The Last Leopard

by Lauren St. John

  The swarm swerved toward her with a hum so loud it resonated in her chest like a bass drum. Martine threw herself on the ground and lay motionless. There was a rush of whirring air as the bees swept over her, followed by a strangled yell as they descended upon Griffin. He turned and fled down the mountainside.

  Martine got to her feet swaying, and stumbled on. Her sole intention was to make it to the top of the hill, where she could more easily be seen. She was almost there when she stepped on the piece of honeycomb that had broken off the nest. It stuck to her shoe. She paused to detach it, and that’s when it happened.

  That’s when the ground gave way beneath her feet.

  Her stomach was left behind, and she was falling, falling, falling, an avalanche of earth falling with her. Each time she thought she’d reached the bottom, the bottom would give way and she’d fall again.

  When she did hit the ground it was with a nasty crunch, and yet still the avalanche kept coming. Moist, cool earth—earth that smelled of worms and rotting leaves—was filling her mouth, eyes, and ears, and as fast as she tried to spit it out or push it away, more came in. She was choking on it. She couldn’t breathe.

  Seconds before the last chink of daylight was erased she saw Khan. He was trying to get to her through the debris, although whether he wanted to save her or attack her, she didn’t know. She just knew she was about to be buried alive.

  Quite suddenly, everything was black and still. The roof stopped falling and she could breathe again. Gingerly, she tested her limbs. They were sore, but it didn’t feel as if anything was broken. Not yet at least. But who knew what Khan had in mind. Maybe he’d just chew her up whole. She strained her ears. Was he readying himself to pounce? She unzipped her survival kit and groped inside for her flashlight.

  It was gone.

  Disbelief and a panic so extreme she felt as if she’d been stabbed in the stomach hit Martine like a tidal wave. This couldn’t be happening. Through every adventure and every near-death disaster she’d experienced since arriving in Africa, she’d been kept going by the knowledge that there were tools in her survival kit that could save her. But it wasn’t only about what was in the pouch. It was that everything in it had been given to her by someone she cared for—by the Morrisons back in England, by Grace, Tendai, Gwyn Thomas, and even by Caracal School’s most infuriating boy, Claudius. Now it was almost empty.

  Martine couldn’t understand it. The survival kit had been with her nearly every minute, apart from a few hours the previous night when she’d forgotten it by the fire after the crisis with baby Emelia. It was hard to believe that her pink flashlight, Swiss Army knife, and other items could have held any interest for the weary villagers. Then who? The witch doctor? She doubted it. The dogs? A roaming night animal?

  A picture of fluttering eyelashes and a long yellow beak popped into Martine’s head. “Magnus!” she gasped.

  The irony of it was too cruel. She’d escaped the human treasure seekers, only to be robbed by a treasure-seeking bird, and now she was alone in the blackness with the most dangerous animal on earth: a wounded leopard.

  21

  Khan gave a menacing growl that was somehow magnified by the dead air and the blinding dark. Martine tried to curl herself into a small ball. If she could have seen his eyes she could have attempted to use her gift to stop him from attacking her, but without light she could do nothing.

  She couldn’t hear Khan, but she was certain he was very near. It would have been comforting to think that he could see as little as she did, but she knew leopards were nocturnal and had perfect night vision. He was probably watching her every move. An image of Khan on the first day she’d seen him came into her head, and the terror she’d felt when he smashed her to the ground, planted his great paws on either side of her chest, and drew back his whiskered lips in a snarl, returned with a vengeance now.

  She wondered if she’d die quickly or slowly, over several days. Big cats sometimes toyed with their meals. Their victims. Perhaps she’d be eaten one leg at a time, and have to lie in the blackness, half in agony, half fainting, listening to Khan crunch up her toes before working his way up to her thighs and so on.

  The strange, muffled silence continued. Martine wasn’t sure which was worse: to see death coming or to sit in blind ignorance. Finally she could bear it no longer. She had to know. Had to witness for herself what the leopard was planning.

  Without changing position, she opened the pouch again and rummaged through it in case it contained some life-saving device she’d somehow missed. But it was empty apart from Grace’s headache potion and a tube of superglue. The hornbill had done a pretty thorough job of stealing the shiny things. Oddly, it was still quite heavy, which was why Martine hadn’t noticed the missing items sooner. She unzipped an interior pocket she rarely used, and her fingers touched something hard and smooth. Something waxy. Candles! And, behind them, slightly crushed, was the box of matches, which she and Ben had taken from Sadie’s house, along with one or two other supplies, when they left. She had put them into her survival pouch without thinking.

  Striking a match, she held it to the candlewick. Khan snarled at the sizzle and the flare of yellow light. As she’d suspected, he was very close to her, but he wasn’t poised to pounce. He was in a smooth hollow on the rock floor of a long cavern. His rib cage was rising and falling very rapidly and his breathing was distressed. She soon saw why. A pool of blood had collected around his chest, staining his golden fur scarlet. A gaping wound was the source of it.

  Martine’s eyes filled with tears. She forgot to be afraid, forgot that he was a killer and could yet eat her, forgot everything except that she’d promised to protect him and failed.

  “Khan,” she whispered, “I’m sorry.”

  Khan’s eyes were glazed with pain. He rose with effort and wandered unsteadily over to a shadowed area. Martine lifted the candle so that the wobbly circle of light illuminated him. He was lapping at a tiny spring. Judging from the water marks on the smooth rocks that surrounded it, it had once been the source of a large stream—perhaps even an underground river—but it had dried up over the years and was little more a trickle.

  The leopard drank for a long time, and then he returned to the hollow and lay down again. Blood leaked steadily onto the floor beneath his chest. He growled softly to himself and licked hopelessly at his scarlet paws.

  Martine was in despair. It was agony to see such a proud, magnificent animal reduced to a pitiful invalid. She was sure that if he carried on losing blood at the present rate he would die within the hour.

  Since he was too preoccupied with his own suffering to pose a threat, Martine climbed stiffly to her feet and began to take stock of their surroundings. It didn’t take long to establish that their situation was desperate. The cavern they were in seemed to be the end of a tunnel hewn by the water and now blocked by an immense boulder. Martine tried holding the candle to the hole where the spring flowed out but couldn’t see what was on the other side. Whether the boulder was part of the landslide or had been there for centuries was difficult to tell.

  She checked the cavern roof, but that didn’t look hopeful either. The hole through which she’d fallen was also blocked, and was much too high for her to reach even if it wasn’t. It’s not as if there was a chair or a ladder she could use to stand on. Last she examined the walls. They were solid rock. Or at least she thought they were. There was something subtly different about the wall behind the leopard. She stared at it for a long time but couldn’t work out what.

  Realistically her, and Khan’s, only chance of survival was to be saved by someone on the outside. Problem was, nobody knew they were there. She could try shouting, but it was hard to believe that anyone would hear her.

  Martine wanted to cry. Some of the ordeals she’d faced over the past eight months had been so horrific she’d been quite sure that if she lived through them she’d never experience anything worse. And yet here she was, buried alive with a wounded leopard. “You couldn’t
make it up,” she said out loud and very nearly managed a smile.

  She eyed the bleeding leopard, sniffed loudly, and pulled herself together. Tendai was always telling her that the more hopeless things seemed in a survival situation, the more you had to focus on doing what you could do, minute by minute. And what she needed to do now was help the leopard.

  Her priority was to stop him bleeding. But how? She was in a solid rock cavern with a virtually empty survival kit. And yet Tendai and Grace insisted that even the most barren places had something to offer in terms of healing herbs or tools that could save a life.

  “When you have looked with your own eyes and you can’t see anything to help you, that’s when you must look with the eyes of a Bushman or an animal,” Tendai would say. “The San lived in the deserts of the Kalahari where you or I would see nothing but sand. But they found every medicine they needed and all the food they could eat.”

  Martine tried looking around the cave with San eyes. The only natural resource there was water. She didn’t know how clean it was, but animals have very good instincts about such things, and the fact that Khan had drunk so much of it was a positive sign. Water on its own was not going to be much use, but if the spring had ever been exposed to sunlight there might be moss. And Grace had taught her that moss was almost as effective as gauze dressing when it came to wounds.

  She carried the candle over to the thin stream, keeping a wary eye on Khan. Worryingly, he didn’t even lift his head. Martine knew that his condition was getting critical. She sighed with relief when she saw the luxuriant bed of green growing up on the far side of the water. Using a sharp triangle of broken rock, she cut two square mats of nature’s best field dressing.

  It was her first breakthrough.

  All she had to do now was find some form of antiseptic or antibiotic. Would Grace’s headache potion be any use?

  She went over to examine her survival kit again and noticed that the bottom of her right shoe kept sticking to the floor. That reminded her that she’d stepped on some honeycomb shortly before her fall. Honey! Honey was an excellent natural antibiotic and wound healer. What if the chunk of honeycomb had tumbled with her? That would make all the difference.

  She rushed over to the pile of earth and stones and scrabbled at it like a terrier after a bone. Thanks to its stickiness, she found the honeycomb almost immediately. She rinsed it clean and ate a few chunks to give her energy. It had a rich toffee taste, which boosted her spirits. They needed boosting. The hard part was still to come.

  Khan’s head rested on the worn hollow of rock with a familiarity that made Martine wonder if he came here often, if this was his secret lair. She’d assumed that he’d tumbled through the cavern ceiling like she had, but if this was his secret den he must have been here already. And if that was true, a landslide must have sealed the tunnel after he was inside.

  Sensing he was the object of her attention, Khan gave a warning snarl so vicious Martine’s heart almost leaped from her chest. Her only consolation was that he’d had two previous opportunities to hurt her and hadn’t. On the second occasion, he’d actually saved her from Mr. Rat and his thugs.

  Martine decided that the only solution was to pretend that the leopard was just an oversized version of Shelby and Warrior, her grandmother’s cats. She picked up the moss, honey, and her almost empty survival kit, marched purposefully over to him, and sat down beside him as if she dealt with injured leopards every day of the week.

  In the flickering candlelight, the expression on Khan’s face was priceless. Had his condition not been so serious, Martine would have dissolved into giggles. He looked too shocked to object. He lay on his side and, for once, was quite docile.

  Before he had time to change his mind, Martine pressed the moss to the wound on his chest, earning a savage growl for her bravery but nothing worse. Her other hand covered his heart. She closed her eyes. Nearly two months had passed since she’d last drawn on her gift, and she was not entirely confident it would work, but she focused on Khan’s silken fur beneath her palms and the steady doof, doof, doof beat of his heart. Her hands grew hotter. Flashes of light and memory, like incoming pictures on a faulty television, began to crash around her head.

  She saw the faces of the ancients, the San Bushmen, and somehow they were kinder and wiser than she could ever have imagined, and they were chanting with her, encouraging her, and it seemed to Martine that they were speaking in the language that the witch doctor had used and that she could understand it. A magical energy came from them and passed through her as if she were a lightning conductor.

  At first the leopard writhed beneath her touch as if her hands were so hot they were singeing him, but gradually his muscles relaxed and a peace came over him. She opened her eyes and lifted away the moss. The bleeding had stopped. Using her handkerchief as a wet cloth, she rinsed shrapnel from the wound and wiped the area around it. Then she dribbled honey onto the exposed flesh.

  Throughout this process Khan lay still, although he trembled slightly. Once the blood had been cleaned away Martine was pleased to see the bullet hole wasn’t as wide or deep as she’d feared. It had bled a lot, but the wound itself was clean. That meant she could use superglue to close it. A long time ago she’d employed soldier termites to stitch up a fallen kudu, but Grace had wisely pointed out they weren’t always going to be handy and that the glue would be a worthwhile addition to her survival kit.

  “I would have thought that you’d prefer to use something more natural than hardware-store glue to treat wounds,” Martine had said.

  “T’aint about what’s natural, honey,” Grace had replied. “It’s about what works.”

  The superglue also meant that no termites were decapitated in the process of stitching, which was definitely good. And it was more efficient. Martine squeezed a tiny amount along one edge of the wound and pressed the two sides together. It sealed perfectly.

  By now she felt confident enough in Khan to pour Grace’s painkilling potion into the side of his mouth. He licked his lips and wrinkled up his nose, baring his fearsome teeth. It was obvious he loathed the foul taste, but he seemed to understand it was for his own good.

  With the immediate crisis over, Martine realized how shattered she was. As long as she’d been focused on Khan, she hadn’t had time to think about herself. Now she couldn’t stop shaking. She washed her hands and face in the spring. The thing she kept thinking about was what would happen if nobody found them. What if this cold cavern was to become their tomb?

  As far as she could tell, she’d done everything she could for the moment. She had light and food (well, a few table-spoons’ worth of honey) and they both had water. Water could keep them alive for weeks, although if nobody found them that might not necessarily be a good thing. They’d simply starve to death over a longer period. What’s worse, they’d starve to death in the dark. There were only two candles in the survival kit, and the first one was half gone.

  She wondered how Ben was doing. He’d protected her from the hunters at great risk to himself, but she had a feeling he would have outsmarted them or, at the very least, outrun them. With any luck the police siren she’d heard belonged to a squad car full of good police, rather than corrupt police, who’d rescue Ben from the clutches of the Rat’s men and then start combing the hills for her and Khan.

  She thought too about her grandmother, who she hoped was not too distressed about her disappearance; about Jemmy, whom she missed with every fiber of her being; Grace, who would be proud of how she’d used the knowledge she’d been given to heal the leopard; Tendai, whose bushcraft lessons had helped her think her way through the situation methodically when a lot of kids she knew would have been hysterical with despair; and, of course, her mum and dad, who might be gone but were always with her and watching over her, every minute of every day.

  Her watch showed that it was early evening, but time was meaningless in the cavern. Martine propped herself up against the cold rock wall and tried to doze. She was as scared
to blow out the candle and face the suffocating darkness as she was to keep it burning and see it melt away to nothing. She would keep it lit until she felt sleepier. It gave the illusion of warmth. The temperature in the cave was dropping by the minute.

  Martine looked longingly at the leopard’s golden form. She wondered if he was as scared and lonely as she was. She tried to remind herself that leopards were the most unpredictable and fierce of the big cats and that he was unlikely to be feeling any such thing, but she had very little to lose.

  She went over to him and lay down in the hollow. It was strangely soft, almost cushioned. Khan half opened one eye but did nothing to suggest he minded. Heart pounding, Martine blew out the candle and snuggled against his silky back, carefully avoiding his wound. When he didn’t react, she put an arm over him and rested her palm on one of his great paws, feeling the sharpness of his claws and the heat of his rough, fleshy pads.

  She was just dozing off when he began to purr—big, tractor-type purrs that vibrated through them both. A slow grin spread across Martine’s face.

  It was a strange kind of heaven, sleeping with a wild leopard, but it was heaven nonetheless.

  22

  Tuk-tuk-tuk. Tat-tat-tat. Tuk-tuk-tuk. Tat-tat-tat. “Magnus, leave me alone,” grumbled Martine. “It’s too early. I’ve told you before not to wake me at the crack of dawn.”

  She stretched stiffly and her arm touched something soft and silky. It let out a noise that was somewhere between a growl and a purr. Martine sat bolt upright in the darkness. The terror of the previous day came back to her. She was hundreds of feet underground with the world’s biggest leopard and they were in a cave that could soon become their tomb.

  She groped about for the candle and matches, and the cavern filled with light. Khan sat up too and his yellow eyes swung on her like headlamps. The hatred she’d once seen in them had been replaced with a look that definitely wasn’t love, but wasn’t far from it either. She leaned forward without fear and examined his chest wound. There was hardly any swelling and the tissue around it was pink and healthy. Martine felt quite pleased with her handiwork. “Not bad for an amateur,” she boasted to Khan, and ran her hand over his amazing spotted coat.