Every Breath(71)

“Did you stay at Hwange until then?”

“I did.”

“But then you left.”

“How did you know that?”

“I looked for you,” she said. “Before putting the letter in the mailbox, I mean.”

“When?”

“In 2006. After I divorced from Josh, probably a year after my first visit to Carolina Beach. I remembered where you worked and I contacted the lodge. Other places, too. But I couldn’t find you.”

He seemed to contemplate that, his eyes unfocused for a few seconds. She had the sense there was something he wanted to say but couldn’t. Instead, after a few beats, he offered a gentle smile. “I wish I’d known,” he said finally. “And I wish you would have.”

Me too, she thought. “What happened? I thought you liked working at Hwange.”

“I did,” he said. “But I was there for a long time and it was time to move on.”

“Why?”

“There was new management at the camp, and a lot of the other guides had left, including my friend Romy. He’d retired a couple of years earlier. The lodge was going through a transition period, and with Andrew off to college, there was really nothing to keep me in the area. I thought that if I wanted to start over someplace else, it was better sooner rather than later. So I sold my place in Bulawayo and moved to Botswana. I’d found a job at a camp that sounded interesting.”

So he went to Botswana after all, she thought.

“They all sound interesting to me.”

“A good number of them actually are,” he agreed. “Did you ever get to go on safari? You had said that you wanted to one day.”

“Not yet. I’m still hoping to, though.” Then, circling back to what he’d said earlier and remembering how many camps she’d contacted, she asked: “What was so interesting about the camp in Botswana? Was it well known?”

“Not at all. It’s more of a middle-tier camp. The accommodations are a bit rustic. Bagged lunches instead of prepared meals, things like that. And the game can be fairly sporadic. But I’d heard about the lions in the area. Or rather, a specific pride of them.”

“I thought you saw lions all the time.”

“I did,” he said. “But not like this. I’d heard a rumor that the lions had learned to hunt and bring down elephants.”

“How could lions bring down an elephant?”

“I had no idea, and I didn’t believe it at the time, but eventually I met a guide who used to work there. He told me that while he hadn’t actually seen an attack, he’d come across an elephant carcass the following day. And it was clear to him that lions had been feasting most of the night.”

She squinted at him doubtfully. “Maybe the elephant was sick and the lions came across it?”

“That’s what I thought initially. People always talk about the lion as being the king of the jungle—even that Disney movie The Lion King played up the mythology—but I knew from experience that it wasn’t true. Elephants are, and always have been, the king of the bush. They’re massive and scary, truly dominant. In the hundreds of times I watched an elephant approach lions, the lions always backed off. But if the guide was right, I knew it was something I had to see for myself. The thought of it became something of an obsession. And again, with Andrew gone, I thought, why not?”

He took a swallow of wine before going on. “When I started working there, I learned that none of the guides had ever seen it, but they all believed it, too. Because every now and then, a carcass would turn up. If it was happening, it was incredibly rare, which made sense. Even if a pride of lions could take down an elephant, they would undoubtedly prefer easier prey. And during my first few years there, that’s all I ever saw. The main source of food for the pride was what I’d always seen in the past—impalas, warthogs, zebras, and giraffes. I never encountered a single elephant carcass. Halfway through my third year there, though, a drought set in. A bad one. It lasted months, and a lot of the regular game either died off or began migrating toward the Okavango Delta. Meanwhile, the lions were still around, and gradually grew more desperate. Then late one afternoon, while on a game drive, I saw it happen.”

“You did?”

He nodded, retreating into the past. She watched as he swirled his wineglass before going on. “It was a smaller elephant, not one of the big bulls, but the lions separated it from the herd and went to work. One at a time, almost like a military operation. One of them attacking the leg, another jumping on the elephant’s back, while the others surrounded it. Just sort of wearing the elephant down over time. It wasn’t violent, either. It was very calm, very methodical. The pride was cautious and the entire attack probably took thirty minutes. And then, when the elephant was weakening, they ganged up, several attacking at once. The elephant went down, and it didn’t take long after that.”

He shrugged, his voice growing softer. “I know you might feel bad for the elephant. But by the end, I was awed by the lions. It was certainly one of the most memorable experiences of my guiding career.”

“Unbelievable,” she said. “Were you alone when it happened?”

“No,” he said. “There were six guests in the jeep. I think one of them ended up selling the video footage he took to CNN. I never saw it, but over the next few years, I heard from a lot of people who did. The lodge where I was working became very popular for a while after that. But eventually the rains resumed and the drought ended. The game returned, and the lions went back to easier prey. I never saw it happen again, nor did I see another carcass. I heard that there was another occurrence some years later, but by then I was no longer there.”