Mavi was found on a Tuesday in February, on the fence-line of a livestock farm on the dome's southern edge. The farmer who called it in had been driving past the same kink in the wire for two days before he noticed her — a young female, maybe eighteen months old, lying flat in the grass with a strand of bonnox fencing wrapped twice around her right hind leg.
By the time our team got there with the dart kit, she'd stopped struggling. We weren't sure if that was good news or bad.
It was good news. She was alive, dehydrated, exhausted and very angry, but alive. The wire had cut through skin and into the muscle of her hock. It hadn't reached the bone. Dr. Naledi Khumalo cut her free in the field, sedated her in the bakkie, and we drove her — slowly, on the gravel road, with one of the volunteers holding her head against a folded blanket — back to the rehab enclosure outside Parys.
The first two weeks were about not losing her.
A leopard with a wound like that is fighting infection, fluid loss, and her own stress response all at once. We kept her quiet. We kept the lights low. We stitched, drained, re-stitched. Naledi changed the dressing every other day for the first ten days, then every third day, then twice a week. Mavi stopped hissing at the gloves around day twelve. That was the first day we exhaled.
The middle of her stay was the boring middle of any rehabilitation: chicken quarters and the occasional rabbit, weighed before and weighed after; gait videos every Sunday; a slow expansion of her enclosure as she could trust the leg again. By week six she was climbing the dead acacia we'd dragged in for her. By week ten she was killing the live rabbits we released with her on the two-yearly licensed-prey training, cleanly and quickly, the way a healthy leopard is supposed to.
The last three weeks were about us, not her. We had to find the right release site. We had to clear it with the landowner — in this case, a farmer thirty kilometres north of where she was caught, with no livestock in the relevant camp and a clean two-thousand-hectare block backing onto the rim itself. Her tracking collar was fitted under sedation eight days before release. Battery: 24 months. Drop-off: programmed for late winter 2028.
Release morning was the third of May. Five-fifteen a.m., still dark. Two of us, Naledi and the farmer, the soft-release crate in the back of the bakkie, no talking. We opened the gate and stepped well back. She didn't come out for nine minutes. When she did, she didn't run. She walked — slowly, twice paused to sniff, once paused to look back at us — and then she was gone into the grass in that low, fluid leopard way that makes you feel like you've imagined the whole thing.
We have collar pings from her every six hours since. She has stayed within twelve kilometres of the release site, and as of this dispatch she has eaten twice — once a duiker, once a young warthog, both confirmed by ground checks.
She is the fourth leopard released into the dome by the trust in three years. We name very few of our patients. We named this one because the volunteer who sat with her on that long drive home was a woman called Mavi too. The farmer asked us to keep the location off the record and we will.
If you would like to support our rehabilitation work — fuel for the bakkie, suturing kits, the next collar — find us at the contact form. Every rand goes on the next animal in. There is always a next animal in.