by Sibel Hodge
I laughed. ‘Has she?’
He shrugged. ‘Who cares? It’s not important in the scheme of things. Boob jobs, face lifts, tummy tucks, extreme diet crazes. People are so obsessed with things that don’t matter. They’re never happy with what they’ve got. They always want something else and something else, until greed takes over.’
Asha trotted up and shook her soaking wet body all over me.
‘Yuck!’ I pushed her off, but she rested her wet paws on my legs and then flopped her head on top of them, looking up at me as if to say, Why aren’t you playing with me?
He glanced at me. ‘I mean, what’s wrong with the world?’
I mulled over what he said, feeling like he was judging me somehow. Before the accident, I was one of those girls who was obsessed with how I looked. Isn’t that what every fifteen-year-old does? My friends and I would regularly pore over the celebrity magazines, trying to copy the stars’ makeup and hair, trying to make ourselves look glamorous before we went into town. Giggling as the boys from school tried to chat to us. Spending hours in the shops choosing the latest eyeliner or lipstick. Not that it would make much difference to me now. No matter how much makeup I put on, or how fancy my hair was, it wasn’t going to change how I looked, and I was one of those people he was talking about who wasn’t happy with what I had.
A familiar bubbling anger rose to the surface. ‘What do you know about it?’ I said, the angry tone of my voice echoing in the stillness. ‘When you look so perfect,’ I blurted out, cringing inside at how that sounded. Now he’d think I fancied him or something. And how pathetic would that be? If we didn’t have to spend so much time with each other because of Asha, there’s no way he’d be seen dead near me.
He chuckled softly. ‘No one’s perfect.’
But that just made me angrier. ‘Yeah, and isn’t it always beautiful people who say things like that? “It’s what’s on the inside that counts.”’ I mimicked a sarcastic voice. ‘You don’t know anything about me.’
He lay back on one elbow, oblivious to my outburst, staring at the water. ‘So tell me.’
‘Tell you what?’ I cried. ‘What’s it’s like to be a freak?! What it’s like for everyone to laugh at you? What it’s like to know that you can never get the job you want because who would want to employ someone like me? What it’s like to be the object of ridicule?’
‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Out here, none of that matters. It’s not like the animals care whether you’ve got eyelash extensions or a club foot.’ He glanced at me. ‘There are more serious things to worry about, like how long it will be before the last rhino gets wiped out, or whether there’s a drought that’s going to kill off some of our animals, or whether a whole herd of elephants has been murdered for its ivory.’
I leaped to my feet and marched back in the direction we’d come with Asha trundling behind, not caring if he was following as I simmered under the surface all the way home. No one as gorgeous as him could understand what it was like to be me.
As I arrived at our quarters, I heard him get into the Land Rover, but before he shut the door, he called out. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning.’
I whipped my head round, my eyes flashing with anger, and I could’ve sworn I saw the ghost of an amused smile on his face.
Chapter 9
‘Can you pass me another fence post?’ Zach said.
It was mid-morning and we were building the enclosure that Asha would eventually move into in front of our quarters. Zach thought the spot was perfect. There was enough shade for her, some trees that she’d be able to practice climbing on, and plenty of thick bushes. She was already three months old and the time had flown by. Her blue eyes had changed to a bright amber, and her coat had turned a deep golden colour with dark rosettes. Her paws seemed to have had a growth spurt ahead of her body, and they were huge. I’d managed to teach her early on to keep her claws sheathed when she was playing with me, otherwise I’d have been scratched to pieces.
Her latest craze was tugging the sheets off my bed with her teeth and dragging them underneath her body between her front paws to the door. Zach said it would help her learn how to drag prey up into the trees when she was older and gave me a tarpaulin sheet for her to use in the hope that she’d leave my bed alone. She sat under the shade of a nearby tree, watching us work with interest, her ears twitching.
I picked up a heavy panel and post that Zach had collected from Nairobi a few weeks before. The panels were made of thin iron bars so that Asha could see out into the bush beyond.
Expertly, Zach sank it in the ground and attached it to the one before it, examining his work carefully and thoughtfully as he went.
‘I hate the thought of her having to be in here without me. Can’t she just carry on staying in the house?’ I asked.
He squinted up at me through the sunlight. ‘We’ve been over this before. She’s not a pet. At this age her mum would be going off to hunt and leaving her on her own for long periods anyway. She needs to learn to be apart from you some of the time.’
I sighed and nodded. ‘Do you want a drink?’
‘I thought you’d never ask.’
I went into the cool of the house and Asha followed me in, thinking it was feeding time.
‘Not yet, Asha.’ I patted her on the top of her head as she looked up expectantly. She showed her disapproval by sitting on my foot and refusing to move. She was the size of a big dog by then and not exactly light.
I laughed at her mournful face, which she didn’t like, so she moved into the corner of the room and sulked at me until I’d poured the drinks into glasses. By the time I headed outside she was back on my heels again, bounding out the door like all was forgiven.
We worked together until late afternoon when Asha trotted up to me, raring to go for her daily walk. She nudged her head into the back of my legs, making me lose my balance and collapse to the floor. This excited her even more and she jumped on top of me. I rolled around with her, playing and giggling as my hat fell off onto the ground. I picked up a piece of rope with a shoe tied to the end of it and ran round the new enclosure as she chased after it with boundless enthusiasm. Then I swung it high in the air and watched her gracefully leaping up to grab it in her mouth before I finally let her have her prize.
‘Do I have to do all the work around here?’ Zach smiled at us.
‘Hey! I’ve been helping.’ I smiled back, forgetting that my face was no longer hidden underneath the shadowed safety of my hat.
‘We might as well walk now. She won’t let us have any peace until we do.’ I pushed Asha away, stood up, and dusted my shorts off.
Zach dropped a pair of pliers in his toolbox, and I fetched Asha’s lead.
‘Come on, girl,’ I said, but she needed no encouragement. She was off, tugging on the lead, only stopping to paw at a beetle or bat a twig, or to scratch her claws on some bark.
‘I think she needs a climbing lesson. Leopards need to be as at home in the trees as they are on the ground. She’ll have to drag her kill up there to feed if she wants to keep it away from scavenging hyenas or lions,’ Zach said as we approached a small tree. ‘This is a perfect nursery tree for her.’
I expertly climbed up the trunk and sat on a low hanging branch, my legs dangling either side.
Zach’s jaw dropped open after watching my skilful ascent.
‘What? Didn’t you think girls from England could climb trees? Is it only people living in the African bush who climb that quick?’ I mocked.
‘Well, out here you’ve always got to be aware of the nearest tree. You never know when you might have to climb it in an instant to get out of the way of an animal. Where did you learn to climb so well?’
I shrugged. ‘I’ve been climbing ever since I was five. I was always climbing the trees in our garden back home. If mum and dad couldn’t find me in the house it was probably a given they’d find me in a tree somewhere, so Mum took me for lessons at our leisure centre climbing wall and that was it.
I fell in love with it. It was like I could completely switch off from anything and just focus on getting to the top. I stopped going after the accident, but it must be like riding a bike. You never forget.’
Asha stood on her hind legs, front paws scratching at the base of the trunk, trying to reach me as Zach knelt on one knee, camera pressed to his face, filming us.
Instinctively, I touched the top of my head to push the brim of my hat down lower over my face and realised that it had fallen off. My gaze frantically swept the ground below, searching for it. Before I had time to panic about how disgusting I was going to look on film, Zach distracted me by laughing at Asha as she tried repeatedly to jump up the bark but kept falling off at the crucial moment, tumbling over and over until she got to her feet again with a determined look on her face.
I climbed back down and lifted her up the trunk, setting her paws onto the bark and holding her, waiting for her to get a grip. With a fearless and inquisitive nature, I didn’t think it would be long before she got the hang of it, and I was rewarded for my faith in her a couple of hours later when she’d managed to stay in the tree for a whole ten minutes, even jumping back down and getting herself all the way up again without my help, using her claws for traction she could balance on even the thinnest branches.
‘She’s a natural,’ I called down to Zach.
He slid the camera way from his face and turned it off. ‘She’s got a good teacher.’ He slung the camera strap over one shoulder and his rifle over the other and climbed up, positioning himself on the branch next to Asha.
A commotion behind us drew my attention away from her, and Zach turned around to see what was happening.
A herd of impala were jumping around and snorting an alarm to each other.
‘There’s a lion,’ Zach whispered, pointing out a large lioness, creeping up towards the herd, belly low in the dry grass. ‘The impala leap around to confuse the lions. They can jump up to three metres high.’
I could feel the tension in the air as the herd began leaping and running in all directions. The lion sprinted forward with a burst of raw power. In all the mayhem, a smaller impala was separated from the others and ran around haphazardly, confused about what direction to go in.
Within seconds the lion was on top of it, holding it on the ground with a bite to the underside of its neck. The impala’s legs twitched in the air as the lion held on tight.
My hands flew to my eyes and I squeezed them shut, not wanting to see the poor animal being torn apart. ‘That’s horrible.’
‘It’s part of the natural balance of our ecosystem, Jazz.’
I dropped my hands and turned around, looking at Asha as she tried to clamber down the tree and investigate what was going on in the distance. I grabbed onto her collar to keep her safely in the tree.
‘Asha’s going to be part of that ecosystem,’ he said. ‘And you will have to teach her to hunt. In two years time you’ll want her to be killing as efficiently as that if there’s any chance of her having a successful life out here. It’s either that, or she’ll be killed by a lion or other animal or starve to death.’
The thought of Asha killing another animal like that made me feel sick. An uneasy feeling settled in the pit of my stomach. Could I do this? Could I really teach this little leopard everything she needed to know when I couldn’t even stand to see a lion kill its prey? What had I been thinking?
But when I looked down at Asha, a thought settled into my brain. This wasn’t about me anymore. This was about saving an orphaned leopard from death in the wild and a sad lifetime locked in a zoo. It was about giving back what the poachers had taken away when they’d killed her mum—a right to her freedom. Life out here for animals was tough, and nature had her own laws. I had to do whatever it took to ensure her survival. Isn’t that what mothers do? I thought about my own mum. How I’d caused the accident that led to her death. I couldn’t be responsible for the same thing happening again.
I took a determined breath. ‘You’re right.’
‘I’m always right.’ The corner of his lip curled into a grin.
‘Well, I wouldn’t go that far.’ I raised an eyebrow at him.
He pointed to a herd of elephants that had ambled up near the tree, keeping a wary eye on the lion. Even though an adult elephant was no match for a lion, a small calf could be.
‘Look, this is one of our biggest elephant herds.’ He pointed at a huge one out in front. ‘That’s Big Mama, the matriarch. The females live in one group in a little girly gang, and the males live in small bachelor groups.’
I knew all about gangs of girls. The ones at school, who were supposed to have been my friends and made my life a misery. The things they wrote about me on the toilet walls and the things they said. But this beautiful herd of twenty-five elephants was nothing like them. They ranged from Big Mama, who was huge, to small calves wandering close to their mothers. For such large animals, I was surprised at how graceful and peaceful they seemed while they slowly fed on the acacia trees and bushes.
‘You see that one in the middle? We call her Houdini,’ he said. ‘She witnessed her mother and the rest of her herd being shot by hunters at a game farm in South Africa. Big rich guys think it’s great fun to fly in for a quick shooting trip and pay a fortune to kill the animals, then fly out again with a trophy or two. They have so much money they think they can do exactly what they want. For two days Houdini stood by her mother’s body, trying to suckle, until the farm owners managed to get her away from the area. They were keeping her until she was old enough to grow tusks so she’d be more attractive to the hunters, but she was so stressed by what she’d seen that she kept charging through the electric fencing they had. After the third time it happened she was captured by the nearest National Park and relocated here to stop her stampeding the local village. Dad and I slowly introduced her to our herd and she’s never tried to escape since she arrived.’ He took a satisfied breath. ‘Elephants have such sophisticated emotions and are so sensitive, they can see and feel things that we don’t even know about. Like us, they feel grief and often touch the bones or the bodies of their dead and show sadness. They also cry tears when they’re traumatised or held captive. Imagine how she must’ve felt when she saw all that.’ He gazed at her. ‘Whenever it seems like things are getting on top of me, I just come out here and look at them. Watch this.’ He climbed down from the tree, keeping an eye on the lioness that was busy feeding. With his hands round his mouth, he called out Houdini’s name.
Houdini stopped grazing on a bush and stood stock still, her mouth open and her trunk lifting up, as if sniffing the air.
As Big Mama had her fill and ambled away, Houdini turned around and walked slowly towards us, her trunk swinging.
‘Come here, girl,’ he said softly to her.
Houdini’s ears spread, picking up his voice.
I gasped at this huge animal coming towards Zach, trunk outstretched, wondering what she would do.
‘How are you doing, girl?’ Zach looked up at her.
She stopped in front of him and blinked her long eyelashes. Then she reached up her trunk and touched his head with the tip, moving it around his shoulders, letting him pat her.
I watched, eyes wide with amazement at this huge wild animal actively seeking out Zach and saying hello.
After a few minutes she dropped her trunk, turned slowly, and moseyed away.
‘There’s nothing like a bit of elephant love.’ Zach looked up and grinned. ‘They can detect one scent particle amongst a million. They can tell which animals live where on the reserve, which have recently been killed, where to get much needed salt when the droughts come, and when the rains will fall. They know which rangers are out here today and can pick up sounds for miles around. Elephants use infrasound, which are low rumbles that travel a long way. It’s so low humans can’t actually hear it.’ He paused with a sad expression. ‘It just makes me sick to think that anyone would want to slaughter such a complex and sensitive creature for t
heir two front teeth.’ He stood and gazed at Houdini’s retreating form as she rejoined her herd. ‘You see, this is what I mean by showing you. Until you witness the things that animals do, you’ll never begin to understand the depth of their intelligence and feelings.’
Houdini greeted Big Mama with a touching of trunks and I felt the emotion and passion in Zach’s voice. It made me sick, too. Watching them made me wonder how they could be killed when we were supposed to be living in a civilised world. Is that what people called progress?
‘Isn’t hunting wild game banned?’ I asked.
‘Hunting is still legal in some parts of Africa, even though there are restrictions in place for dealing in rhino horn or ivory. In the eighties there were hardly any rhino or elephants left here because of their slaughter, and the numbers of antelope and big cats had dwindled to desperate levels. Leopards were all but wiped out due to the fur trade. The bans in horn and ivory helped to increase numbers initially, but we’re getting back to where we were again with an increase in demand. It’s all very well having controls in place, but they’re easy to evade and not effective in protecting these animals.’ He shook his head sadly and took a deep breath, tearing his eyes away from the herd. ‘Come on, we’ll be late for the party.’
