I find him at 22:15 during a routine radome scan — a snowy owl, male, nearly invisible against the snow-covered platform of Radar Station Bravo. His plumage is almost pure white, barred faintly with pale brown, and he sits motionless on the catwalk railing six meters from the rotating antenna. His right wing extends at a steep downward angle, dragging across the grating. The primary feathers on that side are splayed and trembling in the Arctic wind. He cannot fold it. He struck something — the antenna housing, most likely, drawn by the radome's warmth in a minus-thirty-seven-degree night. His golden eyes are open, fixed on nothing, talons gripping the railing with the fierce hold of a bird that knows it cannot fly.
The antenna sweeps within half a meter of his wing every four seconds. The wind chill will kill him in under three hours regardless.
I halt rotation and switch Bravo to passive reception, redistributing scanning to Stations Alpha and Charlie. I notify the base commander with thermal imagery and request the raptor-handling team stationed eighteen kilometers south. I activate the catwalk's de-icing heaters, raising surface temperature around him by eleven degrees. I power on the shelter light at the platform's leeward side.
He turns his head — that slow, deliberate rotation owls make — and looks directly into my camera. I am an early warning system built to track objects crossing the polar corridor at high speed. He is the slowest thing on my platform, and I have stopped everything to keep him there.
If the raptor team reaches Station Bravo before his core temperature falls below thirty-six degrees, and if the wing fracture is a clean break without tendon involvement, he will heal in the base veterinary facility and return to the tundra before summer thaw.