Ahmed's Revenge Read Online Free

bone, before three other lions, two smaller females and a cub, came from the other side of the pond. These females moved nearly as fast as the first one had, and though the urgency of the kill was gone, they tore into the elephant calf too, one of them pulling fiercely on a hind leg, the other pushing its teeth into the elephant’s side. Even the cub, when it arrived, landed on the baby elephant’s middle, then rolled off and began attacking the poor thing’s trunk, which was coming off the ground haphazardly and waving at us in the savaged air.
    Though I’d lived in Africa all of my life I had never seen anything like this before. I didn’t feel very much personal danger, what with the two Maasai and Kamau standing near, but the kills I’d seen before had mostly been viewed through the safety glass of cars, and therefore were a bit like something I’d watched on TV. I knew that soon there would be other cats around, since these females, big as they were, couldn’t drag the little elephant very far away. Either the males and other lions of the pride were on their way already or one of the females would soon go off to fetch them. In an hour there could be a dozen lions eating at our pond. Not only that, but there would be hyenas standing just away, vultures circling above, and who knew what else. We wouldn’t be able to go anywhere near our pond for a day.
    Jules had come out of the house and was standing close behind me when I turned around. He had his rifle with him, slung over a shoulder of his white terry-cloth robe, and his hair was wet.
    â€œOh shit,” he said, “god damn it, fucking A,” but he kept his rifle low. He had been in Africa long enough to know it was too late to do anything but swear.
    It was right about then, with Jules’s terry-cloth robe luminous in the moonlight, that we all seemed to get the idea of retreating at the same time. A lioness might be single-minded when stalking an elephant calf, but now there were three of them, not counting the cub, and one of them was beginning to look around. The Maasai started shouting again, an excited, high-up-in-the-throat chatter that sounded like a grazing-rights argument just before the spears come out, and Kamau took a step toward Jules, standing on the side of him where the rifle was still slung. And just at that instant the other elephants appeared across the pond. There had been a terrific amount of noise connected with the kill, so I wasn’t surprised that we hadn’t heard them. They came out of the dark like grey mountains out of a fog. There were two full-grown females, the one in the lead no doubt the baby calf’s mother, and since they weren’t wasting any time, the lions, though they roared like crazy for a brief second or two, turned toward us to go hide until things calmed down.
    We had stood stupidly watching for so long that by then there wasn’t a hell of a lot we could do. We were fifty yards from our house and, though I know I said I thought we’d be fine before, we had displayed a foolishness, an indifference to danger, not uncommon among people who have lived here for a long time. Still, the lions were running away from the elephants, not attacking us, so I thought that if we crowded together and stood still they might pass on by. Our house was off to the side of the way they wanted to go, and once the lions were past us, I believed, we could quickly run inside. The elephants would then either chase the lions beyond the workers’ dormitory and into the coffee behind, or stop to mourn the calf. Either way they’d make a great mess of things, but right then that seemed like a fair exchange all around.
    The two Maasai fell into a kind of kneeling crouch, their spears pointed up at forty-five-degree angles from the ground. This was a common warrior position, and was based on the perilous theory that an attacking lion would impale itself on the end of the spear