Pride (25 page)

Whenever, after that, she tried to refuse him, he threatened to tell Cap and she surrendered again. Then the surrendering became easier, until she realized, strangely enough, she enjoyed Jimmy's rough, eager ways. Something in her responded to being taken, without love, with violence, transported in torrents of animal passion. She began waiting for, anticipating, Jimmy's degrading attentions.

Sally feels guilty in her relationship to Cap; Cap with his gentleness, respect for her as a woman, as a person. She knows Cap loves her, needs her, feels deeply married to her, and she knows in some way she still loves him. Sally is up against another wall, another crossroads in the conflict between her basic goodness, sensitivity, awareness, and her yearning for excitement, anything to make the day-to-day, momentary quality of her life more meaningful, something left over in many humans from the millions of years lived before agriculture, cities, law, ethics.

And she withdraws from Cap more and more, not just physically, sexually, but in her mind. She begins to see him as the outside world perceives him, a broken-down ex-soldier, shell-shock victim, ex—race driver who's lost his nerve, a beaten man, playing nurse to a lion; a forty-year-old loser racing motorcycles around a wall. He's bald, crippled, and sometimes has trouble chewing because so many of his teeth are missing and his plate is loose.

Still, she loves him, knows she'll never be loved as totally, without reservations, as Cap loves her. Also Sally is feeling trapped. Here she is almost thirty with no children and no sign there ever will be any. Cap always takes care, just as he faithfully sends money to her mother every week, no matter how bad things have been. She feels guilty about that now. She also knows her mother considers her a whore for not getting married in the church. And Sally knows she can't really ever go back. She hasn't worked a switchboard for almost ten years and jobs are hard to find.

Cap is sensitive. He's known what's going on, almost since the beginning. Sally's starting to smoke again, at the beginning surreptitiously, then openly, first tipped him off. Jimmy smokes all the time. He knows Cap's vulnerability and blows smoke in his direction to start him coughing, then laughs, coughing himself in exaggeration.

But Cap's so in love with Sally, so dependent on her for meaning in what is beginning to look more and more like a meaningless life, he can't face up to it. So, as with many others before him, he reverts to the familiar formula: I love her; Jimmy seems to make her happy; if I love her then I want her to be happy. So let her have Jimmy if she wants.

But the difficulty is that something in Sally, something probably related to her convent years, and her basic honesty, goodness, can't let her have the same easy mental, personal, spiritual relationship with Cap they've always had. More and more she doesn't want to be with him, share with him. She feels guilty.

Cap is missing intensely this big part of his life, his closeness with Sally, his once-in-a-lifetime love. He depends heavily on Tuffy to fill the hole of loneliness he's found in the core of his being. Sally, irrationally, is jealous of Cap's time with, affection for, Tuffy.

The lion is now full-grown, practically aged; ten years old. He has a dark thick mane falling across his muzzle and over his shoulders. There's a long furrow between his eyes going down to his snout. His nose is black and shining. When he opens his mouth he shows an impressive set of strong, slightly yellow teeth with canines more than two inches long. Below his chin is a beard that blends with his mane.

When he stands and walks, muscles ripple over his entire body. Even with the slightest twist of his tail a wave of muscle writhes and twitches.

Often Cap goes into Tuffy's cage to play with him or lets him into the pit of the Wall when Sally and Jimmy aren't there. Cap rubs Tuffy's chest or digs his fingers up into the shoulder muscles behind the mane. Tuffy flops on his back and lets Cap rub his stomach. Sometimes they still wrestle, Tuffy entering into the game and trying to be tender, careful with his claws, teeth, great weight, and enormous strength.

Cap is confused, he doesn't know what to do. Sometimes he's tempted to talk it out with Sally, tell her the way he feels, but she senses this in him, is afraid, resists. Other times he wants to have it out with Jimmy. He knows he can't beat him up, Cap is still strong but because of his lungs has no endurance at all. Jimmy is young, knows his advantage. Cap is sure if he gets rid of Jimmy, Sally will leave, he's afraid Jimmy won't take care of her, protect her in any way.

Toward the end of summer, Cap discovers that the transmission on his truck is shot. It's the year 1938, and they're still in Wildwood. The truck is old; it's hard to find parts. The year has been a poor one as have been the past five years. People don't have much money to spend watching two men, a woman, and a lion spin around inside a wooden bowl. Most people are barely earning money enough to feed themselves.

So Cap finds himself with no money and the season over. They can go on the road, head south as they've done before and probably stay alive; make enough to eat and feed Tuffy. But although he's got the truck fixed, he needs to sock away money for gas and food until they can get down to Florida. Cap's already a month behind in Jimmy's salary. Jimmy's never going to quit, he really has no other place to go, but he keeps threatening.

Cap can't help but wonder if he has any control over his life. Maybe it's all some kind of crazy accident, slowly unfolding, in which everybody loses.

P
robably most of what Dick Kettleson thought about lions was wrong. At that time, in 1938, not much was known about the lives of lions in their natural state, at least, not by non-Africans. It is very difficult for us to observe lions in nature.

Because Tuffy is a major character in our tale, perhaps it would be best if we consider briefly the life he might have lived if he had not been taken at such an early age from his home environment. Since a lion is primarily an instinctual animal, some of the ensuing events will be better understood if we contrast the life he's living with the one he
should
have lived.

Apologies are hereby proffered in advance to readers in the twenty-first century for whom the material here presented might be both inaccurate and inadequate. That is, if there are any lions left then, in fact, if there's anything at all left.

Tuffy was one of two cubs born to a lioness, part of a small lion grouping, not a pride. She cubbed in a fissure of rock on the Serengeti Plain, about twenty kilometers from a pride territory and a hundred kilometers or so from the sea. She, the lioness, was killed by local hunters and the cubs brought to the port where they were sold to the sailor we've already met in the San Diego bar.

Lions in their natural habitat are no more dangerous to humans than automobiles. As with automobiles, they can be dangerous if you get in their way under the wrong conditions; but by nature, lions will avoid humans and do not consider them natural prey as they do, for example, the gazelle or giraffe.

As far as is known, there seem to have been ten races of lions, two of which are recently extinct. The bulk of the existing lion population now resides in Africa, although a small subculture remains in a limited part of India. Earlier, lions were spread over the entire Mediterranean basin. At one time, it's been calculated, there were as many lions as men on this planet, about six million of each. Man has gradually destroyed the lion population, while he himself has proliferated. Perhaps this explains lions' fear and avoidance of man. Man's irrational fear of lions is not so easily explained.

Usually, lions will tolerate coexistence with man in a prescribed area. For reasons not directly ascertainable, perhaps genetic, although man, unarmed, is easy prey for lions he is rarely hunted by them. However, older, failed, non-pride lions or lionesses might, when no longer capable of catching and killing ordinary prey, become maneaters.

It is difficult to determine exactly, but probably less than fifty percent of lions and lionesses live in a pride. The rest are “vagrant.” Although these vagrant lions and lionesses might form groupings for social reasons—to hunt, or for reproduction and mutual protection against other lions or hyenas—they have no determined protected territory and therefore do not constitute a pride. This seemingly large percentage of vagrant lions could be the result of man's depredations on lion territory.

A true pride can include from as few as four to as many as forty lions, cubs, and lionesses. This pride inhabits territory that is defended.

Territory adequate to support a pride must have water and a sufficient supply of natural prey, resident or passing through it in migrations, to provide food. The life of a pride is relatively stable and stationary. This is especially true for the pride lionesses, who, along with the territory, are the heart of a pride.

Vagrant lions and lionesses follow or migrate with their food supply. Pride lions and lionesses
intercept
prey animals within the pride territory when they pass through. This is an enormous difference. The average life of a pride lion or lioness is considerably longer than that of the vagrant. Also, and perhaps more important, the survival rate into adulthood of cubs in a pride is vastly greater than that of vagrant cubs such as Tuffy.

Lions are the only social cat. Leopards, tigers, almost all the other large felines live alone, or, at most, come together for brief breeding periods. It is rare to find a lone lion, however, except for the ill or old lion close to death.

A lion or lioness comes into adulthood in its fourth year. A grown male lion can weigh four to five hundred pounds, a lioness somewhat less. Tuffy, as a grown male lion, is over four hundred pounds at the time of our story.

Some lions have been known, in captivity, to live twenty years, but in nature a ten-year-old lion such as Tuffy is rare. Pride lionesses, however, can survive much longer.

While hunting, a lion or lioness can knock down a six-hundred-pound zebra with a swipe of its paw, can jump across a thirty-foot gorge or leap vertically as high as ten feet. For short spurts, a lion or lioness is very fast. But it does not have much staying power. If its prey can keep running for a quarter mile without being injured or caught it can usually escape. Strangely enough, lions and lionesses fail more often than they succeed in their hunting attempts, especially when hunting alone or with a small grouping. Therefore, starvation is common in the lives of lions, especially the young and old. The pattern for lions and lionesses is feast or famine. When there is a large supply of meat, a hungry full-grown lion or lioness can consume as much as sixty pounds at one gorging.

Lions and lionesses sometimes hunt at night but rarely in full daylight. Although they mostly hunt at dusk or twilight, their eyes have round pupils such as with human eyes. They do not have the vertical-slit pupil of night-hunting animals such as the domestic cat and other felines.

A typical “kill” usually begins with knocking down the prey by a powerful swing of the paw. The actual killing is typically done by suffocation, either by taking the head of the victim into the mouth or by biting and closing the trachea. It is rare for a lion or lioness to kill by going for the jugular and causing death by bleeding.

When a lion eats its kill, the belly is ripped open first. The choice morsels of an animal are the viscera: liver, heart, kidneys, lungs. Even the intestines are eaten. The lion or lioness squeezes out the contents, then eats the intestines themselves.

According to hunting conditions, a lion or lioness will eat almost anything from a mouse to a hippopotamus. They will eat fresh-killed meat or carrion. They are great stealers of prey from other animals. Lions or lionesses, when hungry, constantly scan the sky for vultures and buzzards, knowing these birds signal prey, which they can steal without needing to hunt.

The lion family is notoriously lazy. A pride lion or lioness will rarely travel as much as four miles in a day. When well fed, they will sleep or lie about in social clumpings for up to twenty hours at a time. There seems little inclination on the part of lionesses to leave the center of the pride or the nursery area except to hunt, litter cubs, or breed. The male or males of the pride will sometimes circle the pride territory to establish boundaries by spraying a mixture of musk and urine. This is to define and declare the defended territory. Except for that, they rarely move about. A male lion in a pride does not often hunt; this is the work of the lionesses.

When a kill has been made, the lion will chase the lionesses away and gorge or take his preferred parts of the prey to another place and eat in peace. The lionesses get to eat what is left. The lionesses typically chase away the cubs until they themselves are satiated. For this reason, among others, even in a pride, many starve. Less than fifty percent of cubs reach adulthood.

Generally, there are from one to four males in charge of a pride. They are the
only
adult lions allowed in the pride; all young males are chased from the pride territory when they reach maturity. They are chased by the pride lion or lions and lionesses and are not allowed to return.

A team of pride males almost always comes from a single litter, direct brothers; or sometimes from one lioness but of different litters. The reign of a pride lion or team of lions is precarious at best. It may be as short as a few months or as long as an exceptional observed six years.