The Lion Who Stole My Arm (7 page)

Pedru’s arm fell limp by his side. Tears ran down his face.

Down below, Anjani found the little plastic speaker and crunched it in his teeth. Then he turned his attention to dinner.

Phht! Phht!
The darts swished through the air like hornets. In minutes, the two lions were stretched out, fast asleep in the Land Rover’s headlights.

While the team got the collars on and took pictures of the lions, Pedru crouched by Anjani’s head and ran his fingers through the knots of mane. He rubbed his finger on the scar, like a dark star on the lion’s brow.

“You put that there,” said Issa softly, coming to crouch beside him.

Pedru nodded.

“I saw you,” Issa said, “in the tree, with your spear raised. It would have gone straight through his heart.”

“Yes,” said Pedru, “but a dead lion cannot give me back my arm. A dead lion can give nothing back. But a living lion . . .” Pedru looked up into his father’s face. “I think Renaldo is right. There is so much a living lion could give us.”

Issa put his hand on the top of Pedru’s head. “You see? I told you,” he said. “You did not need two arms to be strong.”

P
edru was giving a talk to the whole school about lions. Renaldo was helping. He’d rigged up a big projector screen so that everyone could see the photographs of the lions. Pedru began with a picture of Puna and her four fluffy dandelion-yellow cubs. Some of the children simply couldn’t believe that lions started life so small.

“Most cubs don’t make it,” Pedru told the children. “They starve to death or are killed by other predators, or by lions that take over their pride.”

Pedru told the children about how lions work together to hunt their prey and live in big families. He told the children how clever and strong lions are. Then he showed them a picture of Anjani and Samir with their radio collars on, standing over a zebra that they had just killed.

“This one,” Pedru said, pointing to the dark-maned lion, “is the lion who attacked me.”

The children gasped.

“But because he wears a collar, we can tell where he is, so he can never sneak up on anyone again! Also,” Pedru continued, “here are all the ways we keep safe from lions in our village.”

Renaldo clicked on the next picture, and a big poster popped up. It showed people putting up fences to keep bush pigs and lions out of crops; it showed people sleeping outside in shelters on stilts so lions couldn’t get them; it showed people walking at night with good, bright flashlights to frighten predators away. And it also showed people doing the exact opposite in a very funny way. The pictures made everyone laugh, and the children were all very pleased when Pedru told them that there was a copy of the poster for every child to take home.

After the talk, Mr. Mecula shook Pedru’s hand.

“You are a talented artist, Pedru. Your pictures on the poster will show many, many people how to stay safe from lions.”

“My left-handed writing’s a bit better now, too!” said Pedru. “Thanks, Mr. Mecula. I’d never have found out I could draw if you hadn’t given me that book.”

“You’d never have found out you could draw if you still had your right hand, Pedru.”

Outside in the school yard, John had been helping the younger children make animal masks from paper plates and rubber bands.

“I knew that art course I took in college would come in handy one day.” He grinned.

Little zebras and waterbuck were being chased around by lions and leopards, although nobody had wanted to be a hyena. Zibi and Aji were running around hand in hand and roaring, even though Pedru told them that cheetahs didn’t roar.

Beth and Issa were talking to the grown-ups, showing them the lion collars. Issa put earphones on Adalia, who almost jumped out of her skin when she heard the
bleep bleep bleep
signal coming from one of the collars that was inside the Land Rover.

“Oh, my goodness,” said Adalia, laughing. “I thought a lion was right behind me!”

Mamma Ramina and Mamma Lago stood proudly behind a table, handing out rolled-up posters and homemade cookies to a long line of children.

Renaldo put his hand on Pedru’s shoulder. “Well done. You did a great job,” he said. “Now there’s somebody I want you to meet.”

The young man beside Renaldo took off his sunglasses and smiled. Pedru recognized him at once from his picture in the paper: Mauricio Kapango, the best forward the Black Mambas had ever had. Pedru couldn’t speak. He just shook Mauricio’s hand in wonder.

“I hear you’re a lion expert, Pedru,” Mauricio said. “I’m gonna need some lion experts when I build my safari lodge in Madune.”

It wasn’t long before the word spread that Mauricio Kapango,
the
Mauricio Kapango, was right there for real. Soon he was surrounded by a crowd of very excited children.

“So,” he said, “shall we play a game? Do you have a ball?”

Everyone fell quiet.

“Well, yes,” said Samuel, stepping forward. “But it’s not really good enough.” He held up the tangle of string and grass that they used for a ball.

Mauricio grinned. “This is like the ball I learned to shoot with. It’ll be great to play with one again.”

Pedru decided that it was the best, best, best day of his whole life. He scored the winning goal from Mauricio’s pass, and then Enzi, Samuel, and all of his class carried him around the school on their shoulders.

As they put him down, Samuel said, “Good to have you back.”

“Really, really good,” said Enzi.

Pedru smiled. “I was thinking,” he said. “It’s been a while since we’ve gone fishing. . . .”

P
edru is listening to the
bleep bleep bleep
on his headphones that tells him where the lions are. He tunes in another frequency to locate the last radio collar and turns the antenna to pick up its direction. There! Now he knows where the visitors at the safari lodge should look tomorrow, to have the best chance of seeing lions. He’ll call his father’s cell phone and tell him. His father is the lodge’s best guide, the one the foreign visitors all ask for. Adalia works at the lodge now, too. She says it’s to pay for Aji and Zibi to go to college in Cape Town, like Pedru did. Issa says it’s because she likes bossing people around.

Pedru looks out from the high hilltop as the sun begins to sink. From up here, he can see so much: the lovely loop of the river, the flat green valley and rocky highlands, and, down there, the village where he grew up. It looks much the same as when he was a boy. The houses still stand around a central space, where people meet and boys play soccer. But there are differences. There’s a bathhouse in the middle of the village now, with water piped from a deep well. Everyone can drink and wash without risking an attack by the crocodiles down at the river! There’s a school, too. And now that it’s getting dark, lights come on. Not lanterns or candles, but bright electric lights — lights you can study and sew by. The lights are powered by the row of solar panels that Pedru helped to build on the south side of the village just two years ago. Lights pick out the thick thorn hedge that borders the marashambas, keeping bush pigs and the lions that follow them out of the crops. You can just see from here that each family’s land now has a sturdy hut on stilts, so when people sleep out with their crops, they are safe.

It’s time for Pedru to go. The bleeps have told him something, too: where the A Pride will be tonight. Pedru will spend the night watching them through his nightscope, recording their behavior for his PhD. It’s not the biggest pride in his study area, but it is his favorite.
A
stands for Anjani, because Anjani and Samir were the pride’s males for four years — a long time for lions to hold on to a pride. Anjani and his brother have been dead for a decade now, but Anjani’s granddaughters are still the heart of the A Pride. They have taught Pedru so many things about how lions hunt and live and get around the problems that humans cause them.

As he climbs down from the hilltop, Pedru finds himself talking in his head to the lion, Anjani, just as he did as a boy.
Yes,
he tells him,
you stole my arm, but look at what you have given me in return
.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, when humans still used stone tools and hunted for their food, lions were found in every part of the world except for Australia and Antarctica. Stone Age people made pictures of lions on rocks and cave walls. Ever since then, lions have been important to humans. There are lions in myths and stories, lions on TV and in movies. Everyone knows what a lion is. In fact, I bet that “lion” was one of the first animals that you could name when you were very little.

It’s hard to imagine a world without lions, but that may be exactly what we’re heading for. Today, most lions live in Africa, along with just a few hundred on one nature reserve in India. In the last ten years, the number of lions in Africa has dropped, so that there are only about 30,000 lions left there. That sounds like a lot, until you think that 30,000 is about the population of a medium-size town. Some scientists believe that lions could be extinct in the wild in ten years.

Why are lions in such danger? Well, the problem is that lions are not easy to live with. They are big, fierce predators, and they don’t mind eating cows, goats, sheep, or even people. When there were fewer people and there was more wilderness for lions to live in, this didn’t matter so much, as humans and lions could keep out of each other’s way. But now the human population in East Africa, where most lions live, has grown so much that there’s less wild food and wild space for lions. This means that more and more farm animals and people are being attacked — and even killed — by them. So you can understand why the people who have to live with lions are happy to shoot them, poison them, and let hunters from other countries pay money to kill them. This is exactly what is happening in Africa right now.