A Pride of Lions

by Isobel Chace

  I grinned. “I have a feeling he will teach you excellent Dutch,” I said.

  She gave me a horrified look. “No! I can’t! I’m no good at learning languages! ”

  “That’s true,” Abdul put in, in his soft, distinctly Indian voice. “Her Swahili is very odd and quite difficult to understand.”

  I quelled him with a look. “You won’t find it so bad!” I said encouragingly. “You already understand each other very well!”

  “The language of love is universal,” Abdul couldn’t resist saying.

  “Oh, shut up, both of you!” Janice pleaded. “I don’t even like him!”

  “You’ll never convince him of that!” I chuckled. “You should never have tied back your hair! You know how he felt about your long, flowing hair!”

  Janice made a face at me. “I know, Memsahib Golden Syrup, as the Africans call me! And I wouldn’t have done anything, only you’ve no idea how dispiriting constant disapproval can be! ”

  “Is that why you did it?” I shot at her.

  “I think so,” she said doubtfully.

  “Then what are you going to do?” I asked her.

  She gulped, blushed, and bit her lip. “Marry him!” she said faintly.

  Hans Doffnang came back soaked to the skin. He triumphantly waved aloft two bottles of wine, which he handed over to Katundi to open. Not even our silence could dent his happiness.

  “My lovely wife!” he said in Dutch.

  Janice smiled at him, regaining much of her usual confidence. “Clare says I shall have to learn Dutch,” she told him.

  He waved away any such suggestion. “No, no, it is I who will learn to speak English,” he promised her.

  “But if we live in Holland—” Janice argued.

  Mr. Doffnang interrupted her with a loving kiss. “What a night! Here I am, soaking wet, just when I should like to walk you back to your tent in the moonlight. Why else should one come to the tropics?”

  Katundi brought back the wine and served it with all the dignity that the occasion demanded. He cleared away the soup plates and brought in the next course, grinning happily to himself while we ate the chicken and sweet potatoes he had brought from the kitchen. Neither Janice nor Hans were hungry, I don’t think either of them had the remotest idea what it was that they were eating, and I envied them. Now that the first excitement had died away, my own sadness seemed all the sharper. I ate the food Katundi had set before me mechanically, wishing that the evening was over. And then, when it was, I was afraid to be alone, to remember my quarrel with Hugo.

  Abdul placed my waterproof over my shoulders and glanced out at the rain.

  “No need of a shower tonight!” he commented. “Can you see? Or shall I come with you with a torch?”

  “I can see, thank you,” I said.

  We shook hands with careful formality and then I made a dash down the pathway to my tent. As I ran I could hear the thunder still rumbling overhead. It was queer, but it sounded very like the voice of the Mzee, roaring his defiance, and threatening some new revenge. A flash of lightning lit up the flooding river rushing past the higher land of the camp, and another crack of thunder rent the sky. I zipped up my tent with care and hurried into my bed. Surprisingly, I had hardly lain down before I was asleep.

  When I awoke, the sun was already peeping through the trees and the gossamer threads of the webs of trapdoor spiders shone silver in the grass by the river. I wriggled my arm experimentally and found that it hardly hurt at all. It was an encouraging start to the day.

  I dressed in clean clothes, after spending a long time in the makeshift shower, and hurried along the path towards Hugo’s house before anyone else was up. It was an easy thing to find Karibu’s stable, for she had heard me coming and her trunk was sticking out through a peephole in the door, trumpeting wildly in her excitement.

  “Have a care, love,” I bade her as she pounded on the door. Her trunk fondled my neck and she rumbled happily as she explored my body to make sure that all was well with me. “Come, Karibu,” I whispered in her ear.

  She came willingly enough. Grabbing a bundle of food from her stall, she came pounding down the path after me, much excited by this unlooked-for treat.

  Katundi was lighting the charcoal fire in the kitchen boma. He was clearly surprised to see me up and about so early.

  “I thought I’d clean the filters before breakfast,” I told him. “Karibu can come with me.”

  “I shall come also,” Katundi insisted. “It is necessary to be very careful by the river today.”

  “All right,” I agreed. I wasn’t sorry that he was coming too, for the river was considerably higher than it had been even the night before and the crocodiles were more difficult to see in the muddy water that was busily carrying yet more of the topsoil from upstream away for ever.

  I found the buckets and the scrubbing brushes and hurried out to reassure Karibu, who was waiting impatiently outside.

  “We’ll begin with you,” I told her. “You look as though you could do with a good bath!”

  I gave her one of the buckets to hold, but she dropped it almost immediately. I stooped down to pick it up, talking to her all the while, for truth to tell, I couldn’t help marvelling at her gentleness when I looked at her enormous feet and her tough, wrinkled skin, perhaps the thickest in the animal world, that sagged loosely about her enormous size.

  As I picked up the bucket, I glanced up into the trees and was shocked to see the dead head of an antelope staring down at me through unseeing eyes. I must have gasped, for Katundi, who was following behind, looked up too.

  “Did a lion do that?” I asked with a touch of hysteria. I had an odd, prickly sensation in the back of my neck and I felt slightly sick.

  Katundi shook his head. “Mama?”

  I shook myself, pulling myself together. “Of course it isn’t a lion,” I said loudly. “Stupid of me!”

  “It’s a leopard’s larder,” Katundi said. “No lion takes its kill up into a tree. There are many leopards about here.”

  “Hence Chui Safari Lodge!” I exclaimed with satisfaction. It was only right and proper that there should be some of the animal the Lodge was called after close by. I felt distinctly better. There were no lions anywhere near.

  Katundi pulled the filters carefully out of the river before I let Karibu loose to paddle in the shallows beside us. The elephant cavorted with cumbersome grace into the water, blowing bubbles with her trunk, watching me closely all the while. I filled a bucket with water and threw it over her. She trembled with pleasure, standing quite still while I ran over those parts of her that I could reach with one of the scrubbing-brushes.

  “There,” I said at last. “That’s your lot!”

  Her flanks quivered expectantly. She sucked up a whole lot of water in her trunk, playfully threatening me with a soaking.

  “Don’t you dare!” I screamed at her.

  Katundi sat back on his heels, laughing at the two of us. “You will be wetter than she is!” he called out to me.

  “Not if I can help it!” I danced back out of reach, but Karibu was not to be so easily defeated. She came storming out of the water after me, only to turn back again into the river, her giant feet sluicing the water some eight feet into the air all round her.

  I sat down on the bank beside Katundi, panting after my exertions, and started to scrub the filters free of the dirt they had picked up in the last day.

  “It will be nice when we have piped water again,” I said wistfully, for I disliked the slimy feel of the stuff that attached itself to the filters.

  “The Bwana has a better system at his house,” Katundi informed me. “There, one does not have to carry water back and forth. Aieee, to live there must be the dream of every woman! There is no work there to break her back!” His black eyes glanced quickly at me and away again.

  I sniffed. “I have no intention of breaking my back doing Bwana Canning’s work!” I said.

  “No,” Katundi considered, “for i
t will be a joy to you!” “Besides,” I added fiercely, “I’m going away! Another man is coming for me and will take me to his sister’s house!”

  Katundi looked as if I had struck him. He lapsed into a long silence, intent on his scrubbing.

  “Well, why don’t you say it?” I said wearily.

  “There is no need,” he retorted with infinite dignity. “Your destiny lies here in Tsavo.”

  Crosser than ever at this bland conclusion, I threw caution to the winds.

  “You’ll be telling me next that I have already been chosen by the Bwana’s ancestors to bear his children!” I taunted him, well aware that the old beliefs were far more real to him than either the Christian or the Moslem faith.

  Katundi grinned, wagging his head to and fro, not at all put out by my ill temper. “Mama understands these things very well,” he agreed slyly, “so she will know that it may well be so.”

  I finished scrubbing one of the filters and flung it into one of the other buckets. Karibu’s ears flapped audibly and I wondered what she had heard in the bushes behind me. She threw up her trunk and trumpeted angrily, advancing out of the water.

  “Come on, Karibu, it’s nothing,” I comforted her.

  Katundi rose to his feet. “Mama! The Mzee! The Mzee!”

  I smelt the lion before I saw him. It took all the courage I had to turn my head, knowing that I should look straight into the amber eyes of the Mzee, and that this time I would not escape.

  The lion walked slowly forward. I watched him, hypnotised, as he gathered himself to spring. I made no effort to avoid him, but stood there, waiting. It seemed as if I had always known that he would come. He was the old enemy who had long ago recognised that it was I who had destroyed his pride. It was I who had fired the dart at him and it was my smell that he recognised. And now he was going to take his revenge.

  But I had reckoned without Karibu. She was not in the least afraid of any lion. She grabbed me round the waist with her trunk and flung me on to the ground, Standing over me in exactly the same way as she would have stood over her own young. Her fury was a terrifying thing. Then the lion sprang and, at the same instant, the elephant rose on to her back legs and crashed the full weight of her front feet into the superb body of the Mzee. When she had done, she trampled him firmly and systematically into the dust, while I clung to one of her back legs, weeping my heart out for the death of the king.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  KARIBU’s rage lasted long after Hugo had come and dragged me out from beneath her. The extraordinary thing is that despite her furious, savage attack on the lion, I was completely unharmed. I had always known that elephants were deft with their feet, but the fact that she had not trampled me seemed like a miracle to me. Her trunk flicked over me while she rumbled with fright. She had no intention of allowing me out of her sight for a long time to come. Hugo pacified her as best he could, but with me weeping at his feet and Katundi wailing some dirge over the dead lion, his patience was rapidly exhausted.

  “For heaven’s sake!” he bellowed. “Shut up with that noise! Both of you!”

  I was startled into a damp silence. Karibu patted me on the

  head, breathing gently down the back of my neck. I watched while Hugo bent over the remains of the lion, making sure that it was the Mzee and not some other stranger. He stood up, satisfied, and gave Katundi instructions to bury the beast. Then he turned to me.

  “Well, Elephant’s Child?” he said.

  I got shakily to my feet. “How did you get here?” I asked him.

  He smiled at me. “I heard you letting Karibu out of her stall. Just as well you did,” he added on a quite different note.

  I brushed the tears off my cheeks. “Karibu won’t get into trouble, will she? Killing our famous tourist attraction?”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” he said, “I’ll get hold of Duncan Njugi myself and tell him how it happened.”

  “He must have walked all night,” I said tearfully. “Through all that rain and across the river!”

  Hugo put his arm round my shoulders. “It’s no good getting sentimental about him,” he said. “That’s been the trouble all along, but I doubt the great beast shared in your emotional entanglement.”

  “That’s all you know!” I told him fiercely. “That’s what made it so horrible. We—we were looking at each other.”

  He gave me a little shake. “Thank God for Karibu!” he said.

  I gave her a misty smile and reached up and pulled on her ear. She had stopped shaking and was now only rumbling gleefully, her trunk resting on my shoulder.

  “Poor Mzee,” I said.

  Hugo patted the elephant hard on her rump. “That reminds me,” he said. “If I get hold of Johnny in time, he can go back to Amboseli and get our other lions back.”

  I stepped away from him. “How can you?” I asked him bitterly. “You don’t care a bit that he’s dead, do you?”

  He looked me straight in the eyes. “I think we’ll both live through it,” he said evenly.

  “Well, I won’t! I’ll never get over it!” I pulled my hand out of his and ran away from him, up the path towards the camp. Karibu came running after me, her trunk raised high before

  her, determined not to let me get away from her.

  Katundi gathered up the filters and the buckets and came after me, but Hugo stayed where he was. He doesn’t care a rap, I thought, he doesn’t care about anything! Katundi caught up with me, his dark eyes full of pity.

  “Shall I make you coffee?” he suggested. ‘You will feel better when you have eaten.”

  I nodded my head disconsolately. “Why did it have to happen like that?” I asked him.

  He blinked, unwilling to share his thoughts with me. “The Bwana Njugi will not blame Karibu,” was all he said.

  “But I blame myself!” I told him.

  Katundi blinked again, shaking his head. “The lion came to die,” he said flatly. “I shall bring your coffee to your tent, mama.”

  Karibu was very reluctant to allow me to go into my tent. She stood guard on the pathway outside, doing her best to knock over a nearby tree, hoping to get at the delicious green buds at the top. It seemed as though her adventure was already forgotten and it was only I who could still look into the calm, amber eyes of the Mzee as he came to exact his revenge.

  I blew my nose, lay down on the bed, and shut my eyes. The amber eyes were still there. I sat up and looked at myself in the glass, my own eyes reflecting the sad stare of the lion. Had he really come to die? Perhaps he knew it was the only way to bring back the stolen lions from Amboseli. Because of his death, they would come home to Tsavo and roam free for the rest of their days.

  And what of myself? I tried to remember my anger with Hugo, but it had gone. I, too, could walk the plains of Tsavo all my days if I could find the strength to grasp my future in my own hands. I was ashamed of the pointless quarrel I had initiated over Martin Freeman. Hugo had said I would have to beg him, if I wanted him to kiss me again. Was I too proud for that? I looked deep into my reflected eyes and knew that I was not.

  “Hodi!” Katundi called out from outside the tent. “I have your coffee, mama.”

  “Karibu, come in,” I answered automatically.

  Katundi came in, putting the tray carefully down on the table beside me. “Shall I pour it out for you?” he asked me.

  I nodded, distracted by my own thoughts. “Katundi, will you be serving Bwana Canning’s dinner tonight?”

  He smiled broadly. “Ndiyo, mama.”

  I took a deep breath. “Why don’t you take the evening off?” I suggested. “I’m sure your wives would be pleased to see you!”

  “Ndiyo, mama,” he said again a little more cautiously.

  I cleared my throat, embarrassed. “I shall serve dinner,” I mumbled.

  “Ndiyo, mama!” He could scarcely contain his pleasure. “Everything will be left ready. Will you cook the meal yourself?”

  I nodded, unable to think of anything to say
.

  “Everything must be very good,” he said thoughtfully. “Everything must go well.” He scratched his head. “Does the Bwana—”

  I looked him straight in the face. “Katundi,” I said.

  He looked abashed. “Ndiyo?”

  “Mind your own business!”

  He grinned. “Ndiyo, mama!”

  I felt de trop on the site. Hans Doffnang and Janice were intent only on each other. They managed to communicate surprisingly well, since neither of them had more than a few words of the other’s language. Perhaps they didn’t need to say very much. They were still far too surprised that they had fallen in love with one another.

  Abdul Patel was the only one of us who did a proper day’s work. He was not expecting me to come up to the top of the plateau, for the story of the lion had spread rapidly amongst all the workers.

  “Are you feeling well enough to be here?” he asked me gently.

  “I think so,” I said. “It was quite a moment!”

  He was acute enough to know something of what I had felt for the lion. “I am sorry,” he said quietly. “I’m very sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” I said awkwardly.

  “He must have come deliberately. He knew where the camp was, so he knew where to find us.”

  “Katundi says he came to die,” I told him.

  Patel’s eyes opened wide. “Katundi is a wise man,” he said. “It could well have been so.”

  “Then you agree with him?” Somehow I was surprised that Abdul should also feel that Mzee had come seeking his death.

  “Yes. Yes, I do,” he said.

  It was a comforting thought.

  Hugo’s house was deserted when I got there. The sun was just setting and, when I arrived, an African was trying to persuade Karibu into her stable. The elephant, however, refused to go inside, despite bribes and threats.

  “Perhaps she’ll go inside for me,” I suggested hopefully.

  The African was only too pleased that I should try. He had no ambition for Hugo to come home and find the elephant on the loose. But Karibu had quite other ideas. She refused to set foot in her stable. She flapped her ears and waved her trunk in the air, kicking out at the door that the African was trying to shut behind her. “You’d better let her go,” I said.