The Lioness(27)

And as for Peter himself, he’d shot deer and elk, but never had it crossed his mind that someday he would want (or need) to aim a rifle at another person. He thought he would be capable of pulling the trigger, but only because the men who had descended upon the camp had murdered a couple of rangers and Juma. But had he the aim? He hadn’t been hunting in three years. Who could say what remained of his marksmanship. He had expected that his first day with Charlie Patton would be nothing but target practice. The second day, Charlie might let him shoot a zebra. That was Charlie’s plan, at any rate. Shoot something easy. Something that trusted humans. Something not likely to get them killed flushing it out from the brush if he only wounded it. By the third day, with any luck, he would be reacquainted with the feel of a rifle and more comfortable with the light in the savanna: because the light here was different from Montana, that was clear. Good Lord, he’d seen a full rainbow, horizon to horizon, the other day, the sky behind it the deep, flat, beautiful gray of a thunderhead. An hour before, the sky had been cloudless, a robin’s-egg blue.

And now he was at the back of Charlie Patton’s tent. The interlopers had finished looting the dining tent, which meant soon they would be ordering the staff to disassemble whatever they needed (or wanted) from the guest tents. He heard them no more than forty-five or fifty feet away. He pulled up two of the spikes that pinned the canvas to the ground and slid underneath it. He saw the cot and he saw Charlie’s bag. He didn’t see any of the man’s rifles. But there on top of the camp table was the .38. The Smith & Wesson pistol. It was beside the cot, which meant he had to crawl underneath the mosquito netting. He caught his elbow and then his boot in it, but soon he had the gun. Much to his relief, it was loaded. He thought he might see if the hunter had a box of bullets in the tent too when one of the Russians or Ukrainians or whatever the hell they were started to unzip the tent flap. He collapsed behind the cot, buying himself at best another minute or two before he was discovered, wondering whether he had a prayer in hell even with the pistol in his possession. What was he going to do, shoot the guy? He’d simply be massacred by the others when he started to flee. And he couldn’t try and sneak out the back of the tent on his belly, because he would have to move the mosquito netting first.

But then he heard someone calling into the tent, and Peter once again was left alone. Whoever had been there had just turned around and left to supervise or take on some other task. Peter closed his eyes and, though he hadn’t set foot in a church since his second marriage, said a small prayer of thanks in his head. Then he worked his way beneath the netting and underneath the back flap of the tent. He saw a lone acacia in one direction and thorn brush with some kind of thick tree with leaves and branches in another. He tucked the pistol into the back of his khakis, the grip against his spine, and crawled toward the thorn brush and that fat tree: it would give him more cover than the single acacia. If someone saw him, he hadn’t a chance. Best case, they’d yell for him to stop. Worst case, they’d shoot him as easily as they might a solitary Thomson’s gazelle.

But he made it. He was sweating and filthy, and his bare elbows were bleeding from the dry ground. His chest hurt like hell, and he wondered if he was about to have a heart attack. Now that would be ironic. But as he leaned against the rough bark of the trunk, shielded by the brush, the sound of the criminals—no, they were worse than that; they were murderers, for God’s sake, they were murderers—was mostly a distant murmur punctuated by the clink of metal as struts and supports and pots and pans and jerry cans were tossed into the lorries, and his heart began to slow. With any luck, the men on the other side of the brush would be gone in an hour or two and he could start toward that Maasai boma. If he could make three or four miles an hour on foot, he might be there before dark.

Assuming, of course, that he could find it. And that he didn’t get eaten.

He closed his eyes. No, he wouldn’t get eaten. He hadn’t survived so far just to wind up as lunch for a leopard or lion.

When he opened his eyes, he understood he was wrong. Absolutely and completely mistaken. He sensed the animal before he saw it. There, on a branch above him, was a leopard. Maybe, Peter thought, I have it too: Charlie Patton’s sixth sense. I had felt leopardy (or something), and there it was. The animal.

Slowly he reached behind his back with his right hand for the Smith & Wesson, walking his fingers like small, elderly legs. What was that children’s rhyme? Itsy bitsy spider? He hadn’t had kids, so if he’d ever said it or sung it out loud, it had been over sixty years ago with his mother. When he’d been a child. But he recalled the beginning of it, as once more his heart started to thump behind his ribs. Now he was touching the grip of the pistol with his fingertips. He would shoot the animal and run, because the gunshot would alert the sons of bitches at the camp to his presence. He would aim for the head, even though that was a smaller target than the body and who the hell knew what kind of aim he had. But he couldn’t risk a gut shot that only wounded the creature and left her both hungry and mad. He wrapped his fingers around the grip and was just starting to slide it from his waistband when the leopard sprang from the tree, leaping not onto the ground but onto him. Reflexively he tried to shield his face and his neck with both arms. What was it Patton had once said? You hoisted your rifle perpendicular to your throat and hoped the damn thing would bite down on the barrel until help came. The handgun was utterly forgotten. But it was too late. He saw the big cat’s haunting amber eyes for a brief second as a front paw clawed away his arms with the ease with which he would whisk away a mosquito, and the barbs on her hind feet ripped through his shirt and slashed open his stomach. Then he felt the sting of the animal’s bayonet-like teeth slicing through his neck and tearing open his throat, all but severing the human head that no longer had voice—there was no scream—from the human body.