Escape Under the Forever Sky (7 page)

I hugged my knees and rocked back and forth, taking slow, deep breaths.
What are Mom and Dad doing right now? I bet they aren't sleeping either. Has Daddy gotten to
Addis yet? Mom's probably turned the residence into a war room
. I could see her in her element, giving orders, making phone calls, coordinating, dictating, managing. I could see Daddy calling all our relatives and friends. I could hear him saying, “I'm afraid I have some bad news. . . .”
Grandma Catherine and Grandpa John are going to be wrecks. What about Tana? I hope she didn't get in trouble. I hope she doesn't think what happened was her fault
.

A deep roar thundered in the distance. My head jerked up. I would know that sound anywhere:
anbasa
. A lion. Another roar. And a few minutes later, another. The last one sounded closer; it must have been a second lion answering the call of the first one.

I know a lot about lion behavior. Most people think lions roar when they're angry or when they want to show how powerful they are. But actually they do it to mark their territory and to let other lions know they're there. Lions don't want to get into fights with other lions; they roar so other lions can avoid them. Most of the time the system works pretty well. Unless food or water is scarce, and then lions go wherever they have to go to get what they need. Desperation makes them do
things they wouldn't otherwise do. I guess that's true of people, too.
Is Dawit desperate? Am I?

I once saw a whole pride of lions when I was in one of the game parks. They're called “parks,” but they're not like the parks we have back home. The parks back home are meant for people, so they have benches, fountains, sculptures, playgrounds, and snack bars. Even the big ones—like Rock Creek Park in D.C.—are small enough to walk around in a day.

The game parks in Africa are about land and animals that the government is supposed to protect from developers and poachers. The Menagesha National Park, which is the one closest to Addis, is considered small even though it's four hundred square miles. When you're inside, the land and the sky go on forever, and it's so beautiful you never want to leave. It's hard to put into words, but Africa is the only place I've ever been where human beings feel like just one small part of a vast and complicated earth.

When I'm in the bush, my favorite view is an acacia tree—or, even better, a grove of them—silhouetted against the blue sky in a wide-open field of tall grass. Acacias are the trees everyone thinks of when they
think of Africa, the ones that look like umbrellas because of their long thin trunks and wide canopies. Actually, that's what people call them: umbrella trees. Sometimes I stretch my arms, reaching my fingers out as far as they can go, and tilt my head way back so I see nothing but endless sky. I sway slowly side to side, feeling the grass gently brush against my legs, and pretend I am an acacia tree. It's as close as I ever get to believing in God.

“Did you see any warthogs today?” I asked Dahnie one morning not too long ago. We were driving around Menagesha National Park, looking for anything and everything, like always. I love warthogs. With their giant snouts and beady little eyes, they're the ugliest animals on the planet, and I laugh every time I see one.

“Oh yes, Lucy, I told them you were coming today. They said to tell you
chhhhh!
” He made a huge snorting noise, and I cracked up. Dahnie can be a total goofball even if he is twenty-five years old and married. Dahnie is superskinny and about the same height as my mother, which is about average for an
Ethiopian man. Because nutrition is so bad here, people are much smaller and thinner than people back home. For once I fit right in.

I love going on game drives. Not just because of the animals but also because it's the only time I really feel free to just be who I am and do what matters to me. It was a gorgeous morning, even cool enough for me to wear a sweatshirt. I took a deep breath and let the air come whooshing out. “So,” I asked Dahnie, “where to first?”

“I thought we would head west a bit. I want to check on some blue-winged geese that are nesting in the grass.”

He waited while I checked my watch: 9:44 here and 1:44 in Bethesda. The compass showed we were headed north. I pointed left. “Thataway,” I said.

We bounced along the dusty road for a while, not saying much. Dahnie's rifle rested on the seat between us, but I was used to it, since Dahnie always carried it with him when we were in the park.
“You never know what can happen out in the bush, Lucy.”
Dahnie's father was killed by poachers when Dahnie was very young. Sometimes I watch Dahnie and look for that loss, but I never
see it. I only see the peace he and I share when we're in the park. The sadness and anger must be buried somewhere deep.

The jeep bumped over the rocks, and I gazed out the open window at the tall grasses and bushy olive trees. We stopped and got out of the car to watch a herd of antelope grazing in the distance. I plucked a grass stem and chewed it for a while, fantasizing.

“They're so beautiful,” I said at last. “Wouldn't it be amazing to walk right in there with them?”

“Do not forget, Lucy, they are wild animals. You must respect their need for distance from you.”

“Oh, Dahnie, why do you always have to remind me how dangerous everything is?”

“I do not try to scare you, Lucy. I want you to understand your place in this park and to respect the animals that live here.”

“You know I respect them,” I said, “but can't I also
admire
them? Can't I
wish
that things were different and I didn't have to worry about them eating me and they didn't have to worry about me shooting them?”

Dahnie laughed. “Of course you can.”

We got back into the car and continued driving.

“Dahnie?”

“Yes, Lucy?”

“What did Ethiopia look like before? I mean before so many of the trees were cut down.”

“It was much more green, of course. But there was also much more of everything—more fertile soil, more animals, more rain. Deforestation is terrible for Ethiopia. It makes a very bad cycle of poverty and famine. Without trees, the earth dries up, the wells dry up. Then the farmers cannot grow food, and their animals cannot graze. The wild animals die too, because they also do not have enough food. It is as bad as war.”

“So why does the government let people keep chopping down trees?”

“What else can the people do? They are so poor they cannot buy other fuel. The government plants more trees, but people cut them down faster than the government can plant them.”

Suddenly Dahnie slammed on the breaks so hard I almost smashed my head on the dashboard.

“Over there,” he said in a fierce whisper. “Look there, Lucy.”

I looked first at him and then out the window where he was pointing.

I gasped.

There in the shade of a huge acacia, maybe twenty feet away from us, sat a whole pride. I counted them. Two lionesses, three cubs, and several yards away from the rest of the group, a full-grown lion.

We were so lucky. Most of the big game in Ethiopia has been poached or, like Dahnie said, has died off from deforestation. There are maybe a thousand wild lions left in the whole country. We watched them for a long time. The male seemed to be sleeping. The cubs played a lot, and the lionesses mostly ignored them.

“Dahnie?”

“Yes, Lucy?”

“How come they just sit there?”

He turned to face me. “Why should they get up?”

“What do you mean, ‘Why should they get up'?” I asked.

“I mean just what I said. Why should they get up? What do they need to do? They have no predators, so they do not need to be on the lookout for anyone.”

“But don't they have to go find food or something?

I don't know—don't they need exercise?” It just seemed bizarre to me that wild animals could have so much leisure time.

“A lion can eat one hundred pounds of meat at one meal and then eat very little for a week. Lions sleep as much as twenty hours in a day.” Dahnie paused, like he always does before he says something he wants me to remember.

“Lions are the most powerful members of the animal kingdom. They do not get up, Lucy, because they do not have to.”

All alone in my shack, I thought about that for a long time.
What makes a lion have to get up? What makes anyone take action?

T
HE LIONS ROARED
on and off all night, and I stayed awake listening to them. Then it hit me—I knew where I was! Well, sort of. Almost all the lions in Ethiopia are in the southern and southwestern parts of the country. If there were lions nearby, that was where I had to be. For the first time I felt as if I was
somewhere
instead of
anywhere
. I was no longer adrift in a million square miles in the Horn of Africa. Instead, I was lost in one finite region that I could picture on a map in my mind. My newfound knowledge felt like a small anchor that tethered me to a familiar reality. It comforted me just enough that I could fall asleep.

I woke up to voices outside my jail cell again.
Sunlight streaming through the cracks in the walls told me it was morning.

“English, please! There will be no Amharic here. We speak a language all three of us understand, or we don't speak at all.” It was the woman who had brought me the
injera
. She was definitely British. She had one of those boarding school accents that I could recognize anywhere—I had met enough of those girls.

And she had just confirmed that the men were speaking Amharic, so my initial hypothesis was proved correct: I had been kidnapped by greater than or equal to two Ethiopian men—and one British woman.

In the morning light I could see my prison much better. It looked like something that had just been thrown together, maybe even something temporary. There were spaces where the boards didn't line up all the way and sunlight poured through, so I knew it was a freestanding building and not part of a larger house. I got up off the mat slowly because of my painful bruises and as quietly as possible so they wouldn't hear me and put my eye up to one of the biggest cracks. I could see the woman, half of a man's back . . . and Dawit.

“Be patient, Dawit. Let them worry about the girl.
It will make our position stronger.” The other man turned as he spoke, and I recognized him as the man with the bad teeth from the car. Unlike Dawit, who was tall and beefy by Ethiopian standards (in other words, average by American standards), Nasty Teeth was small and wiry. He reminded me of a mole viper, a little black snake that looks harmless but you don't want to get it mad because one bite will kill you.

“No, Markos, Dawit is right,” the woman said. “You need to make the call now.”
Markos. Nasty Teeth's name is Markos
.

“Are you giving orders, Helena?”
Helena
. “That is not your job here.” Markos sounded annoyed.