tree.
Above Pedru’s head, the bush babies broke into a family squabble. They squeaked and chittered and rustled the leaves with their wild jumping. Pedru sensed the tension in his father’s body draw even tighter as the lion stirred, and it turned its face toward the tree. Pedru felt the attention of its eyes, its ears, its nose, and even its whiskers, searching the air between them.
Bush babies,
the lion concluded.
Just bush babies!
Reassured now, it moved, low but swift and decisive, to the dark patch that was the goat, and it began to tear at it with its mouth and paws.
Pedru’s left hand tightened on his spear, and he knew without looking that his father’s right hand had done the same. But still they waited.
The lion found that it couldn’t carry off the goat. It was stuck somehow. But now the lion was too hungry and irritated to be suspicious, and it pulled at the bait again, ripping off bits of flesh, no longer noticing the bush babies rustling in the trees above.
Pedru saw the spear in the lion’s side before he knew that his father had thrown it. It stuck out, firmly lodged between the ribs. The lion staggered and snarled — a sound that ripped a hole in the stillness. Pedru aimed and threw with all his strength. He almost seemed to feel the spear strike home, piercing the lion’s other side. Darkness flowed down the bright coat, as if the night itself were bleeding from it. The lion fell, crawled a little way, then lay still.
Pedru stared at the spears.
My spear,
he said to himself.
Thrown with my left hand! I’ve killed the lion who stole my arm!
But when they climbed down to look at the body, Pedru’s feeling of triumph leaked away a little. Was this his lion? He could not be sure, and without certainty he could not feel triumphant. This lion was a female, a lioness, without the scrappy start of a mane that he remembered on his lion. And he was pretty sure that his lion had not had anything around its neck. The sad, dead body at his feet was wearing a collar.
1 bush baby: a nocturnal squirrel-size relative of monkeys, with huge eyes and ears and long back legs for leaping
P edru fetched help from the village, and at dusk on the fourth day, Issa and three other men carried the lioness into the space between the huts. Everyone came out to look at the body, but some didn’t want to get close, as if they feared the animal could come to life. Children and women touched the fur with one finger. Some giggled nervously; some snatched their hands away in disgust. The men pushed back the lioness’s lips to look at its huge stabbing teeth, and then they popped the claws out of their sheaths. Mamma Lago hit the body with a stick, then ran back to her hut crying.
But the thing that made everyone talk and ask questions, more than the beast’s teeth, claws, or size, was its collar. It was a thick leather collar with a kind of plastic capsule attached to it, and a message was written in worn letters: PLEASE RETURN THIS RADIO COLLAR TO THE LION RESEARCH UNIT AT MADUNE .
Issa explained that the collar had been put on the lion by some foreigners who lived in a compound outside Madune. The capsule on the collar sent out a signal, like the radio station that sent the news and soccer matches to the crackly old radio in Mr. Massingue’s hut, and the foreigners could use the signal to tell what the lion was doing. But this explanation just made people ask even more questions.
“If they could tell where the lions were, why didn’t they just kill them?”
“If they could tell what the lions were doing, why didn’t they keep them from doing bad things?”
Mr. Massingue held up his hand for quiet. “I also have heard,” he said, “that the foreigners sometimes help those who bring back their lion collars. They have powerful medicines and a big Land Rover that can take people to the hospital if they are very sick. I think it would be a good thing for someone from this village to take back the