The Last Leopard

by Lauren St. John

  The leopard gave a blood-curdling snarl and surged to his feet. Martine froze. Was she about to pay the price for crossing a line with him? Was he going to turn on her? Then she heard it again—a faint knocking.

  Khan moved on silent paws toward the center of the cavern and crouched there, listening. The noise seemed to be coming from above. He looked around at Martine for reassurance.

  “Maybe it’s our friends,” Martine told him. “Maybe they’ve found us. Maybe we’re going to be saved.”

  She was astonished to find that she experienced a slight twinge of sorrow at the thought. Of course she wanted to be rescued. Of course she wanted to see Ben and her grandmother and everyone else. But she also knew that the magic of this time with Khan, when it was just the two of them against the world and they were utterly dependent on each other, would never come again. As soon as anyone else entered the cavern, the specialness of these moments would be banished with the morning light.

  Another more disturbing thought entered her head. What if the distant hammering wasn’t her friends at all? What if it was Griffin and his crew wanting revenge, or Rex Ratcliffe’s hunters, ready with their rifles? Those possibilities kept her from crying out for help. And yet anything must be better than starving to death in a black hole.

  She got up from the hollow, thinking to herself that it had been surprisingly warm and comfortable for a rock bed. Too warm and comfortable. A ghost of an idea flitted across her mind, but it was gone before she could get a grip on it. The hammering outside had started again but it was not so loud. The rescue party was moving away.

  Martine lifted the candle and was struck again by how the back wall of the cavern seemed slightly different from the rest. She rapped it with her knuckles to test it.

  The elusive thought floated into her head. It had to do with a comment Ngwenya had made when he was telling them about Lobengula’s treasure. He said that the burial party had “hidden it well and sealed the entrance with a stone wall.”

  Martine ran a hand over the wall, and that’s when she knew. It was man-made! That’s what was “wrong” with it. Whoever had built it had done it superbly, going to enormous lengths to replicate exactly the color and grain of the rock. Only someone who’d spent as much time in the cavern as she had would have noticed it was any different from the other walls.

  The hairs stood up on the back of Martine’s neck. She stared at the hollow. The last resting place of the king of leopards is the hiding place of the king’s treasure . . .

  It wasn’t the last resting place of the leopard, but it very nearly had been.

  Khan was snarling at the boulder, his tail swishing furiously. He paced the cave on legs wobbly from blood loss. Martine paused for a moment, hoping that he might have heard the distant voices of some rescuers, but she heard nothing.

  Sighing, she bent down and studied the smooth impression in the cavern floor. It had a worn appearance, which she’d put down to it having been used for months or even years as a sleeping area by Khan. But now she saw that it wasn’t rock at all; it was ancient leather. She used the sharp piece of rock to pry up a corner. Underneath was a platform of wood, which was easy enough to lift off. And beneath that was a vault hewn from the rock. It was filled with dusty sacks and three rusty cans that might once have been silver. One of the sacks had a small rip in it, out of which protruded a single gold sovereign. It winked in the candlelight.

  Khan roared and Martine nearly leaped out of her skin. From behind the boulder, there came the distinct sound of footsteps.

  “Martine!” Ben’s voice was muffled. “Martine, are you in there? Oh, please be alive. MARTINE!”

  As if in a dream, Martine replaced the wooden platform and the leather cover, went over to the pile of debris, and used her sweatshirt to carry several loads to the hollow. She patted it down and put her sweatshirt on top of it. Then she walked slowly to Khan’s side. She squatted down and put her arm around him.

  “Ben! Ben, I’m here!” she shouted, and her voice echoed back at her: “Ben-en-en-en! Ben-en-en-en, I’m here-ere-ere-ere!”

  23

  Martine would always remember that day as one of the happiest and saddest ever. Happy because she and Khan were saved, and her best friend, Sadie, and her grandmother were in one piece, although all were a bit shaken. Happy too because there were lots of hugs and tears of joy, and because after the boulder had been pulled away from the tunnel entrance, she, her friends, and practically everyone from Mercy and Odilo’s village had traveled to Black Eagle Lodge on the back of a tractor trailer and enjoyed a celebration barbecue in the sunshine.

  There was plenty to celebrate. A wave of arrests, for starters. The district attorney had been appalled to discover from Ngwenya that the involvement of several police officers in the pay of Rex Ratcliffe had led to the wrongful incarceration of two elderly women, one with a broken leg. He’d had his eye on the Lazy J for quite some time, and the evidence provided by the horse wrangler and the waiter finally gave him the ammunition he needed to get a search warrant. Not, however, before Sadie and Gwyn Thomas had spent a night in the cells with a host of petty thieves and one murderer.

  “I haven’t laughed so much in years,” declared Sadie, who seemed, bizarrely, to have relished the experience.

  The district attorney had taken a rather more dim view of his officers’ conduct, and after a day of inquiries had locked them up in the same cells. The police car Martine had heard when she was fleeing Griffin belonged to constables sent from Bulawayo by the DA. They’d been on their way to arrest the hunters for trespassing and attempting to kill a protected animal without a license. After they’d caught the duty manager chasing Ben with a stick, the policemen had added “assault on a minor” to the charge sheet.

  On their way back to the retreat, they’d discovered a comatose figure by the roadside. It was Griffin, suffering an allergic reaction to the bee stings. He was so swollen that one of the constables described him as looking as if he’d been blown up with a bicycle pump. He’d been rushed to the hospital and was sleeping off the medication. One of the first questions the police asked Martine was whether she and Ben wanted to press charges against the treasure seeker when he came to his senses. His shamwaris had fled the area and would have to be dealt with later.

  After talking it over, Ben and Martine agreed not to press charges. The ants and bees had punished Griffin enough and they felt he’d probably learned his lesson.

  “Deep down, he’s not a bad person,” Martine told Odilo. “As you said, he’s just fallen in with the wrong crowd and lost his way. If he gets a second chance, maybe he’ll think about going back to school and end up on the right side of the law.”

  Rex Ratcliffe had been arrested for illegal hunting, foreign currency violations, and other offenses too numerous to list, and was likely to be in jail for quite some time. The Lazy J had been closed down with immediate effect, and all the animals were going to be re-homed in new sanctuaries.

  “Good Rat-ence,” Sadie quipped when she was told about the Lazy J owner’s grim future behind bars. She was full of smiles. On her release, she had checked her post office box in Bulawayo and found a heap of bookings from an American travel agent, plus a $1,000 check from an anonymous benefactor. It all meant that she could rehire her former Black Eagle staff, with one new addition: Odilo was to replace Sadie as chef.

  “I don’t have any imagination as a cook,” she admitted. “The only recipes I know all seem to contain butternut squash.”

  But she was also beaming for another reason. “I saw the leopard again,” she said over and over. “I saw Khan and he was worth every second of every day I spent fighting for him.”

  In the late afternoon, Martine and Ben climbed Elephant Rock and sat on the hill’s summit watching the sun go down over the ancient landscape of the Matopos. They could see almost as far as the Hill of Benevolent Spirits and World’s View. Magnus the hornbill had flown up with them and was perched on Martine’s knee.

 
“Tell me again how you found me,” Martine said to Ben, unpacking the slices of chocolate cake she’d brought with her.

  He stretched out his brown legs on the warm granite rock and ate a mouthful of cake before replying. “Well, after the cops showed up and arrested the hunters, Ngwenya and I started searching for you. He’s a pretty good tracker himself and between us we tracked you to the top of Rock Rabbit Hill. There your footprints just stopped. We could see that ground near the tree had recently collapsed, as if there’d been a landslide or an old mine shaft had fallen in, and we were scared to death that you’d been buried alive, or were wandering around the catacomb of tunnels with a concussion or even lying somewhere with a broken limb.”

  He paused, battling tears. “I was frightened I might never see you again.”

  Martine grinned. “You’re not going to get rid of me that easily, you know.”

  “Promise? Anyway, it took a long time to get a rescue effort together because it’s impossible to dig up a whole hill, and nobody could agree on where or how to start. If we’d got it wrong, we could have made things much worse for you. We needed equipment, a paramedic, and a wildlife vet to tranquilize Khan if necessary. Plus your grandmother and Sadie wanted to be there, and most of the villagers insisted on helping.”

  “It sounds as if it was one of those ‘too many cooks’ situations,” Martine said sympathetically.

  “It was. Tribal custom meant that Chief Nyoni, who is the highest-ranking chief in the Matobo Hills, also had to be present. By coincidence, it turned out that his grandson was a famous wildlife vet. That was good news, but both of them were coming from different places and they took ages to arrive. It was very hard to be patient, but I just kept hoping that you’d figured out what the witch doctor meant when he said ‘Look to the House of Bees.’ ”

  Martine shuddered at the memory of the collective hum of the swarming bees. “I did,” she said.

  “We started digging at first light, but we were getting nowhere fast,” Ben went on. “Sadie and Mercy were waiting at the bottom because Sadie couldn’t climb with her crutches and Mercy is . . . well, Mercy is not built to climb up mountains, and they kept shouting conflicting instructions. It was a bit annoying. But if it hadn’t been for them and Magnus, we might never have found you.”

  Martine stroked the hornbill’s head and he swooned with delight. “You’re a bad bird for stealing my survival stuff, but I might have to forgive you,” she said. She took off her silver dolphin necklace and gave it to him. In a trice he’d scooped it into his yellow beak. “Now we’re connected too,” she told him.

  To Ben she said, “So it was Mercy who noticed Magnus was behaving oddly?”

  “Yes. She remarked to Sadie that it was weird how the hornbill kept flapping around this one shrub on the side of the hill. Sadie put two and two together and realized that Magnus might be trying to get to you. We pulled back the shrub to discover the old water tunnel, and the rest . . .”

  “The rest is history,” finished Martine.

  She knew the rest of the story by heart. Ropes had been put around the boulder and the tunnel roof had been propped up with two big planks of wood in case it was unstable. Nobody, including Martine, knew how the leopard would react when the tunnel was cleared, so a decision was made that no more than four people would enter. At Martine’s insistence, they were Ben, Ngwenya, Chief Nyoni, a frail, birdlike man, and the wildlife vet, Chief Nyoni’s grandson. He’d traveled overnight from Hwange Game Reserve.

  The vet was not able to approach Khan and had to examine him from the other side of the cavern, but he saw enough to be impressed that Martine had managed to stem the bleeding, and disinfect and seal the wound with only moss, honey, and superglue at hand.

  “All those years at veterinary school and I could have just stayed in the Matopos picking up tips from an eleven-year-old,” he joked.

  After that, things got serious. Chief Nyoni sat Martine and Ben down and told them that late the previous night the leopard clan had gathered together to discuss Khan’s future if he was found alive. Their number-one priority was preserving Khan and his descendants for the benefit and enjoyment of future generations in the Matopos, and they agreed that if he had to be sent away to a place of safety for a few years until peace returned to Zimbabwe, then so be it. The following morning, they’d talked it over with Sadie and Gwyn Thomas, and the clan had unanimously agreed that if Khan survived he should go to live at Sawubona.

  “Sawubona!” gasped Martine. “That would be awesome. I mean, I couldn’t imagine anything more brilliant, but surely there’s somewhere closer. Surely there’s one place in Zimbabwe where he could go and be safe?”

  “It is sad to say,” Chief Nyoni said, “but at this time there is not. We hope that peace and prosperity will return to our beautiful land one day, of course. But for the foreseeable future nothing is certain and we want Khan to be in a place of true sanctuary, with people who will honor and care for him.”

  “Oh, we will definitely do that,” Martine assured him. “You have my word. But how will he get there? I’m not sure if there’s room in the Land Rover for all of us.”

  Ngwenya laughed. “We have a network,” he said. “Since Mzilikazi’s time, the Ndebele people have had many enemies, so we have learned to have friends in many places. Chief Nyoni’s grandson is the best wildlife veterinarian in Zimbabwe. He is authorized to sign the necessary papers. He will sedate Khan now and they will leave within the hour for the border. The fuel delivery truck came today and we have already arranged the transport. At the border we also have friends among the customs officials.

  “Chief Nyoni’s grandson will stay with the leopard until they reach Sawubona. Mrs. Thomas said that your game warden, Tendai—did you know that Tendai is an Ndebele word for ‘thank you’?—will take care of him in your wildlife sanctuary until he is well enough to be released into the wild.”

  Martine could hardly believe what she was hearing. The magnificent creature now growling in the circle of her arms was going to be living at Sawubona. Even if she rarely glimpsed him, she’d always know he was there. Watching her.

  Watching over her.

  “But how long will he be able to stay with us?” she’d asked excitedly.

  “Perhaps a couple of years, perhaps forever,” the chief replied. “We give you our word that we will never send for him or for his sons and daughters until they can once again live without fear in the Matobo Hills.”

  The vet had tapped his watch then. “Time is running short if we are to make the border before nightfall,” he said.

  Tears had poured down Martine’s face as she realized that, after everything they’d been through together, she and Khan were about to be parted. To the shock and awe of the onlookers, she put her nose to that of the leopard in a sort of Eskimo kiss.

  “I’ll always love you, Khan,” she whispered, and was rewarded with a final purr.

  Minutes later, he’d been sedated and was fast asleep, and Chief Nyoni’s grandson and men with a stretcher bore him away. His long journey south had begun.

  Chief Nyoni broke the awkward silence that followed. “I’m glad to have seen with my own eyes that we have appointed the right guardian for the leopard,” he said.

  At a word from Martine, Ben left the cavern and she was alone with the chief and Ngwenya.

  “I have something for you,” Ngwenya told her. He dug in his pocket and handed her a pink Maglite flashlight, a Swiss Army knife, and one or two other shiny things from her survival kit.

  Martine was thrilled. “Where did you find these?”

  “In the hornbill’s nest. At the top of the hill, a bees’ nest had been knocked down. Magnus’s house was behind it. It was full of money and jewelry, like Aladdin’s cave.”

  “Enough to feed the whole of the Matopos for a year?” Martine teased.

  Ngwenya laughed. “For a year at least.”

  “I also found something,” Martine said.

  Chief Nyoni sat up s
traight.

  “You found what?” Ngwenya said carefully.

  Martine handed him the candle. “I’ve left my sweatshirt back there in the shadows,” she said. “I’ll leave it up to you to decide what to do with it.”

  She almost ran from the chilly cavern after that, rushing along the tunnel and emerging, blinking, into blazing white sunshine and the waiting arms of her grandmother.

  “To think that I was worried about you having a little canter on the white giraffe,” Gwyn Thomas said, hugging her. “Instead I bring you to the Matopos, where you’re chased by hunters, kidnapped by treasure seekers, and buried alive with a leopard. The next time I suggest dragging you across the countryside for a so-called vacation, say to me, ‘Grandmother, I’d much rather stay home and read books and ride Jemmy.’”

  “Umm, I did try,” Martine reminded her with a grin.

  “I know,” said Gwyn Thomas. “But next time I’ll listen.”

  They were waiting by the tractor trailer when Ngwenya and Chief Nyoni appeared at the tunnel entrance. Ngwenya was holding Martine’s sweatshirt but nothing else. They were halfway down the hill when there was a muffled explosion. Martine guessed that they’d removed the planks holding up the tunnel roof and triggered a landslide. A dust cloud blasted out of the space where the tunnel had been, and then the whole hillside seemed to buckle and change shape. It was as if the cavern and its precious contents had never been.

  Ngwenya and Chief Nyoni never looked back. When they reached the tractor, Ngwenya handed Martine her sweatshirt.

  “Was that the only thing you found?” she couldn’t resist asking him.