The Lioness(26)

Juma took out his binoculars but remained behind the wheel. So did Muema in the other Land Rover. But the nine Americans all stood on their seats and looked over the sides of the vehicles, the open roofs raised a good two feet above them. Peter got out his Leica and studied the animals through the camera. Reggie was using a twin-lens Rolleiflex that managed to look both like a boxy antique and a complicated tool for an astronaut.

“What are they waiting for?” David asked. “Why are they just standing there on the northern bank?”

“They want to be sure it’s safe,” Katie answered, and Peter watched Juma nod approvingly. “Or as safe as possible. There might be crocodiles in the water. Or a big cat waiting to grab one in all that high grass here on the southern side.” David handed her the binoculars they had brought and, like Juma, she scanned the herd and the water before it.

After Peter had taken a photo, he let the camera hang like a medallion across his chest and reached into his pants pocket for his cigarettes and lighter. He hadn’t smoked since breakfast because his doctor had told him he’d live longer if he stopped. But now that he had taken a picture of the wildebeest massing and all they could do was wait, he grew bored, which was usually when he smoked.

As he was snuffing out the cigarette in the ashtray in the armrest of the door, the crossing began. The animals started to run down the steep bank in three spots, a thunderous, three-column charge that caused the Land Rover to rock gently.

“It’s like an earthquake,” said Terrance.

The northern side of the river grew veiled by dust, but the shallow water, which had been so still a moment ago, began churning as the wildebeest tried to run or dogpaddle across it, some snorting and bellowing, others splashing forward in silence as best they could. Soon the first animals were climbing the southern bank and continuing across the plain, utterly oblivious to the pair of Land Rovers or simply not caring. Only when they were a quarter mile away did they pause: they were eating, Peter realized, calm and content. Little by little, more of the animals joined them.

“Looks like they’re all going to make it,” David said, and Peter couldn’t decide if he was disappointed or relieved. But it didn’t matter, because no sooner had David spoken than everyone in the car saw that he was mistaken. Katie let out an actual, nontheatrical gasp: a lioness had leapt from the high grass no more than twenty feet from where they were parked and pulled a wildebeest from the queue and wrestled it to the ground. The victim kicked his legs into the air for an agonizing half minute, because the lioness hadn’t killed the animal quickly by ripping a hole through his neck. Instead, she wrapped the wildebeest’s whiskered snout—mouth and nose—in her jaws.

“She’s smothering him,” Juma told them. “The animal can’t breathe. He’s suffocating. That’s often how lions do it.”

“Why?” Katie asked.

Juma shrugged. “Lots of reasons. Sometimes so their prey can’t bleat for help. Sometimes so the lion is controlling the horns and the wildebeest can’t defend itself. I’ve seen them kill baby buffaloes that way, too.”

The wildebeest pedaled his legs one last time, a weak and ineffectual poke at the air, and then grew still. The lioness looked down at the dead animal and then up at the humans staring at her from the openings in the roofs of the Land Rovers.

“She looks a little guilty,” Reggie observed. “She looks like we caught her with her paws in the cookie jar.”

“Are you okay, sweetheart?” David asked Katie.

“Yes. I’m fine.”

“At least it was bloodless. She didn’t open the poor bastard’s neck,” her husband said.

Peter shook his head and pointed at the river. His attention had been caught because the zebras at the back of the columns, most still on the grass before the riverbank on the north side, had stopped. But then he saw what they saw: two wildebeest were thrashing in the water, and already it was too late for them, also. Crocodiles were wrestling them into the foam. Whether they died because they drowned or they died because they bled out in the Mara River, they weren’t making the southern bank.



* * *



.?.?.

Now Peter was creeping on his stomach. Sometimes he would use his elbows like feet and drag his body forward with his head raised so he could see both what the men were doing and where he was going: what he could hide behind next and how close he was to the back of Charlie Patton’s tent. But more often Peter was keeping his body as close to the grass as possible, his head down and his nose or his cheeks scraping the savanna. He was inhaling dust through his nostrils. He thought of the snakes that might be watching him. He imagined a cheetah that supposed he was just far enough from the other humans to be safe game.

He would have given a great deal to have had Patton with him right now. Or Reggie Stout. Or Terrance Dutton. He was probably deluding himself, but if he had had even one of those other men with him, as a pair they might have a fighting chance to retrieve a couple of guns and…

And what?

Stout had shot human beings in the war, he supposed. But that was in a very different situation. A battlefield, for God’s sake.

And Charlie Patton? He’d “collected” animals. Not blasted humans.

And Terrance Dutton? He was just an actor. Opinionated and strong-willed, yes, but he still spent his days playing make-believe.