Among the ruins of a village in Northern Ukraine, quiet and long in dilapidation, houses and arusted husk of an old car indicated that fact, a grey female cat and her three kittens played the waiting game. A tiresome game, waiting around the homestead for their human caretaker to return . He never did, for he joined 50,000 others in departing the village en masse over 30 years ago. Impatient, the grey feline mother and children had to fend for themselves.

Alone or in unison, the grey feline family ventured outside their ramshackle house on the village outskirts to hunt for their meals. Each day, they flushed out rats, from the overgrown green fields, from the old abandoned school. The same luck wasn’t travelling with them one day, when they wandered into a cattle barn. There were fewer rats to be found, but a lone owl in the rafters found the 3 cats, disturbed, rather angry at those intruders. Awkward move. Walking into owl territory.

One little grey kitten broke away from the rest of her family, venturing into an open field alone, for the first—and only time. A winged shadow swiftly descended on her from its rounds in the sky. Exposed prey for a famished eagle.

Over the decades, the forest crept into the village. With the former human world depopulated, nature’s as prolific as the black pen in this writer’s hand. Botanical green dominated everything. Green light for the animals of the wild to stroll in, some once assumed by scientists to be extinct.

Uninterrupted, the food chain goes on. Eagles fly from rooftops hunting snakes in the grass, black beetle hunts for worms in the soft dirt, timber wolves hunt for boars in the night-time woods [ when not searching for a mate ], bears scrounge for anything, moving or not—

Elks and deer graze, buffalo grow in number, horses gallop on former farm land and roads once frequented by cars.

Most people the globe over expected a post-disaster wasteland, covered in radioactive fall-out like lethal snow. A desert formed from a reactor core explosion. Nuclear bombardment versus nature. Hands-down winner—nature.

Unsafe for humanity. Unforeseen paradise for animals. Chernobyl.