Spotted Cats Read Online Free Page B

shotgun, strength against strength on the terrain that we both knew. This was why I had come to Africa. To kill or be killed. Before I went unconscious, when I still didn’t know which of us was the winner, I experienced this odd, wonderful sense of fulfilment, a kind of peace, as if it had all, finally, come together for me. At that instant I think I believed I was dead. And right then it was OK.’
    He turned his head and stared at me. ‘See,’ he said, ‘it isn’t really guilt over Walter McIntyre. That would be simple. And it wasn’t death. I didn’t fear death itself. But it was death in that tall grass. When I was in the hospital I dreamed about it. I still do. Weird, terrifying dreams. In the hospital I think I would’ve welcomed a peaceful death, numbed by drugs and fever and pain. I hallucinated on images of all the animals I’d ever killed coming after me, goring me and trampling me and ripping at me with their teeth and tusks and claws. It was them that I feared, not death itself. So I knew. I couldn’t go back. A lot of hunters get hurt. They go back. I knew I couldn’t. That’s what’s so hard to live with.’
    Jeff closed his eyes.
    ‘Is that why you wanted me to come?’ I said. ‘To share this with me?’
    He turned his head slowly and opened one eye. He gave me a quick, ironic smile, then closed his eye. ‘Ignore me,’ he mumbled.
    Jeff’s body healed as much as it was going to after he killed his last African leopard. The razor claws of that gutshot leopard had permanently reduced the big muscles of his left thigh to strings, but with the support of a crutch he was able to dodder around the bungalow. He had lost one testicle. His shoulder and his face healed. His soul never did.
    He lived on the royalties from the books he had written about Africa and the films he had made. It was a living for him. Barely. But then, Jeff Newton himself was barely living.
    On my rare trips to Orleans to visit him, I tried to persuade him to go out on to the pond with me in his canoe, or take a stroll through the wooded gardens inside the fence, or climb into my car for a drive to the ocean.
    ‘Another time, maybe,’ was his standard reply.
    Once I suggested he write another book.
    ‘Can’t even begin to think of it,’ he said.
    He read a little, watched some television. According to Lily, he mostly lay around with his eyes closed listening to Mozart tapes, and on especially nice days he let her persuade him to sit out on the patio to look at the flowers she was cultivating in the terraced rock gardens and watch the hummingbirds and sniff the salty breezes. He received company infrequently and unenthusiastically.
    He still slept away more than half of each day. He continued to require medication for the residual infections and chronic pain. A local doctor visited him weekly.
    At first, Lily had cooked elaborate meals for him. But Jeff showed no enthusiasm for her efforts and only picked at them, so after a while she gave it up. She fed him canned soup and sandwiches. He grew thinner and softer and more wrinkled.
    Life, it seemed, was a condition to be endured until something better came along.
    Now we were sipping martinis at the end of this Friday in July.
    After a while, I said, ‘Did you want to talk business?’
    He opened his eyes. ‘Why the hell else would I ask you to come down here?’
    I smiled.
    ‘I want to rethink my will.’
    ‘Not much to think about, Jeff. You haven’t got a helluva lot to leave behind.’
    ‘I got this place. I got the movies and books. I got the jaguars.’
    I shrugged. The place was mortgaged, the movies and books weren’t worth much, and I had long ago persuaded him to will the jaguars to the Museum of Fine Arts, knowing that they’d return them to the Mexican government.
    ‘I want to take care of things,’ he said. ‘Set things right.’
    ‘How?’ Jeff had a simple will. Jeff’s wife divorced him when he took off for Africa. Everything except the jaguars