Part 7
It was April, six months after Gideon died. The drive took three hours. We disagreed about where the navigation voice put the stress in a town’s name, then missed a turn because Rachel was still demonstrating her version.
Above Talven, blackened patches interrupted the new green. Fresh fencing stood beside burned posts that had been left beyond the enclosure line.
Mack slept on a raised platform with his mane spread in the sun. Bram rested below, one eye open. In the shade, Tansy was reducing a feed sack to long strips.
I looked for May.
Their keeper, Joyce Ellery, took us down a service path toward a smaller yard.
“She’s free to go back to them,” Joyce said. “Usually she spends mornings with the group. Lately she’s been coming here after lunch.”
Beyond two mesh barriers and a roofed gap, a ten-week-old lion cub paced a nursery pen. His legs seemed to have grown ahead of the rest of him. New fur covered a rubbed patch where a collar had been.
Officers in Ohio had removed him from a private home. He’d been kept in a laundry room and fed unsuitable formula. His medical quarantine was finished, but he cried when people disappeared and hit the pen door when something frightened him.
Joyce explained the visual-access trial before Rachel asked. Staff had noticed May resting outside the closed privacy screen. They had proceeded slowly. There was no contact, no obligation for May to stay, and no assumption that her interest would last.
Rachel walked the divider first. She checked the protected gap, the independent door controls, and May’s route back to her siblings.
Joyce answered each question and waited while Rachel checked a latch a second time. I stood behind them with my hands in my pockets.
The cub kept moving while we entered the viewing aisle. When Joyce stepped away from his door, he began to call.
May appeared above us on the slope.
She came down at an unhurried walk and stopped short of the barrier. The cub crouched and hissed once. May lay down.
Joyce stayed where she was. Rachel took out the little paper notebook she still used near animal rooms.
“How much has she done this?”
“Today makes four days. Twenty minutes sometimes. Once nearly two hours. Nobody calls her over.”
“And food?”
“Both eating normally.”
Rachel wrote. Through the lower mesh, I could see the pale mark on May’s hind foot. It was larger now, stretched over a grown lioness’s toe.
“Any trouble with the group?” Rachel asked.
“Mack calls for her occasionally. She goes when she’s ready. We aren’t taking her out of the group to do this.”
The cub crossed part of his pen, halted, then came the rest of the way. He lay beside the inner barrier.
On her side of the protected gap, May edged nearer and set a forepaw against the mesh.
Rachel turned the notebook so I could read it.
“Female chose to approach. Lay alongside cub. Calling ceased.”
She offered me the pen. Beneath her entry, I wrote, “Both routes away remained clear.”
Joyce took the notebook when Rachel handed it over. We stayed beside her without speaking.
Mack called from the main habitat. May lifted her head, rose, and stretched. She went halfway up the slope before turning toward the nursery.
The cub woke and made a brief, thin complaint.
May came back. She circled once and lowered herself beside the divider again. Another call came from her brother’s enclosure. The passage behind her remained open.
She tucked the marked hind foot beneath her body. Her forepaw stayed against the steel.
Across the gap, the cub put his nose opposite it and slept.