Zoo Page 5

  Like dogs, but unlike humans, lions are unable to sweat through their skin. Their only effective means of thermoregulation is panting. The heavy breathing they are doing now, though, isn’t from the heat, or even from exertion.

  It is from eating.

  Beneath them, scattered throughout the thorny scrub of the forest glen, swarms of fat, shiny flies hover above the meat that lies rotting under the sun’s steady blaze. They tickle across the bones, collectively making a wavy droning noise like a cello holding a note in sustained vibrato. Human bodies—or, rather, human body parts—are strewn in the bloody grass. Rib cages and hip bones shine white as aspirin under the blinding sun.

  The rest of the pride is arranged in a large, loose circle around the bones. Vultures hop around in the mess, their wings like shrugging shoulders, their necks like little worms, yanking rubber-snap strings of meat off the skeletons with their beaks. The lionesses and the cubs have eaten their fill, and are happily active now, tumbling around in the grass.

  The two males are massive as golden hills. They are brothers, twins, almost identical, except now the older one is missing an eye, recently lost while taking over the pride. The brothers, having killed two of the former alpha males and driven off the third, have further established their dominance by devouring all their rivals’ cubs, four young females.

  But the swell of power and dominance they felt when they took over was a feeble feeling compared to the killing of the two human groups.

  A new feeling has overtaken the lions, a new understanding. One that changed their perception of humans from fellow predators—irritating, inconsequential animals to be ignored, mostly—into prey.

  They saw them coming. Two of the smaller, swifter lionesses had climbed into a sausage tree above the tire trail and lain in wait. When the cars passed, the lionesses dropped in from above on the open metal boxes full of the pathetically weak mammals. Once those big naked monkeys were on their slow, idiotic feet, it had been a quick rout.

  It wasn’t because the lions were particularly hungry. The humans had been nothing compared to the eighteen-hundred-pound Cape buffalo, the pride’s more typical prey. The cars had been like boxes full of snacks.

  The two males slip off the rock, first one, then the other. They amble through the pride, heads held high, ears perked up, mouths closed, tails swishing from side to side. After a moment, the females begin to follow, heads held low.

  As the two lions approach, a vulture standing on a woman’s face shrugs its shoulders and takes flight, flapping, awkward and sloppy as a big pigeon. The one-eyed lion nudges the meat with his paw. He holds it down and takes a bite, his jaw making a popping sound as his carnassial teeth efficiently peel meat off the bone.

  After a moment’s chewing, he looks up and turns his remaining eye to the east. His ears swivel, his nostrils dilate. His sense of hearing is only slightly above average, but the sebaceous glands around his chin, lips, cheeks, and whiskers give him a powerful sense of smell.

  He smells something. He glances at his brother, who is looking in the same direction now.

  Humans, the two convey to each other with a glance, a growl. More humans.

  The two males turn to the pride, changing their expressions and postures. They go through a repertoire of vocalizations, varying intensity and pitch, telling everyone what to do.

  Chapter 17

  A CHATTERING FLOCK of storks burst from a treetop as we drove through a field some three miles or so north of the camp. They were marabou storks, distinguished by their wiry white hair, featherless pink necks, and tuxedo plumage—carrion eaters often found with vultures around carcasses. Undertaker birds, they’re called. Abe grimaced up at them. He was projecting a cool facade, but I could tell he was worried, which made me worried.

  Actually, I had already been worried.

  Since we’d landed at the deserted camp, I’d found myself thinking about my first trip to Africa. It was a grad-school field trip to the famous rock beds of the Karoo desert region in South Africa, which showed one of the world’s clearest geological snapshots of the history of life.

  What I kept thinking about was a layer of sediment from two hundred and fifty million years ago that was completely empty of fossils. The lack of fossils in the rock was evidence of the Permian–Triassic extinction event—P–Tr, in geology shorthand. P–Tr, or the Great Dying, was the biggest and baddest of Earth’s major extinction events. Ninety percent of all species on the planet rapidly perished. It took many millions of years for the earth’s biodiversity to recover. There have been five such major extinction events; statistically, we’re about due for one.

  The K–T event, the one that killed the dinosaurs, was almost certainly caused by an asteroid impact. But we’re still not sure about P–Tr. Some theorize that the P–Tr extinction was caused by volcanic activity. Or maybe an asteroid, or cosmic radiation. But no one really knows exactly why almost all the animals, vegetation, and insects in the world suddenly died.

  It was the mysterious nature of that ancient total global ecosystem collapse that made the present HAC activity so unsettling. An animal’s behavior is the result of millions of years of evolution, thousands upon thousands of generations of adaptation. This evolution happens in response to changes in the environment. The environment changes, and some animals adapt to it, some don’t. To suddenly observe such anomalous behavior in wildly different species of animals all over the world wasn’t just alarming, it was unprecedented.

  I opened my camera case and began to ready my video camera. I clipped in the battery, polished the lens, strapped on the shoulder mount.

  As we rolled deeper into the Okavango Delta in search of the missing tourists, I was suspecting more strongly that some kind of macro-level environmental disturbance was underway.

  I’d clacked in a new mini DV tape and was switching on my pricey-ass Sony image stabilizer when there was a commotion behind me. Abe’s two Rhodesian ridgebacks started barking like hell. Then, in an instant, my camera was no longer in my hands and something hard and cold was pressed against my throat and collarbone.

  One of the men in the back was holding something against my neck, which I guessed was a machete, as that was what the other man had against Abe’s neck.

  Abe brought the truck to a careful stop and began speaking in Setswana to the man holding the machete to his throat. Abe’s negotiation skills seemed to be all that stood between me and a severed jugular. My heart was going like a jackhammer. I could feel every hair on my arms standing straight up. The man holding the machete to Abe’s throat kept shaking his head and gesturing back in the direction behind us. Abe kept talking. The man shook his head.

  “No-no-no-no-no-no-no,” he said. “No, mon.”

  The man lowered the machete in order to hop out of the car. He held the machete pointed at Abe, but was only half paying attention as he worked with the other hand to liberate the Winchester from the gun rack. Abe reached into the inner lining of his utility jacket and his hand came out holding a nasty little snub-nosed .38 Special. Abe put the pistol barrel between the man’s eyes: they crossed just as Curly’s do when Moe pokes him in the nose. The man took his hands off the rifle and lowered the machete.

  Then the guy behind me removed the machete from my neck. The men and the teenager exchanged glances, shrugged as though they’d just lost a bet fair and square, and hopped out of the truck. Without another word to us, they started walking away, back in the direction we’d come from. The dogs growled and barked after them, but Abe whistled them silent. Abe was red-faced and shaking. At first I thought it was from fear, and then I realized it was mostly anger.

  “Cowards!” Abe yelled back at them between his cupped hands. “Boogie shite-asses! Scoundrels!”

  He spat brown juice out the window, wiped his face on his sleeve, cursed under his breath, and released the clutch.

  “Superstitious traitorous idiot boogie sons of bitches,” he muttered, half to me and half to himself, maybe half to the dogs.
“It’s just us now, gents.”

  I leaned back in my seat and wiped sweat off my face as I closed my eyes. My pulse was still hammering when I turned and lifted the camera off the seat behind me.

  Maybe Natalie had been right about my coming here to Africa, I thought. A cubicle in an air-conditioned office building wasn’t looking quite so terrible to me right about now.

  Chapter 18

  A COUPLE OF miles farther north, we came upon some salt flats forked by a river delta. The scenery beyond them was breathtaking. An endless patchwork of more grassland and salt flats ran as far as the eye could see. I could understand why rich European and American tourists came to the Okavango Delta for safaris. The landscape was spectacular.

  The trail we’d been following passed through a ford in one of the river deltas.

  “Jesus, are you sure—” was all I could get out before Abe impassively stomped the accelerator and plowed us headlong into swirling water the color of chocolate milk. The water came up to the truck’s door handles. I was expecting the motor to quit at any moment. I mentally prepared myself to go swimming. We got wet.

  “You New Yorkers,” Abe said, pushing us through the flood with his hand on the clutch and his foot on the gas, getting us through it with a mix of horsepower and will. He jerked his hat brim at the snorkel on the side of the truck. “Got it handled, man. Leave it to Beaver.”

  We slogged through to the other side and up the steep, muddy bank onto a plain of tall, light green grass, maybe about three or four acres wide. A path of tire tracks cut straight across it toward a lagoon that sparkled like silver, where a herd of seventy or so Cape buffalo were shouldering each other in a shallows.

  “Look sharp,” Abe said, pointing to the herd. “We’re getting close now. Those are the buffalo the lions hunt.”

  I almost dropped the video camera when Abe stomped the brake and brought us to an abrupt stop halfway to the lagoon. At the other end of the tall glade of faded grass, an open Land Rover exactly like ours, with the name of the safari company on the side, was parked by a sausage tree.

  Abe took a pair of binoculars from one of his kit bags and stood up on his seat. He slowly swept the glasses over the grassy plain. Then he lowered the binoculars, draped the strap over his neck, sat back down, and drove cautiously across the clearing toward the empty truck.

  We stopped beside the vehicle and got out. Something shiny caught Abe’s eye. He bent down to the ground and lifted something from the grass. I zoomed in on it with the camera.

  It was a woman’s gold Cartier tank watch. It looked as out of place here in the African veldt as a shrunken head would have on a plate at the Four Seasons. The alligator strap was encrusted with blood.

  We got back in the truck and kept bucking and rocking over the grass. We weren’t talking. There were clothes littering the ground around the empty truck and the trunk of the sausage tree, scattered among the grass and dwarf savanna shrubs. Blood-stiffened scraps of shirts, pants, a woman’s sneaker, a fanny pack. Bits of fabric blew across the fields. There was a piece of what looked like a Hawaiian shirt stuck in the tree, fluttering on a branch like a flag.

  Abe looked up into the canopy of trees and then over at the Land Rover.

  “Look, man,” he said, pointing. “See the rifle? It’s not even out of the rack. The safari guides who go out with the guests, they’re no superstitious pussies like our dear kooky friends back there. They’re professionals. This all must have happened in seconds. Too fast for them to get their guns.”

  “Male lions will protect their pride from humans, but this looks like some sort of ambush,” I offered, trying to be helpful.

  “And what did they do with the bodies?” Abe said. “Lions usually feed where they kill. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  Chapter 19

  STRETCHED FLAT IN the tall grass, the dominant one-eyed male lion crouches, waiting. Since hearing the distant grumble of the engine, he has been lying on the edge of the clearing about eighty feet to the east, just within charging range.

  His powerful chest rises and falls under his almost strawberry blond mane. His dusky amber eyes narrow, focused on the distance. He opens his mouth slightly, whiskers tingling as he scents the dry wind.

  Having hunted this pride area almost from birth, the ten-year-old male knows every inch of the terrain. At first, he’d lain in wait to the west, but moved when the wind shifted. A keen predator, he takes up a position downwind, so his scent won’t be detected by his prey.

  He is waiting patiently for his prey to put its head down or face the other way, the optimum position for attack. Just a moment or two of distraction will give him enough time to charge. He will finish the stalk as he always does, by quickly knocking his prey off its feet and clamping his jaws on its throat.

  He would have already attacked, except he is wary of people, unused to hunting them. He has been shot at several times before by hunters and game preserve rangers during his days of wandering, before he had joined his pride.

  Without taking his eyes off the prey, the lion makes a low vocalization. It is answered by a soft growl, almost a purr, in the grass to his right, and then by another string of moans in the grass to his left.

  In response to his call for a stalking attack, the two dozen lions at his back split into two groups, one to flank and herd, the other to wait in ambush.

  The flanking lions begin skulking quickly, silently through the grass, using every scrap of cover. Their yellow and brown fur makes them all but invisible, tawny masses of grass-colored animals in the vegetation. They string themselves into a loose net around both the sausage tree and the prey, cutting off any chance of escape.

  Chapter 20

  ABE COCKED HIS head and whistled, and the dogs leaped from the truck and into the tall grass.

  “Listen, man,” Abe said as he sighted through his rifle’s telescope. “If it comes up, the best way to kill a lion is a head shot, right between the eyes.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” I said, continuing to film.

  I lowered the camera a moment later when two sharp, loud dog whines rose in the air at the clearing’s edge. One right after the other.

  Abe whistled for the dogs. Nothing happened.

  He put his fingers to his lips, whistled louder. Silence.

  “That’s not good,” he said.

  Abe raised the Remington to his shoulder and pressed an eye to its sight. I swung my camera in the same direction and held my breath.

  A lion appeared in the grass twenty yards to our east.

  I had never seen a lion in the wild before. It is a beautiful and terrifying sight. The sheer bigness of the animal. It truly makes something spin in your soul, deep below the ribs.

  I was still in a state of unprofessional awe when Abe pulled the trigger. The blast of the rifle so close to me was like a kick in the head. It left a mosquito whine in my left ear. In the place where the lion had been standing a moment before, there was nothing. It was as if he had disappeared.

  Abe climbed back up into the Land Rover.

  “Get your ass up here if you feel like staying alive, man.”

  That sounded like a good idea to me. I slammed the door, and then there was motion from the other end of the clearing. A second male lion broke cover and stood up in the tall grass, stock-still, tail swishing. Watching us. There was something otherworldly and bleak about his implacable, amber-eyed gaze.

  The lion roared and began moving toward us. Slowly at first. Then something triggered in him, and he tumbled into a charge, coming at us at breakneck speed. Abe pulled the trigger just as he began his leap. Another jolting crack of firepower in the air. I saw a fistful of brain fly out of the back of his head. He died in the air and slammed onto the ground in a tumble, rolling into the driver’s side of the truck, rocking it as though it were a cradle in the grass.

  I kept filming as Abe kicked out the bullet casing. It pinged off the edge of the windshield with a sound like a wind chime. On the ground be
low, I noticed that the lion was still breathing.

  Not for long. There was another whamming thud as Abe shot it right above the buttocks through the spine.

  Abe replaced the three spent cartridges in the rifle’s magazine. When he was done, he lifted off his hat and swiped his brow as he looked around the clearing. Silence. No insects, no birds. The shadow of a high white cloud raced over us. I took my eye from the viewfinder for a moment and glanced at Abe beside me. He looked sick.

  I panned the camera, following his gaze.

  In the grass about thirty feet away, surrounding the truck, was a circle of tawny heads.

  All the lions had manes. They were males. Two dozen male lions.

  Abe was blinking, a finger to his open lips. He was so puzzled that confusion got the better of terror.

  “Impossible,” he whispered. “All males?”

  It didn’t make sense. Male lions just don’t do that. A pride of lions consists of a dozen or so related female lions and one, sometimes two, at most three or four males, if it’s an unusually large group. Adult male lions who aren’t part of a pride will hunt alone. Never—absolutely never—in the wild do male lions congregate in large numbers. It just doesn’t happen.

  Except it was happening.

  I kept rolling with the camera as the male lions began moving. They moved forward for a few steps, then stopped to allow the lion behind them to go forward. They seemed like trained soldiers, coordinated, choreographed, synchronized.

  I expected Abe to stomp on the gas and get us the hell out of there. Instead, his mouth pinched into a hard set. Almost in a single fluid motion he raised the rifle to his shoulder, sighted, and fired. Off to the left, the head of the lion closest to the truck blew open and the animal slumped into the grass.