The Lion Who Stole My Arm Read Online Free Page A

collar.”
    “I’ll do it!” Pedru said. “I’ll go tomorrow.”
    Perhaps the lion people would tell him for sure if the lioness they had speared was his lion or not.
    The lion people’s compound was a long ride out of Madune. Pedru was glad to get off his father’s bike and lean it against the sign that said:

    There were two thatched huts and several tents. A battered-looking Land Rover was parked under a tree, and a white man with a bushy beard and a woman with dark hair tied in an untidy bun were peering into the engine under the lifted hood. A tall young man, looking a bit like an older version of Pedru himself, sat in the shade with a laptop computer glowing on his knees. None of them noticed Pedru.

    Mr. Massingue and his father had told Pedru that the lion people would be pleased to get the collar. But now that he was here, seeing the huts and tents, the car and the computer, all devoted to finding out about lions, Pedru wondered how pleased they would be about a dead lion. For a moment, he thought about leaving the collar and just running off, but then he might never know if he had speared his lion. He decided to be brave. He stepped in front of the young man with the laptop.
    “Hello. I’m Pedru,” said Pedru, “and I have a collar for you.”
    The young man was named Renaldo, and his two workmates were Beth and John. Beth was from Cape Town, and John was from New York, in America. They were sad that the lion was dead, they said, but they were all very pleased that Pedru had brought them the collar. They thanked him, several times. They made him sit in the shade and brought him a drink of water and some cookies; they were very kind.
    “The lion was speared near my village,” Pedru explained cautiously. “It killed a man named Mr. Mori Pelembe. I saw it running away.”
    The three lion researchers nodded sadly.
    “We’re very sorry to hear that,” said John.
    “But I would like to know,” Pedru went on, holding up his stump, “if it was the same lion who stole my arm.”
    The three researchers looked at Pedru’s missing right arm, as if noticing it for the first time. For a moment, everyone was very quiet, and then John said, “Well, this collar may just be able to answer your question.”

I nside the hut, Renaldo connected the collar to another computer. He explained to Pedru that it carried a record of everywhere the lion had been. 1 While they waited for the collar to download its story onto the laptop, Beth showed Pedru some photographs of lions on another computer screen. Each lion had a name beside its picture and a little drawing of its face.

    “This is how we identify lions,” Beth explained. “From photos and these drawings. We tell one lion from another by their whisker spots, their ears and scars, and the size and color of their manes.”
    “And the color of their noses,” John added, “tells us how old they are. The pinker the nose, the younger the lion; the blacker the nose, the older!”
    “We give all the lions we study names,” Beth said, and then she added in a pretend whisper, “because it’s easier than numbers for John’s old brain to remember!”
    “Thanks, Beth!” John grinned. He pointed to one particular photo up on the screen. “That’s Puna — the lioness this collar belonged to.”
    John brought up a photograph of Puna lazing in the shade of an acacia with four tiny cubs. Pedru had only ever seen lions slinking like evil spirits through the grass or snarling and spitting when a hunter had cornered them. Or dead. He had never seen a lioness with cubs; he hadn’t realized that lion cubs could be so tiny and so helpless, all eyes and fluffy yellow fur. Pedru had feared and hated lions all his life, but he was disconcerted to find that Puna and her cubs reminded him of his mother and his little sisters.
    “The cubs were Cheli and Seti — two girls — and two boys, Samir and Anjani,” Beth said, pointing to each cub on the screen. “Here’s the last