Die Again (26 page)

When at last I’ve had my fill, I rock back on my haunches and gaze across a clump of papyrus to the trees and waving grasses beyond the river. To the creatures who inhabit this green and alien world, I am but a walking source of meat, and everywhere I look, I imagine teeth waiting to devour me. With sunrise came the noisy
chatter of birds, and when I look up, I see vultures tracing lazy loops in the sky. Have they already marked me for their next meal? I turn upriver, toward camp, and see the clear trail of footprints I’ve left along the bank. I remember how easily Johnny tracked even the faintest paw prints. My trail will be as glaring as neon for him to follow. Now that it’s daylight, he’ll be hunting me because he can’t afford to let me live. I’m the only one left who knows what happened.

I rise to my feet and continue to flee downstream.

I can’t allow myself to think of Richard or the others. All I can focus on is staying alive. Fear keeps me moving, pushes me deeper into the wild. I have no clue where this river leads. I recall from the guidebook that the rivers and streams of the Okavango Delta are fed by rainfall in the Angola highlands. All this water, which annually floods these lagoons and swamps from which so much wildlife magically springs, will eventually empty into the parched Kalahari Desert. I glance up to gauge the direction of the sun, which is only now lifting over the treetops. I am walking south.

And I am hungry.

In my knapsack I find six PowerBars, 240 calories each. I remember tucking them into my suitcase in London, just in case I couldn’t abide the food in the bush, and I remember how Richard mocked my unadventurous palate. In an instant I devour one of the PowerBars and have to force myself to leave the remaining five for later. If I stay near the river, at least I’ll have water, an endless supply of it, even though it surely carries a host of diseases I can’t even pronounce. But the water’s edge is a dangerous zone where predator and prey so often meet, where life and death converge. At my feet is an animal’s skull, bleached by the sun. Some deer-like creature that met its end here on the riverbank. A line of ripples disturbs the water, and a crocodile lifts beady eyes to the surface. This is not a good place to be. I veer away into the grass and find a pathway has already been trampled here. Tracks stomped in the dust tell me that I am following in the footsteps of elephants.

When you are afraid, everything zooms into sharp focus. You see too much, hear too much, and I’m overwhelmed by a rapid click-click of images and sounds, any one of which might be the only warning of something that will kill me. That must all be processed at once. That swaying of the grass? Merely the wind. The blur of wings swooping above the reeds? A fish eagle. The rustling in the underbrush is merely a warthog rambling by. Tawny impala and the darker shapes of Cape buffalo move along the horizon. Everywhere I see life, flying, chattering, swimming, feeding. Beautiful and hungry and dangerous. And now the mosquitoes have found me and are feasting on my blood. My precious pills are back in my tent, so add malaria to the list of ways to die, along with being mauled by a lion, trampled by a buffalo, drowned by a crocodile, and crushed by a hippo.

As the heat builds, the mosquitoes become relentless. I wave at them maniacally as I walk, but they thicken into a biting cloud that I cannot escape. In desperation, I’m driven back to the riverbank where I scoop up handfuls of mud and slather my face and neck and arms. The silt is slimy with decaying vegetation and the smell makes me gag, but I slap on thicker and thicker layers until I’m encased in it. I rise to my feet, a primeval creature emerging from the muck. Like Adam.

I continue on the elephant path. They, too, prefer to travel alongside the river, and as I walk I spot other prints that tell me this route is used by a multitude of different creatures. This is the bush equivalent of a superhighway, all of us traveling in the footsteps of elephants. If impala and kudu walk this way then surely lions do as well.

Here is yet another killing zone, where predator and prey find each other.

But the tall grass on either side of me hides just as many threats, and I don’t have the energy to thrash my own path through dense bush. I must move quickly, because somewhere behind me is Johnny, the most relentless predator of all. Why did I refuse to see it? As the others were taken down one by one, their flesh and bones fed to this
hungry land, I was blind to his game. Every look Johnny gave me, every kind word, was merely a prelude to a kill.

As the sun reaches its height, I am still trudging the elephant path. The mud dries to a hard crust on my skin and clumps of it crumble into my mouth as I eat a second PowerBar, and I devour it, grit and all. I know I should conserve my food supply, but I’m already famished and the ultimate tragedy would be to collapse dead, with food still in my knapsack. The trail veers back toward the water’s edge, where I come to a lagoon so black and still that a twin sky is reflected in its waters. The heat of midday has silenced the bush; even the birds have gone quiet. At the water’s edge is a tree where dozens of strange, pendulous sacs hang like Christmas balls. In my heat-crazed exhaustion, I wonder if I’ve stumbled upon a colony of alien cocoons, left to incubate where no one will discover them. Then a bird flutters past and vanishes into one of the sacs. Weaverbird nests.

The water of the lagoon stirs, as if something has just awakened. I back away, sensing evil here, waiting to trap the unwary. I feel its chill at my back as I retreat, once again, into the grass.

T
HAT EVENING,
I
WALK
straight into the elephant herd.

In bush this thick, even something as large as an elephant can take you by surprise, and as I stumble out of a stand of acacia trees, suddenly
there she is
in front of me. She seems just as startled as I am and gives a trumpet of alarm so loud that it seems to blast straight through me. I’m too shocked to run. I stand frozen, the acacias at my back, the elephant facing me, standing just as still. As we stare at each other, I see massive gray shapes moving all around me. A whole herd of them are rattling the branches, snapping off twigs. They know I am here, of course, and they pause in their feeding to warily eye the mud-caked intruder. How little effort it would take for any one of them to kill me. A swat of the trunk, one massive foot on my chest, would rid them of this threat. I feel them all studying me, weighing my fate. Then one elephant calmly reaches up, breaks off a twig, and
slides it into her mouth. One by one, they resume feeding. They have judged me, and issued their reprieve.

Quietly I slip back into the brush and move toward the cover of a majestic tree that towers above the acacias. I clamber up the massive trunk until I’m high enough to perch safely above the herd, and I settle into the crook of a branch. Like my primate ancestors, I find safety in the trees. In the distance, hyenas cackle and lions roar, a warning of the coming battle at nightfall. From high in my perch, I watch the sun set. In the shadows below my tree, elephants continue to feed, rustling and shuffling. Reassuring sounds.

The whole night comes alive with screams and roars. The stars wink on, crystalline bright in a black sky. Through arching branches I spy the constellation Scorpio, which Johnny pointed out to me on the first night. It’s just one of the many things he taught me about living in the bush, and I wonder why he bothered. To give me a fighting chance and make me more worthy as prey?

Somehow I have outlasted all the others. I think of Clarence and Elliot, the Matsunagas and the blondes. Most of all I think of Richard and what we once had together. I remember the promises we made, and the nights when we’d fall asleep with our arms around each other. Suddenly I am weeping for Richard, for all that we once had, and my sobs are like one more animal call in this noisy nocturnal chorus. I cry until my chest aches and my throat is raw. Until I am so exhausted that I am limp.

I fall asleep the way my ancestors did a million years ago, in a tree, under the stars.

A
T DAWN ON THE
fourth day, I unwrap the final PowerBar. I eat it slowly, each bite an act of reverence for the holy power of food. Because it is my last meal, every nut, every flake of oat is a joyous explosion of flavor that I never truly appreciated before. I think of the many holiday feasts I’ve gorged on, but none was as sacred as this meal, eaten in a tree as the sky blooms gold with the rising sun. I lick the last crumbs from the wrapper, then clamber down to the riverbank,
where I drop to my knees as though in prayer, and drink from the rushing water.

When I rise to my feet, I feel strangely sated. I can’t remember when the plane is due back at the landing strip, but it hardly matters now. Johnny will tell the pilot that there was a terrible calamity and there is no one left alive to search for. No one will ever come looking for me. To the world, I am dead.

I scoop up mud from the river and anoint my face and arms with a fresh layer. Already I feel the sun’s heat beating down on my neck and swarms of biting insects rise from the reeds. The day has scarcely begun, and I am already exhausted.

I force myself to my feet. Once again, I trudge south.

B
Y THE AFTERNOON OF
the next day, I am so hungry that I double over with stomach cramps. I drink from the river, hoping that water will ease the pangs, but I gulp down too much, too fast, and it all comes up again. I kneel in the mud, retching, weeping. How easy it would be to give up now! To lie down and let the animals take me. My flesh, my bones, will be devoured by the wilderness, forever joined to Africa. From this land we all arose, and to this land I return. It is a fitting place to die.

Something splashes in the water, and I lift my head to see two ears flicking on the surface. A hippo. I’m close enough to alarm it, but I’m beyond fear, beyond caring if I live or die. Though it knows I’m here, it continues to bask unconcerned. The murky water ripples with small fish and insects, and cranes splash down from the sky. In this place where I am dying, there is so much life. I watch an insect flutter toward a thicket of papyrus reeds, and suddenly I’m hungry enough to eat even that dragonfly. But I’m not fast enough, and all I catch is a handful of reeds, thick and fibrous. I don’t know if they’ll poison me; I don’t care. I just want something to fill my stomach and ease the cramps.

With the pocketknife from my knapsack, I slash a handful of reeds and bite down on the stems. The rind is soft, the flesh starchy.
I chew and chew until all that’s left in my mouth is a hard wad of fibers, which I spit out. My cramps are easing. I cut another handful of papyrus reeds and gnaw on them, like an animal. Like the hippo, who calmly grazes nearby. Slash and chew, slash and chew. With every mouthful, I take the bush into me, feel it become one with me.

The woman I once was, Millie Jacobson, has reached the end of her journey. On my knees, at the river’s edge, I surrender her soul.

BOSTON

M
AURA COULD NOT SEE HIM, BUT SHE KNEW HE WAS WATCHING HER
.

“There, up on the ledge,” said Dr. Alan Rhodes, the zoo’s large-cat specialist. “He’s just behind that clump of grass. He’s hard to make out because he blends so perfectly into the rocks.”

Only then did Maura spot the tawny eyes. They were fixed on her and only her, with the cold, laser focus that binds predator to prey. “I would have missed him completely,” she murmured. Already shivering in the cold wind, she felt her chill deepen as she met the cougar’s unrelenting stare.

“He didn’t miss
you
,” said Rhodes. “He’s probably been tracking you since we walked around that bend, into his field of view.”

“You say he’s tracking me. But not you?”

“For a predator, it’s all about identifying the most accessible prey, the easiest one to bring down. Before he’d attack a full-grown man, a cougar will choose a child or a woman. Look, do you see that family coming toward us? Watch what the cougar does. Watch his eyes.”

Up on the ledge, the cougar’s head suddenly swiveled and he snapped to full alertness, his muscles rippling as he rose to a crouch.
His gaze was no longer on Maura; instead those laser eyes were fixed on a new target, which was now scampering toward his enclosure. A child.

“It’s both movement and size that attract him,” said Rhodes. “When a kid goes running by this enclosure, it’s like flipping a switch inside a cat’s head. Instinct takes over.” Rhodes turned to her. “I’m curious why you’re suddenly interested in cougars. Not that I mind answering questions,” he added quickly. “In fact, I’d be happy to tell you a lot more over lunch sometime, if you’d like.”

“I find big cats fascinating, but I’m actually here because of a case we’re working on.”

“So it’s about work.”

Was that disappointment she heard in his voice? She couldn’t read his face, because he’d turned toward the enclosure, his elbows propped on the guardrail, his gaze back on the cougar. She considered what it might be like to have lunch with Alan Rhodes. Interesting conversation with a man who was clearly passionate about his work. She saw intelligence in his eyes, and although he wasn’t particularly tall, his work outdoors kept him tanned and fit. This was the solid, reliable sort of man she
should
have fallen in love with, but the spark wasn’t there. Chasing that damn spark had brought her nothing but sorrow; why did it never ignite with a man who could make her happy?