The Lion Who Stole My Arm (3 page)

Pedru flicked through the empty pages in wonder. No one ever had a whole exercise book to themselves — not ever! It was amazing, but also daunting. “Do I have to fill all the pages, Mr. Mecula?” Pedru asked.

“Yes, Pedru. You do. But I think you’ll find it easier than you expect,” Mr. Mecula said, pointing to the picture of the lion. “Your left hand seems to know what it’s doing already!”

N
ow that the rains had come, it was the busiest time in the fields. Everyone from the village was out working from dawn to dusk. Pedru was determined to prove himself to be just as strong and useful as always, digging, hoeing, and planting with his left hand.

“You will be like my uncle Dano,” Adalia told him. “He was a fine fisherman even though a crocodile took his leg.”

Pedru knew she was trying to be kind, but he didn’t want to be like anyone who was a cripple. He couldn’t stand how the other children looked at him now, so instead of playing soccer in his spare time, he went off on his own and practiced with his spear. He threw it over and over again, strengthening his left arm and improving his aim.

Adalia didn’t let him forget Mr. Mecula’s exercise book. Every evening when she lit the lamp in their hut, she put the book down in front of him. “Throwing spears isn’t the only kind of practice you need!” she told him. “One drawing every day, please.”

But after a few days, Adalia didn’t need to nag him. It was comforting to recall some part of each day and see it come to life again under his hand. Slowly the pages began to fill up: a guinea fowl, a hammerkop,
¹
the new shoots showing in rows in the fields, a basking lizard, his sisters carrying a bucket between them.

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
marashambas
²
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.

T
he 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 acacia
¹
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.