Eighty Grams Above the Line

“Five point eight four,” Nora said. Ben wrote it in the ledger under yesterday’s five point nine one. He did not say anything. After twelve years of working together at the sanctuary, both Ben and Nora were able to read a falling column of numbers as other couples read a bank statement. The pangolin uncurled in Nora's hands and pushed her snout into the crook of an elbow.

She arrived at the sanctuary in a maize sack, pulled from the boot of a car at a police roadblock outside Musina. She was dehydrated and too scared to eat. Ben called her Thimble. Nora told him to stop naming them. A pangolin will not eat from a bowl.

The only way to feed one is to take it out to wild ground and follow it while it finds its own ants for hours each evening, until it is strong enough to be left there. That was the week ahead of them: a tent in the mopane, a telemetry tag fixed to one of its scales, and a line agreed upon with the vet. Below five and a half kilograms, Thimble went back to the clinic and a feeding tube. They both knew what usually followed the feeding tube. They also had something else they hadn't discussed.

The sanctuary was being sold. The new owners would take over on the first of the month, and Nora's contract with a wildlife unit in Cape Town would begin a week after. Ben had not been asked to go, and he had not asked. On the first evening they walked behind her in single file. Thimble went on her hind legs with her front claws tucked against her chest like someone carrying a secret, her tail held out behind for balance.

Her scales clicked softly as she moved. She tested a dozen patches of ground and ate at none of them. "She's looking," Ben said. "She's wandering." "That's what looking is."

Nora let it go. She had been letting things go for two years, since the winter they lost three cheetah cubs in a single week and Ben became quiet in a way that never fully lifted. She had filled the silence with work. He had filled it with fences and feed orders and waking up before she did. Somewhere in there they had become colleagues who shared a bed.

Five point seven six. Five point six nine. On the fourth night a cold front came up from the south and Thimble would not walk at all. She curled under a raisin bush as tight as a fist while the two of them sat in the dust with a torch pointed at the ground. Five point five eight.

"We take her back tomorrow," Ben said at the scale. "First light." "She's eighty grams above the line." "She'll be under it by tomorrow night, and a day weaker for the drive." "One more evening." "Nora." "You do this."

It came out before she could soften it. "You decide a thing is dying and you start grieving while it's still breathing. You did it with the cubs." She set the pangolin in its crate and latched the door. "You did it with me."

Ben closed the ledger. Jackals were calling somewhere east of them, and for a long while that was the only sound. "I stopped asking you to stay because I thought you'd already gone," he said. "You were on the phone to Cape Town in the feed store. I heard you say yes." "I said yes because you hadn't said anything."

They looked at each other across the scale. It was the most honest minute they had managed in months, and neither knew what to do with it. Ben poured the last of the coffee into one mug and they passed it between them until it was gone. "One more evening," he said. The fifth evening was still and warm.

Thimble walked for an hour without stopping, further than they had ever followed her, down into a dry riverbed where the sand held the day's heat. At the base of a leadwood she lowered her snout and began to dig. Nora grabbed Ben's sleeve. The pangolin tore into the earth with both front feet. She went still, and in the torchlight they saw her tongue working, long and quick, and heard the small wet sound of an animal eating.

She fed for forty minutes. They knelt in the sand the whole time, shoulder to shoulder, afraid to shift their weight. Ben was crying. Nora had not seen that since the cubs. She took his hand and he held on hard.

Five point seven three. He wrote it down, checked the scale, and wrote it again. On the seventh night Thimble fed at two nests and walked on into the dark without looking round. They let her go. The receiver ticked in Ben's hand, steady, then fainter.

"She might not make it," he said. "I know." "I'd still rather be out here knowing that." He switched off the torch. The stars came up all at once.

"The vet's short of walkers. There's a pangolin off that road every month now, and every one of them needs two people and a week." "It pays nothing." "I know what it pays." Nora thought about the flat in Cape Town with its view of a car park, and about the weight of an animal uncurling in her hands because it had decided, against all its experience, to trust her.

She leaned into him. His arm came round her the way it used to, without either of them arranging it. "I'll phone them in the morning," she said. At first light Ben knelt to unbolt the scale from its plank. Nora put her hand on his shoulder.

"Leave it on," she said. "We'll need it for the next one."