Mika knelt on the floating dock at first light, the pup warm against her ribs. Three years of failed recalls sat behind her. This pup still answered her call. But Mika did not know the sound a weaned pup made for its own mother — and without it, her voice was only noise dressed up as meaning. She set the brass listening tube against the planks and uncorked it. The funnel caught the slap of water and the far cries of the colony down the shore. She had built the dock here for this exact reason. Close enough to hear. Far enough not to spook them. For hours she listened and wrote nothing. Then a yearling surfaced near a cow and made a sound Mika had never logged — two short barks, a rising whine, a click at the end. The cow answered with the same shape, inverted. Mika's pencil shook. She wrote it four times to be sure. She climbed back to the shelf above the tideline where her borrowed research waited — dolphin pages, dog recall charts, imprinting notes pinned under stones. She slid the new transcription between them. The gap in her method had a shape now. She could practice it. She could teach it. Mika walked back to the pup and tried the call, soft, two barks and a whine. The pup lifted her broad-snouted head, scarred whiskers twitching, and answered. Not Mika's old call. The new one. The training had to start over from today.

By the second morning after the restart, the pup turned her head from the fish. Mika set the shallow wooden bowl on the dock, ice crusting its rim, fresh mash inside. The pup sniffed once and looked away. Mika's chest tightened. A weaning pup could not skip meals long. She dragged the tally board from the stone hut where she had been sleeping near the fire. She notched every refusal. Time of day. Tide. Wind. Which call she had used before offering food. By dusk the bone counters showed a pattern she did not want to see — the pup refused every time Mika gave the new call before the bowl. Mika sat back on her heels. She had bound the new sound to recall, then used it at feeding too. The pup was waiting to be called out to water, not fed. The food sat wrong inside the meaning. She carried the bowl down to the waterline. She did not call. She just set it where the wet stones met the dry and waited. The pup humped forward on her own, dipped her snout, and ate. Mika marked the board with a shaking hand. The method held — but now every feeding had to happen at the sea's edge, and the line between call and shore was thinner than she had planned.

By the third dawn of shore feeding, the gulls had learned. They came in low, screaming, before Mika could set the bowl down. One snatched a strip of fish from the wet stones while the pup was still humping forward. Mika kicked sand at them and watched the pup flinch back toward the surf, hungry and confused. She stopped using the bowl. She dragged a heavy metal trough down to the tideline and chained it to a driven stake, sloped sides facing the water so only the pup's snout could reach in. She packed it with cold meat from the ice store. The gulls circled, but the trough's lip held them off the food. It was not enough. By midday a larger bird drove the pup off the trough entirely. Mika built through the afternoon — sturdy beams, stretched canvas walls, an open frame around the trough so the pup could enter from the sea but the sky was closed off above. She raised a tall watch rig beside it, a wooden tower with a rotating mirror to flash light across the shallows and scare the wings off. "You can't sit up there all night." Asha Veil stood at the dune line, hands in her coat pockets. She had walked the coast to find Mika. "I've watched you three years. You're thinner this time." She paused. "I'll take the second watch. I don't sleep much." Mika did not argue. She climbed the tower at dusk. Asha climbed at moonrise. The pup ate from the sheltered trough, untouched, three feedings in a row. The shore was hers again — but the cost was clear now. The feeding ground needed guarding, and Mika was no longer doing this alone.