“She’s smothering him,” Juma told them. “The animal can’t breathe. He’s suffocating. That’s often how lions do it.”
“Why?” Katie asked.
Juma shrugged. “Lots of reasons. Sometimes so their prey can’t bleat for help. Sometimes so the lion is controlling the horns and the wildebeest can’t defend itself. I’ve seen them kill baby buffaloes that way, too.”
The wildebeest pedaled his legs one last time, a weak and ineffectual poke at the air, and then grew still. The lioness looked down at the dead animal and then up at the humans staring at her from the openings in the roofs of the Land Rovers.
“She looks a little guilty,” Reggie observed. “She looks like we caught her with her paws in the cookie jar.”
“Are you okay, sweetheart?” David asked Katie.
“Yes. I’m fine.”
“At least it was bloodless. She didn’t open the poor bastard’s neck,” her husband said.
Peter shook his head and pointed at the river. His attention had been caught because the zebras at the back of the columns, most still on the grass before the riverbank on the north side, had stopped. But then he saw what they saw: two wildebeest were thrashing in the water, and already it was too late for them, also. Crocodiles were wrestling them into the foam. Whether they died because they drowned or they died because they bled out in the Mara River, they weren’t making the southern bank.
* * *
.?.?.
Now Peter was creeping on his stomach. Sometimes he would use his elbows like feet and drag his body forward with his head raised so he could see both what the men were doing and where he was going: what he could hide behind next and how close he was to the back of Charlie Patton’s tent. But more often Peter was keeping his body as close to the grass as possible, his head down and his nose or his cheeks scraping the savanna. He was inhaling dust through his nostrils. He thought of the snakes that might be watching him. He imagined a cheetah that supposed he was just far enough from the other humans to be safe game.
He would have given a great deal to have had Patton with him right now. Or Reggie Stout. Or Terrance Dutton. He was probably deluding himself, but if he had had even one of those other men with him, as a pair they might have a fighting chance to retrieve a couple of guns and…
And what?
Stout had shot human beings in the war, he supposed. But that was in a very different situation. A battlefield, for God’s sake.
And Charlie Patton? He’d “collected” animals. Not blasted humans.
And Terrance Dutton? He was just an actor. Opinionated and strong-willed, yes, but he still spent his days playing make-believe.
And as for Peter himself, he’d shot deer and elk, but never had it crossed his mind that someday he would want （or need） to aim a rifle at another person. He thought he would be capable of pulling the trigger, but only because the men who had descended upon the camp had murdered a couple of rangers and Juma. But had he the aim? He hadn’t been hunting in three years. Who could say what remained of his marksmanship. He had expected that his first day with Charlie Patton would be nothing but target practice. The second day, Charlie might let him shoot a zebra. That was Charlie’s plan, at any rate. Shoot something easy. Something that trusted humans. Something not likely to get them killed flushing it out from the brush if he only wounded it. By the third day, with any luck, he would be reacquainted with the feel of a rifle and more comfortable with the light in the savanna: because the light here was different from Montana, that was clear. Good Lord, he’d seen a full rainbow, horizon to horizon, the other day, the sky behind it the deep, flat, beautiful gray of a thunderhead. An hour before, the sky had been cloudless, a robin’s-egg blue.
And now he was at the back of Charlie Patton’s tent. The interlopers had finished looting the dining tent, which meant soon they would be ordering the staff to disassemble whatever they needed （or wanted） from the guest tents. He heard them no more than forty-five or fifty feet away. He pulled up two of the spikes that pinned the canvas to the ground and slid underneath it. He saw the cot and he saw Charlie’s bag. He didn’t see any of the man’s rifles. But there on top of the camp table was the .38. The Smith & Wesson pistol. It was beside the cot, which meant he had to crawl underneath the mosquito netting. He caught his elbow and then his boot in it, but soon he had the gun. Much to his relief, it was loaded. He thought he might see if the hunter had a box of bullets in the tent too when one of the Russians or Ukrainians or whatever the hell they were started to unzip the tent flap. He collapsed behind the cot, buying himself at best another minute or two before he was discovered, wondering whether he had a prayer in hell even with the pistol in his possession. What was he going to do, shoot the guy? He’d simply be massacred by the others when he started to flee. And he couldn’t try and sneak out the back of the tent on his belly, because he would have to move the mosquito netting first.