Pride of Eden

by Taylor Brown

“We’ll do what?” said Malaya.

  Still the man shook his head. He would not speak.

  Jaager grunted and rose, brushing off the knees of his trousers. He ordered the rangers to confiscate the snares and salt, the bucket of gut hooks and skinning knives.

  “What the hell are you doing?” asked Malaya. “He knows something.”

  Jaager stood with his knuckles on his hips, elbows out.

  “What am I supposed to do? Beat it out of him?”

  Malaya sniffed. She bent to pick up a coil of wire, then squatted in front of the poacher. She looked at Big John.

  “Ask him how many animals he’s killed with this.”

  The poacher’s mouth clicked, his throat pulsed.

  “He say his family is hungry,” said Big John. “He say dinner walks in the bush.”

  She nodded, her bottom lip out.

  “Ask him if he’s ever imagined what it’s like to be dinner himself. Strung to a tree, bleeding, wondering whether it will be the hyenas or lions to find you first.”

  The man’s eyes were on her hands. She was shaping the wire, fashioning a simple snare like the poachers used. She held the noose just over his head, like the bent-wire halo from a church play. It was slightly too small. She clucked to herself, widening it.

  “He say you will not do this,” said Big John.

  The rangers stood in a circle about them. They said nothing.

  “Malaya,” said Jaager. The word came small from his mouth, scarcely heard.

  Malaya slipped the noose over the man’s neck, tenderly, as if it were a necklace. She cocked her head to regard it, slowly tightening the cinch. “Tell him if he does not want the lions to kill him, enough pressure will cut his jugular. He can kill himself.”

  “Malaya,” said Jaager again, in a whisper, like a lover might.

  But the man had already begun to talk.

  * * *

  She’d never reported the Camp Liberty incident, which took place during her second tour in Iraq. At the time, she’d been cleared for jump school after her return stateside. If she passed, she’d earn the silver jump wings of a paratrooper, pinned to the left chest of her uniform blouse. When the time came, she hoped to be selected as one of the first female candidates to attend Ranger School—a chance to earn the same tab once worn by her father.

  She didn’t know if that ambition was why she’d been targeted, but she knew that reporting the matter would compromise her chance of ever earning the tab. It was compromised anyway, a week later, when a chief warrant officer made a crack about her ass in the hallway of the mess. There was a knowing glint in his eyes—or she thought there was. She shifted in an instant, attacking him with knees and elbows, edged hands and inked shins. He was reduced to a sack of bones huddled quivering against the wall, leaking from the nose and mouth.

  “You want to tap it now?” she asked.

  She was dropped from the list of candidates. She told herself it didn’t matter. Even if she earned her wings, she couldn’t serve in a direct combat role. Only men could be trigger-pullers.

  * * *

  Jaager stood at the entrance of her tent.

  “Malaya.”

  She was lying propped up on the bed, her bare feet crossed, her ballcap sitting beside her thigh. Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea lay open in her lap, the old Cuban fisherman dreaming of the pride of lions he saw on an African beach.

  “Wat?” She imitated his accent.

  He stepped into the tent. He was still in uniform, wearing the mid-thigh shorts he always wore in the bush, which showed the thick bulbs of muscle over his knees.

  “The other night,” he said.

  “Uit,” she said. Out.

  He stepped closer. “You don’t want me to leave.”

  “That’s irrelevant,” she said. “I told you to.”

  He stepped to the edge of her bed.

  “You don’t give the orders here. You seem to have some trouble understanding that.”

  “You came to teach me a lesson, that it? Show me who’s in charge?”

  His nostrils flared. His eyes were the palest blue, chipped from ice.

  “I want you.”

  “You have a wife.”

  “At home, in Durban, I am a pet dressed up in bright colors for parties, barbecues. Out here, with you, I am myself.”

  “You mean you are Impisi White.”

  He said nothing. His assent.

  This man, she had tested him. He was strong enough, sharp enough to cut her, to pierce the angry leopard inked over her heart, and she knew only one thing to do. She looked him up, down. She narrowed her eyes.

  “The White Wolf?” She shook her head. “No, I see only a dog.”

  He stiffened, as if ordered to attention. His right eye twitched.

  “Please,” he said.

  “And you beg like one.”

  “I could kill you,” he said.

  “It might be harder than you think.”

  She slid the small pistol from where it lay hidden beneath her ball cap, tapping one finger on the receiver. His face was drum-tight, bloodless. His teeth showed. His eyes roved her. They stopped on the sole of her foot, the one bearing the print of the leopard cat.

  “You know, the luiperd is bigger than the hiëna. It has five weapons instead of one. Teeth and claws. But when the hyena comes? The leopard, it always runs.”

  Malaya leaned forward.

  “That’s a good story, Jaager. Have you heard the one about the African white wolf? With a bullet in its brain? It dies like any other dog.”

  He smiled, a wide white blade of teeth, and walked out.

  * * *

  She dreamed that night of the elephants that first brought her to Africa. They were war orphans, survivors of bloody Mozambique. They had seen their parents killed, their siblings, whole herds of their kind murdered by truck-mounted machine gun, by helicopter gunship. Their tusks had occupied endless rows of warehouses in Maputo, white forests of ivory that financed the wars of men. The survivors bore the scars of shrapnel blasts, like flocks of tiny dark birds against their skin. Their great ears were riddled like country road signs, their brains laced with dark snares of trauma, waiting to be tripped.

  The elephant never forgets.

  They overturned safari trucks in the reserves, the iron beasts that once killed their families, and they fled the giant flies that chopped the sky, that stung their rumps and put them to sleep. Gangs of poachers haunted the land, armed with automatic rifles and night-vision goggles, chainsaws to remove tusks and horns. The elephant would go extinct, the rhino. Scientists gave them a decade each. Veterans were needed who could train rangers and patrol reserves. Who could, if need be, pull triggers.

  She’d come.

  In her dream, Malaya was high on the back of a war-elephant. It was woolly, with great snarls of tusk crossed like swords. She was riding in the howdah, the armored carriage that rocked upon this boulder of muscle, and the moon was hot copper above her, as if newly formed. Her right foot was an eagle’s claw, her left a leopard’s paw. In her hands, a rifle. It bore a cyclopic green eye that could see at night, a drum of steel-jacketed lightning. The barrel was an extension of her, like the arm of a god. There was an elephant before her, another behind. They were traveling in convoy, clasped trunk to tail, and she realized what would happen before it did. Ambush. Like Baghdad, there was an explosion first. A blast of the reddest hell, sprung from the core of the world, and the elephants screamed and lurched through the bush, their ears winged and flaming, their pain trumpeted through the night.

  Then she saw them, a gang of poachers come surging through the red-grass, dark-skinned and light, each slavering with desire. She turned the green eye of the gun upon them, keen as a leopard’s, her finger flexed on the trigger. She was mindless instinct, the dream of herself. But these were not men, she realized. They were a cackle of spotted hyena, bright-toothed in the dark, and they were laughing at her.

  She couldn’t shoot.
r />   They washed over her, a white flood of teeth.

  * * *

  The cairn was just where the bushmeat poacher said it would be. A small pile of stones set at the edge of the tar road that ran alongside the eastern boundary of the reserve. Here, a narrow gulch twisted down through the dry red earth and carved right under the fence. There was an opening just big enough for a small man to slither through. Big John squatted before it, picking a lint-sized piece of cloth from a snag of fence wire. He rolled it between his fingers, sniffed, then studied the tracks.

  “They come two, three hours ago. They are already in the park.”

  “How many?”

  “Five, maybe six.”

  “Fuck,” said Malaya.

  Jaager cradled his rifle in the crook of one arm, frowning.

  “They will use the same flaw to escape. A perfect bottleneck. We remain here and ambush their escape.”

  “They won’t be leaving without horn.”

  “They may already have it.”

  “And they might not. We haven’t heard a shot. Let me take a tracking element after them.”

  “It will be dark soon,” said Jaager. “I cannot split the team.”

  “We can’t let another one go down.”

  “There’s nothing we can do.”

  “The fuck there isn’t.”

  “Malaya. Malaya!”

  She didn’t look back. She was already disappearing into the bush.

  * * *

  The moon hung low over the edge of the world, curved and sharp. Malaya’s breathing was almost back to normal. She’d had to outrun them for the first mile, into the red fire of the west, until it was too dark to track her. Night fell quickly here, something about the angle of the sun. Jaager would have caught her and bound her hands, telling her it was for her own safety.

  The trail she walked was pale in the dark, like moonstone. The sea of grass was purple, furrowed by the passage of beasts, strewn with thorny shrubs. The night was alive, choral. The cicada roared, a mania of tiny engines, and over them the sustained churr of nightjars, sight-hunting against the moon. She stopped beneath a leadwood tree and sucked on the straw of her hydration bladder. A troop of baboons, like dog-snouted old men, watched her from the high branches. They were silent, the color of ghosts.

  She adjusted the sling of her carbine and kept on, moving west through the veld. She knew she was being pursued. There was the White Wolf and his pack of rangers, tracking her through the bush, and the shades of lions and leopards that hunted at the night. Still she didn’t stop. She stole through the long blades of grass, barely a shiver in her wake. She bled from shadow to shadow. She was trained, armed. She was a crossbred shadow-walker, born to this.

  She came upon a mound of rhino dung, laid to mark the territory of a bull. It was fresh; the beetles had yet to find it. She must be on the right track. The acacia grew denser, a long train of trees strung low over the horizon. They marked the river, she knew, and she quickened her pace.

  The soil was basalt, a layer of prehistoric lava risen from deep fissures in the earth. She thought of the bull rhino’s squeal of three days ago, the hell that flashed the world of men. The ground descended beneath her, softened, and she was beneath the cool night-shadows of the trees. The dark snake of river appeared, coursing through the land. Its banks were pale under the moon, almost white.

  She found him there, the one she sought. He came bouncing through the tall grass on the far side of the river, heavy as a dreadnought, and turned broadside on the beach, as if just for her. He looked like the ugly brother of a unicorn, the brunt of laughs. An oxpecker stood on his shoulder like a tiny guardian. Seeing him, her heart roared.

  The rhino bent his head to drink, and that’s when she saw them. They were coming through the grass behind him, their heads floating disembodied over the chest-high blades. Poachers. A skulk of them. An unkindness. Her heart was stammering, beating at her breast. Her fingers were numb. She brought them under the barrel of her gun.

  “Stand down.”

  It was the White Wolf, slunk up behind her.

  “You are not cleared to engage.”

  The poachers crept from the grass over the river. They were carrying dusty AK-47s at hip-level, approaching the bull. Malaya was neither leopard nor eagle nor wolf. She was only herself. If even one of the poachers fell, the rest might run.

  “Don’t,” said Jaager. “They must be first to engage.”

  She thumbed off the safety of her carbine. She could not hear the squeals again, the pain of the world unseamed.

  “Stand down,” said Jaager. “That is an order.”

  The men that knelt on the beach to aim, they were hungry. They had children to feed. They had come miles through the bush, braving lions and leopards and rangers with guns. They had their reasons. Their hungers and equations. They were men.

  They were in no danger of going extinct.

  “I will kill you,” said Jaager.

  The men raised their weapons to the bull, this horned relic of prehistory drinking from the river, and Malaya laid her crosshairs over the nearest man’s temple. The shot was less than one hundred yards. By the time Jaager fired, her bullet would already be sent, passing through the poacher’s brain like a judgment.

  “Please,” said Jaager. “Ek is lief vir jou.”

  I love you.

  The rhino raised his head, as if he’d heard the words.

  Malaya pulled the trigger.

  CHAPTER 2

  LION COUNTRY

  Lope knelt before the fire engine, rag in hand, polishing the silver platters of the wheels. An old song rose in his throat. Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf, begging his baby not to go, not to be her dog. Lope let the words hum against his lips, unvoiced. There was heat in the blues, he knew, as if the singer’s heart were held over the blue hiss of a gas flame.

  Lope started to part his lips, to sing to the sleeping engine, when a whistle rose in accompaniment, like the train songs of old. A turbocharged diesel came whining up the drive, a black Ford dually with smokestacks risen over the cab like a pair of chrome horns. The truck skidded to a halt before the firehouse bays, rocking on its wheels, as if summoned here.

  Little Anse Caulfield jumped down from the cab, his backcut cowboy heels clacking in the gravel. He was a square-jawed bantam, built like a postage stamp, bowlegged like the old jockey he was. He wore a bush hat, the brim pinned on one side, and the small round eyeglasses of a small-town clerk, his nose smashed broad and flat against his cheeks, as if by God’s thumbs. His eyes were iron-gray. In one hand he held a double rifle, like for shooting elephant. He stood before the open bay, squinting at Lope.

  “You ain’t seen a lion, have you?”

  Lope stood from the wheel. He snapped the rag at the end of one long, dark arm.

  “Lord,” he said. “Not again.”

  * * *

  Her name was Henrietta. She was a golden lioness, born on the grasslands of Africa, sired by a black-maned king of the savannah. She was still a cub when poachers decimated her pride, killing the lions for their teeth and claws and bones. The cubs were rounded up and sold on the black market. She became the pet of an Emirati sheikh, who later sold her to a Miami cocaine lord who enjoyed walking her on a leash amid the topiary beasts of his estate, ribbons of smoke curling from his Cuban cigar.

  After a team of DEA agents raided the place, she found herself under the care of Anse Caulfield. His high-fence compound on the Georgia coast was a sanctuary for big cats and exotics of various breeds. It was located an hour south of Savannah, where the dark scrawl of the Satilla River passed beneath the old coastal highway—known as the Ocean Highway in the days before the interstate was built. On this two-lane blacktop, laden with tar-snakes, tourists had hurtled south for the beaches of Florida while semis loaded with citrus and pulpwood howled north. Sometimes they’d collided. There had been incredible wrecks, fiery and debris-strewn, like the work of airstrikes.

  Now traffic was scarce
. Log trucks and dusty sedans rattled past the compound, which was set back under the mossy oaks and pines. Behind the corrugated steel fence, there lived a whole ambush of tigers, many inbred or arthritic, saved from roadside zoos or private menageries or backyard pens. Some surrendered, some seized, some found wandering highways or neighborhood streets. There lived a duo of former circus tigers, a rescued ocelot, and a three-toed sloth once fenced in a family’s backyard jungle gym. A range of smaller big cats—servals and caracals popular in the exotic pet trade. An elephant that once performed circus handstands, a troop of monkeys, and a lioness.

  Anse called the place Little Eden.

  No one knew why he kept the property, exactly. His history was vague, rife with rumor and myth. Some people said he’d been with an elite unit in Vietnam—a snake-eater, operating far behind enemy lines. Others said a soldier of fortune in Africa. Some claimed he was a famous jockey who’d fallen one too many times on his head. But Henrietta was his favorite—everyone knew that. He’d built a chain-link enclosure for her, sized like a batting cage for Paul Bunyan, and people said his big dually truck cruised the night roads, rounding up strays to feed her. Others said it was Henrietta herself who stalked the country dark, loosed nightly to feed. Why she would return in the morning, no one knew.

  * * *

  “You reported it yet?” asked Lope.

  “What you think I’m doing now?”

  Lope got on the radio. The schools would be locked down, the word put out. The county cruisers would begin prowling the backroads along the river, looking for tracks. The firefighters would take their own personal trucks. When he emerged from the radio room, the firemen had paired off into two-man search teams. Anse stood bouncing on his bootheels, grinding his teeth. The odd man out.

  “I’ll ride with you,” said Lope.

  They aimed up the old coastal highway at speed. Lope had one long arm extended, his hand braced against the dashboard.

  “This fast, ain’t you afraid you could hit her crossing the road?”