned off every light.
Before they left, a wind rose from the north. It moved through the grass in long bands. Elias stood behind the east window one last time, his binoculars hanging unused from his neck. A gray shape appeared beside the generator shed.
F-27 emerged from the foundation gap and stopped in the open. At five years old, she was larger than Elias remembered, though the coat exaggerated her size. Old weather had roughened one ear. Her face remained grave and watchful.
Three kittens came after her. They were past the round helplessness of infancy but still awkward in their thick coats. The smallest tried to jump onto a stone, slid backward, and began nosing the ground where it landed.
Nora made a sound that was almost a laugh. Sarnai touched one finger to her lips. F-27 lifted her head toward the window.
Elias’s hand moved to the binoculars by instinct. He stopped before raising them. At twenty yards, glass would give him detail, not closeness. He let them hang and stepped half a pace away from the window so his outline would not fill it.
For several seconds, the cat faced the station. Her low ears turned toward the old frame creaking in the wind. She could have been watching the reflection of the sky or measuring the distance to cover. Then one kitten wandered too far, and her attention left the building at once.
She crossed to the youngster, touched its shoulder with her nose, and moved toward Black Ridge. The other two followed. The smallest remained beside the stone until F-27 stopped and waited. No call passed between them that Elias could hear.
The kitten ran after her. Four gray bodies slipped through the grass, reached the first broken rocks, and disappeared one by one. F-27 went last. She did not turn back.
Beside him, Nora lowered her head. On his other side, Sarnai wiped her face with the heel of her palm and began checking that the station had been left safe.
They walked out without opening the back door. At the weather mast, Elias noticed a fresh length of blue cord securing the new sensor cable. The knot was sound, but a six-inch tail fluttered where an animal could nose beneath it. He took a small pair of scissors from the tool case and trimmed the tail close, then put the loose piece in his pocket.
Nora waited by the truck instead of telling him to hurry. Temuulen drove south as the last light spread over Black Ridge. The ridge soon became what it had been on most days of Elias’s life there—stone, grass, and distances that concealed more than they revealed.
Nora’s hand rested open on the seat between them. Elias placed his hand over it before the station disappeared from view.