The Lioness(38)

The safari had seen three spotted hyenas their very first day. They had heard some last night while they were tucked in their tents. “Hyenas are ugly,” Carmen said.

Charlie nodded. “They are. Why Noah grabbed a pair for the ark is beyond me. Damn things have a canine snout and a koala’s ears. And they’re so slow that practically everything they want to eat is faster than they are, so they pick on the very old and the very young—and, of course, the very dead. The Maasai have a great name for them.”

“For hyenas?” Carmen asked.

“Yes. Sometimes they call the bastards ‘limpers’ because their walk is so odd. There’s a great fable. A crow tells a bunch of them to stand on each other’s shoulders so they can stretch tall enough to reach the top of a tree where some tribesmen have stored their meat. But the crow was just tricking them. Knew they would try to steal something that wasn’t theirs, because they’re such loathsome creatures. There was no meat at the top of the tree. Not a scrap. Anyway, the hyena at the bottom couldn’t hold the ones above him, and so he struggled out from beneath them without warning them. They all fell, of course, and the species was left lame for eternity.”

“That old lion you were thinking of,” Felix mused. “Did he know the hyenas were near?”

“Absolutely. Hyenas are anything but subtle. I’m sure he smelled them and then he heard them and then he saw them. And, if the time had come, he would have put up a good fight. He would have lost. But he was proud. He would not have gone gently into that good night. He would have burned and raged. Nevertheless, in the end he was going to be their dinner—and he would have been breathing when they started to dine.”

“Was it an easy shot?” Peter wondered.

“Technically, yes. Emotionally, no.”

Carmen dabbed at her lips with one of the cloth napkins the porters had set out on the blanket. Then she looked at the hunter and asked, “Did you consider shooting the hyenas instead?”

“Heavens, no. The hyenas were just being hyenas. If those ones didn’t finish off the lion that morning, three or four would have the next day. Or the day after.”

“I actually had a couple of pet turtles on Okinawa. We did. Four of us. They were the soft shells,” Reggie said. “Most of the time, we were trying not to get killed. But a friend of mine found these two in some muck in a bomb crater, and one was missing a leg and the other had big cuts on his face. He was missing an eye. And suddenly, we had built them a turtle tank out of an oil drum and were foraging bugs and worms for them. They became like mascots for us. Some fellows were superstitious and told themselves that so long as the turtles stayed alive—we named them Mike and Ike, after the candy—they’d stay alive.”

“I have a feeling that didn’t end well,” Felix said.

Reggie shrugged. “No. The turtle tank was blown up by a mortar shell. And the next day, two of the GIs who helped build the turtle tank were killed, too. Anyway, we were all shaken up by Mike and Ike’s deaths in ways we hadn’t expected. Let’s face it: they were turtles.”

“They died quickly. That’s the best thing that can happen to an animal,” Charlie said.

“We’re animals, too. But I think the timing matters,” Felix said. “You’re talking about old lions and old elephants and wounded turtles that may also have been pretty old.”

“And?” asked Charlie.

Felix almost didn’t answer. Opening his mouth a moment ago had been a reflex; for a change, he wasn’t thinking about what he should be saying. “And,” he said finally, “quick is relative. My kid sister died quickly, but whether she had thirty seconds or three minutes before her heart stopped or her brain stopped or whatever stopped, she must have been so scared. So horribly, unbelievably scared.”

Carmen smiled at him gently and Reggie was nodding.

“How did she die?” Charlie asked.

“Car accident. Another car slammed into her.”

“Well, when human animals”—and he emphasized the word animals in a way that sounded affectionate to Felix—“die out here, it’s not because of automobiles.”

“No,” said Reggie, and he chuckled. “It’s because, I suppose, we get eaten.”



* * *



.?.?.

It happened fast: the deaths. Not as quickly as a bullet taking down an old lion or a mortar obliterating a pair of wounded turtles, but it unfolded with a speed that astonished Felix. And, either because he hadn’t had the time to think or because he was simply fed up with being a child, he jumped into the fray.

Carmen lunged forward and wrapped her scarf around the driver’s neck, pulling it tight at the same moment that Reggie plunged that little jackknife into the neck of the guy behind them. And so Felix dove across the seat and grabbed the man’s rifle barrel, and while he wasn’t strong enough to wrest it from the guard’s hands, he could keep it aimed up toward the roof, while over his shoulder Reggie kept stabbing the fellow and the blood splattered him like marble-sized drops of rain. The Land Rover careened off the track and into the grass as the driver lost control, and then he jammed his foot hard on the brake and everyone in the vehicle was thrust forward, especially Carmen, who fell between the front bucket seats and into the dashboard. But she held on to the scarf and broke the guy’s neck. Felix saw it and he knew, even as he and Reggie and the guard were falling against the seats ahead of them, that his wife had snapped the driver’s neck. His head whipped forward and then backward, and then his hands and his body went limp—which meant that his foot slipped off the brake and the Rover sped forward and smashed into a copse of acacia and rolled onto its side.