Tiziri.

Between 2013 and 2020, a team fitted sand cats in the Moroccan Sahara with radio collars and measured home ranges of more than three hundred square kilometers in males and more than two hundred fifty in females. On one of those nights, a male covered more than twenty kilometers in a straight line. For the species, that's just walking. Tiziri covers Ghardaïa's upper sector, the most spread out and the farthest from the depot, entirely on foot, from the first stretch to the last.

Her reflective vest is a size too big, and she's never swapped it. Her boots have zip ties instead of laces — a lace works loose halfway through the night, and a zip tie doesn't. Wearing that, she reaches the edge of the sector, which ends in a patch of waste ground littered with rubble, with no pipe running through it. She stops there for a long minute every night, facing the rubble, then turns back. She's never said what she listens for out there, and it's been a while since anyone asked her twice.