The sun rose over the Karakorum mountains slowly, as if reluctant, prying open its red, inflamed eye above the jagged line of the ridge. Light spilled across the desert like pus, painting the gray scree and sparse wormwood bushes the color of old blood. The Pallas's cat sat motionless on a boulder, like a statue weathered by the winds of millennia.

He hadn't slept that night. The hunt had failed. Twice he had pounced on pikas, and twice the damned creatures had slipped into their burrows a fraction of a second before his pawheavy and precise as a blacksmith's hammercould snatch them. His stomach gnawed and achedthe dull, throbbing pain of hunger. Age was catching up with him. He was entering his seventh year; for a Pallas's cat, the deep autumn of life.

"Bad," he seemed to whisper to the wind, which ruffled the thick fur on his cheeks. The cat didn't move, only flattened his earsround, oddly placed almost on the sides of his head, like an owl's. He was listening to the desert.

And the desert answered.

First, he caught a scent. Alien, metallic, burnt. Then he heard a sounda strained roar, like the cough of a sick beast. The Pallas's cat had never seen a vehicle, but the fear of the unknown was wired into him deeper than the instinct of hunger. He flowed off the boulder, pressed himself into the earth, merging with it through the color of his coatfaded ochre with ash-gray undertones.

From behind a ridge of rocks, lurching like a wounded yak, a battered military truck burst forth. It roared, bouncing over hummocks, and in its bed, a cage clattered and banged against the side, chains rattling. The truck stopped about a hundred meters from the hidden cat. Doors slammed. Two men got outin camouflage, holding shiny objects. The cat didn't know they were rifles, but he knew for certain: he needed to stay as far from these creatures as the edge of the world.

They talked loudly, laughed. Then one opened the cage. Squinting in the unfamiliar sun, He emerged.

Another Pallas's cat. Young. Translucently thin, fur matted and patchy, a white film clouding his left eye. His coat hung in clumps, he trembled constantly, but in his good eye burned the same unquenchable, wild fire as in the old cat's. The man prodded the prisoner in the side with his rifle barrel, urging him on. The young one bared his fangsterribly, silentlyand stumbled away into the desert. The men got back into the truck and drove off, dissolving into the heat haze like evil spirits.

The old Pallas's cat didn't move. He lay flat behind his rock, watching. The stranger, staggering, made it to the nearest patch of shade under a cliff and collapsed there, panting heavily, his swollen tongue hanging out.

The day crawled across the desert like a sated snake. The sun climbed to its zenith and began torturing the earth. The air shimmered and melted. The old cat, accustomed to thirst, simply lay in his den under a rock, breathing slowly and sparingly. But the young one he thrashed. He would get up, take a few steps, fall, get up again. He tried to dig in the sand, seeking moisture, but the sand slid back, dry and dead. The eye with the film was completely swollen shut; the good one had glazed over.

The old one watched with indifference. That was the law. The weak die. A stranger, even more so.

But when the sun passed its zenith, something happened that the old one didn't expect. The young one, now crawling on his belly, approached the old cat's den. He didn't see the old cat, couldn't smell him over the stench of his own rotting, dying body. He was just looking for shade. The last refuge.

The old cat's instinct screamed: intruder! enemy! rival! The fur on his nape bristled, a hiss erupted from his throata warning like the sound of air escaping a punctured tire. The young one froze, lifted his clouded face, but didn't snarl back. He only let out a plaintive, almost puppy-like whine and dropped his nose onto the hot sand at the entrance, right at the old one's paws.

Something inside the old cat wavered. He had seen many deaths. He had sent hundreds of pikas and gerbils to their end. But this submission, this refusal to fight This wasn't right. A Pallas's cat doesn't give up. A Pallas's cat fights to the end.

Slowly, with immense caution, he emerged from the shade. The young one didn't even stir. The old one circled him, sniffed. The smell was terriblerot, metal, fear. And then, gathering his last strength, the young one licked his paw. With a tongue rough and dry as sandpaper.

The old one froze. In his small, ancient mind, a heavy process was underway. Finally, he made a decision. He turned and, without looking back, rana heavy, economical lope, low to the ground. He ran not from an enemy, but toward a destination known only to him.

To the old, dry riverbed, where under the largest rock, even in the fiercest heat, a puddle of bitter, salty water remained. Fifteen hundred of his cat-length steps there. And the same back.

He returned half an hour later, as the shadows grew long. The young one was no longer breathing, but his one good eye was open. The old one approached and stopped beside him. Clamped in his jaws was a bloody scrapall that remained of a lizard he had miraculously caught on the way back. To place the kill beside the dead? Pointless.

He sat down next to him, watching the sunset. The sun was dying in a crimson haze, and the old cat felt that, along with it, something inside his soul, hardened over long years of solitude, was also dying. He didn't understand compassion; he had no words for it. But in his chest, beneath the thick fur, there was a raw ache, just like the gnawing emptiness of hunger in his belly. Only the hunger was familiar. This was not.

At night, the jackals came. The old Pallas's cat didn't leave. He sat on the boulder, guarding the body of the one who had dared to lick his paw. The jackals circled, eyes gleaming, but didn't dare approach. This old, stocky cat with the flat face and the wild eyes was terrible in his silent fury.

And at dawn, as the east began to pale with the first hint of blue, the old Pallas's cat finally rose. He didn't look back. He went to hunt. Life went on. But now, in his heavy, unhurried step, there was something new. A kind of unbearable, aching weightthe weight carried by those who once tried to defy the ancient law of the desert: the law of eternal solitude.