The Lion Who Stole My Arm

by Nicola Davies

  He stuck the drawing of the lion in the front of the book and looked at it each night. Although everyone else seemed to have forgotten his lion, Pedru would not.

  The rains fell and fell. The river grew fat and spread out over the flatlands, leaving little sprigs of islands dotted in the muddy waters. Plants sprouted everywhere — grass, reeds, leaves, and flowers, growing green and lush where the ground had been as dry and hard as stone before the rains came. The crops in the fields sprang up, and everyone began to hope for a good harvest, with plenty to eat for the rest of the year.

  But as the crops grew, bush pigs came at night to eat them, trampling the new shoots and pushing their snouts deep into the soil to eat the roots. Their long noses and pointed ear tufts began to appear most days in Pedru’s exercise book. So every evening Issa and Pedru left Adalia and the girls in the village and went to the fields, to light a fire and be ready to chase the pigs out of their crops.

  Pedru’s family’s fields were on a slope, so Pedru could look out and see the fires on other marashambas2 dotted around the land. Sounds carried in the still dark: familiar voices, tree frogs and night birds, hippos arguing down on the river. It was exciting to be out in the dark with his father, under the stars, with just a little straw lean-to to keep off any passing showers. It was thrilling to hear the snorts and crashes of the pigs in the field and to run toward them, shouting and waving a burning branch. But it was dangerous, too. Leopards and lions liked to eat bush pigs, and they would follow their favorite meal into the fields. Pedru thought of Mr. Inroga’s cousin, eaten by a lion as he chased pigs from his crops. So when he rushed out into the dark with Issa, Pedru made himself brave by imagining throwing his spear.

  I’m ready for you, lion, he told himself. I’m ready!

  But when a lion came, Pedru wasn’t ready at all. He was asleep.

  A scream woke him. It filled the air — a terrible sound of pain and fear. The fire was out, and clouds covered the stars so that it was deeply dark. Pedru leaped up, calling for his father, but he was alone in the lean-to. In the blackness, he scrambled for his spear and only succeeded in tripping over the last of the fire and burning his foot. The screaming stopped, leaving an awful moment of silence before other frightened voices began calling out. Pedru’s hand found a stick meant for the fire, and he ran with it toward the voices, down the hill, where the trail curved around the edge of the fields.

  People were crashing through a tangle of bushes and head-high grass, their burning torches flashing through the leaves and branches. Pedru and the torchbearers broke through a last screen of greenery to see dim figures — human and lion — half hidden in vegetation and darkness. Through the flicker of shadows and his own fear, Pedru saw a spear fly; it missed, and the cat snarled and streaked away like a smear of lesser shadow, leaving a human figure quite still on the ground. Pedru stared in horror as the torchlight drew around it: a man, his father’s size and build, but as broken as a stem of grass, quite dead. Pedru felt his knees give way. No, he thought. No, no, no.

  1hammerkop: a type of stork with a feathery crest that makes its head look like a hammer

  2marashamba: a plot of land where food is grown

  The next morning at dawn, Adalia was poking the fire with a stick as if she were stabbing something to death.

  “He passed out chasing after that murdering beast and now you’re taking him to hunt it?” she shouted. “Are you crazy?”

  For once her scolding did no good. Issa stood his ground.

  “Pedru fainted in shock,” he told her quietly. “He thought that I was the one the lion had killed. Pedru needs to hunt this lion. He’s coming with me.”

  It was almost the longest speech Pedru had ever heard Issa make in response to one of Adalia’s attacks. He jumped away from the doorway of the hut to hide the fact that he had been eavesdropping, and he pretended to play with his little sisters, who were making a little village of stones and sticks in the mud.

  “Ready, Pedru?” his father called.

  Ready? Ready? Pedru had been waiting with his spear and his bedroll for half the night. If he had to wait any longer, he was afraid he might just explode with excitement and pride. As they walked through the village in the slanting early light, people came out to wish them luck. Enzi and Samuel and some of the other boys ran after Pedru and slapped him on the back, and girls looked at him from under their eyelashes. He felt like a hero already.

  The tracks where Mori Pelembe had been killed by the lion had been trampled away by human feet, but beyond the little marsh, they found some clear prints in the soft ground. Pedru touched one of the paw prints with his fingers. His lion had stood right here, in this space where Pedru himself now stood. Only a few short hours separated them.

  I’m coming, Pedru whispered in his head to the lion. I’m coming to get you!

  The plan was to track the lion, then use the dead goat they had brought with them as bait, to tempt it to come within range of their spears as they lay in wait.

  They followed the tracks through tall grasses and under acacia1 trees all day, then camped out, taking turns to keep watch in the darkness, and set off again at dawn.

  Early on the second day, they found tracks dug deep into the mud at the edge of a pond. The tracks led up, away from the band of acacias and baobabs,2 onto a long slope littered with rocks. The ground was too hard here to take the imprint of a paw, but Issa found other little signs — a tiny wisp of fur caught on a spider’s web, a sharp smell of cat when he put his nose close to a rock.

  Then late in the morning, it rained — a downpour like buckets being tipped one after another from the purple clouds. It didn’t last, but it was enough to wash away every trace of the lion’s journey.

  “We’ll lay a scent trail with the bait, from the place where I last found a good track — the top of this ridge,” Issa said. “You stay here. It’s better if there is as little human scent as possible.”

  The dead goat had gotten smelly. It oozed. Pedru watched Issa let the stinky liquid trickle over the rocks as he dragged the dead animal down the slope, through the first bit of scrubby woodland, and back to the foot of a tree.

  “We’ll climb up the tree and wait,” said Issa.

  Pedru looked up to where the trunk divided into smooth gray branches: high enough to keep them safe, but not too high for their spears to hit the lion down below. With two arms, Pedru could have climbed up there in moments. Now Issa would have to haul him up on a rope. Issa would not complain, but Pedru’s heart stung.

  It took some time to get the rope around one of the branches, then around Pedru’s waist. But once Pedru was in the tree, he felt more useful. Issa tied the rest of their gear to the rope, and Pedru hauled it up, pulling with his left arm and looping the slack away with his stump. Then Issa spread as much goat scent around as possible and staked the goat firmly to the ground, so that the lion couldn’t just grab it and run before they had a chance to throw their spears.

  The preparations took all afternoon, and the sun was sinking as Issa pulled himself up into the fork of the tree beside Pedru.

  “Now,” Issa said, “we wait.”

  Pedru drew the shadows growing long across the clearing in his exercise book, but soon the darkness spread and enveloped him. As he sat in silence beside his father, Pedru had to admit that inside the excitement and the pride he’d felt all day was fear.

  1acacia: a tree with tiny delicate leaves and thorny branches

  2baobab: a tree that is sometimes called the upside-down tree because of its thick trunk and mass of wiggly rootlike branches

  Every insect in Africa seemed to be crawling over Pedru’s skin, especially on his left arm, where he couldn’t squish them. He knew he had to sit as still and quiet as his father, but it was very hard. Pedru had never known before how long the night was when you stayed awake for all of it. By the time the crescent moon had floated halfway up the sky, he felt as though he had been awake for a hundred years.

  A tiny scratc
hing sound came from higher up the tree. Very slowly, Pedru tilted his head to look up at it and saw two bush babies1 silhouetted against the sky. They leaped along the branch together, holding up their arms as if celebrating each jump. Pedru forgot all about the insects tormenting him.

  Issa’s elbow nudged him in the ribs, and he looked down. Moonlight streaked the space beneath their tree, with the dead goat a dark stain at its center. Something was creeping toward it, down the slope from the rocks above. A pale shape in the moonlight, a creature that seemed to be made of liquid, flowed between the trees and bushes, disappearing and appearing. Finally it stood still, and its eyes glowed as they reflected the moonlight. A lion’s eyes!

  Pedru’s skin prickled, and he spoke in his head to the lion to make himself feel brave: Come closer. Come to my spear!

  If Issa and Pedru had been still before, now they sat like stones, hardly breathing. Their eyes reached into the black-and-white world of the moonlight, out to where the lion stood at the edge of the clearing. Its glowing eyes scanned the night so that father and son wished themselves sunk into the smooth bark of the 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.

  1bush baby: a nocturnal squirrel-size relative of monkeys, with huge eyes and ears and long back legs for leaping

  Pedru 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 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.”

  Inside 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 on
e 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 photo we have of them, about a year ago, when the cubs were almost grown.”

  Beth clicked on a photo of Puna and her cubs, now more than half their mom’s size.

  “Not long after that, we found Puna’s two sisters speared by hunters, and Puna just disappeared,” John explained.

  “We guessed that something bad had happened to her and her cubs,” Beth said sadly.

  Not as bad as what happened to Mr. Pelembe, Pedru thought.

  At last, the collar was ready to tell its story. A map with colored dots appeared on Renaldo’s screen, and they all gathered around.

  “There’s your village, right?” John said, pointing to a black dot on the map with the name of Pedru’s village written beside it. “The orange dots show where Puna went, and the numbers beside them are the dates, OK? Can you see on this map where the attacks happened, Pedru?”

  It took a moment to figure out what the map showed, and then Pedru had it! There was his village, with the trail to the river and the fields to the north, and there was the little marsh at the bend in the path. Pedru put his finger on the screen. “There is where Mr. Pelembe was killed, five days ago, and there is where the lion attacked me, before the rains.”