Ahmed's Revenge (3 page)

The Maasai understood immediately what was going on and began producing noises that would make the lions think we were many and scare the little elephant away at the same time. The Maasai's trick was a good one but it worked too well. The elephant calf jumped around in fear and, trying to run too quickly, fell to its knees in the mud.

After that things happened fast. A big female lion came out of the darkness very close to us. I had my torch on her and I saw her look our way even as she gained speed. The elephant calf was on its feet again. It trumpeted another small scream into the night just as the lion hit it, smashing into it with the force of a lorry accident on the road and flipping the elephant all the way over onto its back. The lion planted her claws deep into the baby elephant's head, and was biting the elephant deeply too, taking a large amount of the flesh of its neck between her jaws, puncturing the skin and holding on while the elephant wriggled around, still using all of its power but to no particular end, with no particular goal at all.

There was a single moment of relative quiet then, when we could hear the breaking of skin and bone, before three other lions, two smaller females and a cub, came from the other side of the pond. These females moved nearly as fast as the first one had, and though the urgency of the kill was gone, they tore into the elephant calf too, one of them pulling fiercely on a hind leg, the other pushing its teeth into the elephant's side. Even the cub, when it arrived, landed on the baby elephant's middle, then rolled off and began attacking the poor thing's trunk, which was coming off the ground haphazardly and waving at us in the savaged air.

Though I'd lived in Africa all of my life I had never seen anything like this before. I didn't feel very much personal danger, what with the two Maasai and Kamau standing near, but the kills I'd seen before had mostly been viewed through the safety glass of cars, and therefore were a bit like something I'd watched on TV. I knew that soon there would be other cats around, since these females, big as they were, couldn't drag the little elephant very far away. Either the males and other lions of the pride were on their way already or one of the females would soon go off to fetch them. In an hour there could be a dozen lions eating at our pond. Not only that, but there would be hyenas standing just away, vultures circling above, and who knew what else. We wouldn't be able to go anywhere near our pond for a day.

Jules had come out of the house and was standing close behind me when I turned around. He had his rifle with him, slung over a shoulder of his white terry-cloth robe, and his hair was wet.

“Oh shit,” he said, “god damn it, fucking A,” but he kept his rifle low. He had been in Africa long enough to know it was too late to do anything but swear.

It was right about then, with Jules's terry-cloth robe luminous in the moonlight, that we all seemed to get the idea of retreating at the same time. A lioness might be single-minded when stalking an elephant calf, but now there were three of them, not counting the cub, and one of them was beginning to look around. The Maasai started shouting again, an excited, high-up-in-the-throat chatter that sounded like a grazing-rights argument just before the spears come out, and Kamau took a step toward Jules, standing on the side of him where the rifle was still slung. And just at that instant the other elephants appeared across the pond. There had been a terrific amount of noise connected with the kill, so I wasn't surprised that we hadn't heard them. They came out of the dark like grey mountains out of a fog. There were two full-grown females, the one in the lead no doubt the baby calf's mother, and since they weren't wasting any time, the lions, though they roared like crazy for a brief second or two, turned toward us to go hide until things calmed down.

We had stood stupidly watching for so long that by then there wasn't a hell of a lot we could do. We were fifty yards from our house and, though I know I said I thought we'd be fine before, we had displayed a foolishness, an indifference to danger, not uncommon among people who have lived here for a long time. Still, the lions were running away from the elephants, not attacking us, so I thought that if we crowded together and stood still they might pass on by. Our house was off to the side of the way they wanted to go, and once the lions were past us, I believed, we could quickly run inside. The elephants would then either chase the lions beyond the workers' dormitory and into the coffee behind, or stop to mourn the calf. Either way they'd make a great mess of things, but right then that seemed like a fair exchange all around.

The two Maasai fell into a kind of kneeling crouch, their spears pointed up at forty-five-degree angles from the ground. This was a common warrior position, and was based on the perilous theory that an attacking lion would impale itself on the end of the spear before it actually got to the Maasai. I looked at their faces and they were calm, so since Kamau had immediately got down behind one of the Maasai, I got down behind the other. That left only Jules in a fully upright position, standing there shining in his terry-cloth robe. Jules took his rifle off his shoulder at about the time the first of the lions got near. She was still at least twenty feet away but she wasn't passing by fast enough. The elephants had stopped at the carcass of the calf, and the lions, who were still looking back, stopped too.

Because Jules was terrified, he wasn't very quick with his gun, even though the lead lioness was undecided about what to do next and thus had given him time. She first took a step toward the coffee, then turned back toward the elephants again and then turned to look at Jules. The Maasai and Kamau and I had pivoted in the lion's direction each time she moved. We were like human tank turrets, so she finally decided to run past us on Jules's side. Jules got his rifle up but the lioness was there instantly. She ran at him hard, then fell back suddenly and rose up above him, dancing in the dirt like a fish on a line, and swatting at Jules with the wide-open claw of what I thought of as her right hand. She immediately knocked the rifle away, into the dirt a few yards from Kamau and me, and then she backed up and began turning in circles, furious and completely unsure of what to do. The other two lions and the cub were gone now, so we all stood up, moving, again, toward the house, the Maasai spears pricking into the night air behind us. And I only realised that something was seriously wrong when Jules didn't come along. He had slumped to the ground and the white of his robe, from his shoulder to the cuff of his left arm, was turning slowly and deeply dark. I thought the lion had only knocked the rifle away, but now I imagined a shredded arm, though the terry-cloth didn't seem torn at all. “Julius!” I called. “Oh Christ, get up and come over here! Let's take care of it inside!”

The Maasai warriors took a couple of steps back toward Jules, and Kamau went over and quickly got the rifle. The lion was roaring again, still unsure, but when Kamau fired the gun, Jules leapt off the ground, the lion disappeared, and so did the elephants, all of them running back around the pond. For a moment I thought that was the end of it but it was not. We all soon realised that Kamau's bullet, while it had successfully scared the animals away, had entered my husband's back just to the side of his right shoulder blade, first sending him after the animals, then plunging him into the dried-out dirt a half dozen yards from where I stood. His robe rode up above his waist in an undignified way, and the moonlight bathed his buttocks and legs and the horrible, filthy ground.

As soon as the shot was fired Kamau dropped the rifle and ran. One of the Maasai and I got to Jules at the same time, while the other hurried back toward the house, calling out for anyone.

I was afraid to turn Jules over or even to touch his arm, but when we got to him he let us know he was alive, at least, by trumpeting out his own harrowing sound. I grabbed the spear from the Maasai and used its sharp tip to tear the cloth at the bottom of Jules's robe. And once I had it started the Maasai and I pulled the robe apart quickly, making long thick strips of bandage.

“Hold on, Julius!” I said. “We'll just stop this bleeding and then I'll get on the radio. Looks like you'll be going back into Nairobi a day ahead of time.”

I tried to keep calmness and order in my voice, but when we finally did turn Jules so that we could wrap the strips of bandage around his arm, calmness and order went away. What I supposed to be Jules's left bicep was flapping free of his bone, and though there had been a good deal of blood on the robe, the worst thing was that the bicep appeared to be bloodless now, like a piece of thick shoe leather or the lolling tongue of a dead cow. I could see the plain white expanse of my husband's humerus behind his bicep, desolate-looking and thin, like the handle of an unpainted hoe.

“Oh dear God!” I moaned, grabbing my own arm and turning my head away. But it was up to me to pick that bicep up and tuck it back in next to the bone. After that I took the cleanest piece of terry-cloth and wrapped everything tight, from my husband's shoulder to his elbow and below.

I think I forgot the hole in Jules's shoulder in order to deal with his arm, but once I got him turned over I could see that though the bullet had entered neatly, where it came out, the wound looked bad. Jules's right breast, the far right side of his chest, was like a crater on soft ground, so I simply placed layers of folded terry-cloth over it and pushed down.

“Can you help me now?” I shouted at the Maasai. “Can we carry him inside?”

I was speaking English but the Maasai came right away, and when we lifted Julius up he turned himself under my husband in such a way that Jules's chest bandage was pressed tightly between them, held in place by the warrior's back. And when I tried to help he motioned me away and carried my husband into the house, where the other Maasai or one of our field hands had made a makeshift bed on the floor.

I am trying to let my telling of the story embrace all of the horror that the night contained, though when I remember it now, I think of myself as having been calm. I was doing my best to hold my emotions at bay until I had stopped the bleeding and done the work that needed to be done. Even inside the house with the door closed, I worked as I might had I been tending to a stranger or to a member of our crew. I found blankets to keep Jules warm, and I got on our radio, quickly calling the ranger in charge of the Narok branch of the Ministry of Wildlife and asking that he find a helicopter to send. For once the radio worked well, and in a matter of minutes I had everything arranged. I even went into the kitchen for a bottle of Irish whiskey, poured some of it into a tablespoon, and dripped it down over my husband's lips and tongue.

I had forgotten to ask where the helicopter was, whether it was in Narok or Nairobi, but it was too late to radio back by then, for I had begun to shake, I think because everything was done. I asked the Maasai to go out and look into the sky, to listen and watch for the helicopter, and then I got down next to Jules, laying myself along the length of him, so that he could make me stop shaking and I could make him warm. “Dear God, keep him alive!” I whispered. “Don't let him die!”

When I heard the helicopter not much time had passed, and when I'd collected myself, getting some money from our desk and calling a couple of the farm workers in from the porch, my shaking was gone. We had a stretcher on the farm, and after the helicopter landed, beating its blades frantically, like wings against our door, we moved Jules out and got him settled on a platform built for such things, on a pontoon just outside the cab.

The helicopter pilot was a man I knew, an old park ranger who had long ago worked for my father. “Francis,” I said, “quick, get him to Nairobi Hospital. Please, Francis, make us get there now.”

I got into the helicopter, taking the seat nearest Jules, and as we lifted off I saw my husband's hair move in the wind and I saw the two Maasai point their spears up and I saw the farm workers all standing together like a choir, their mouths forming zeros as they watched us fall upward into the sky. As we flew over the pond I saw the dead elephant calf, his trunk severed but beside him on the hideous ground, and when we banked into the somehow purple night, I looked down into the Great Rift Valley, then up toward Ethiopia and beyond it to the Middle East, to Jordan where the valley began, and where there was a river that Jules would surely be crossing, that he'd surely be crossing sometime that night or early the next day.

Things had worked better than I imagined they would—we got off the farm quickly and into the city in record time—but I hadn't thought to tell the people at Nairobi Hospital we were coming, and when we landed in the car park it took forever to get anyone at all to come outside, and to get them to call our own doctor, who lived out next to my father's house on Lower Kabete Road.

Jules's immediate problem was loss of blood. I told them his blood type was “O,” and when they stuck needles in his arm, I swear I could see the colour coming back into his face right away. There was a certain articulation in his lips and a pinkness in the fingers at the end of his good right hand.

“Stay with us, Julius,” I cried. “The worst is over. All you have to do now is hold on.”

I was still acting, still trying for a light tone, for that can-do spirit that the relatives of dying people always seem to want to attain, so I was surprised when Jules opened his eyes and smiled. His lips moved, cracking the dried blood around them, and when I bent closer to hear what he would say, he growled, “Where is he? Find the little fucker, don't let him get away.”

Since I'd bent over expecting words of love, I was surprised again, first because Jules seemed to know it was Kamau who shot him, and second because he didn't seem to understand what a horrible state he was in. All I could manage, however, was a smile and a nod before the attendants hurried over and rolled the stretcher away. After that I had hours and hours and hours to wait there in the hall, my mind moving like the helicopter, in and out of darkness, though I tried not to think of the darkest possibility at all.