by Taylor Brown
Poachers.
* * *
“Malaya.” A whisper. “Malaya.”
A touch on her arm. She exploded awake, opening her eyes to find Anse holding her wrists, keeping her fingernails just short of his face. His hat was knocked off.
“Whoa,” he said. “Whoa, now.”
Malaya dropped her hands. Tears were swarming her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was dreaming.”
Anse nodded. “I know.”
Malaya leaned her head back on the seat and breathed, her chest thumping.
“I’m sorry.”
Her window hummed down.
“Go on, get some air,” said Anse.
Malaya leaned her head out the window, dizzied, her hair hanging over her face. Within weeks of Lawrence’s death, poachers had descended on Thula Thula, breaching the fence and shooting one of the rhinos in broad daylight. Malaya had been on a contract elsewhere in the country, unable to help. Rage and guilt racked her at the time—she could do nothing as the reserve was picked apart, perforated. Thula Thula would survive thanks to the steely resolve of Anthony’s widow and a team of loyal rangers, but Malaya still carried that wound, like so many others, bleeding into her dreams. Now she felt a warm light on her cheek, calling her to lift her head. She looked up, cracking one eye open.
There, high against the night, glowed a giant yellow paw. It was bigger than the moon, brighter, drowning the stars. An emblem, gas-filled and electric, that blazed day and night. Now her eyes came to rest on the giant cage at the foot of the sign. It was the size of a shipping container, double-fenced and strung with razor wire, the iron bars shining in the floodlights. She got out of the truck, slowly, and approached the outer fence, hooking her fingers in the wire, squinting into the darkness. She saw nothing until the lion lifted his head, his eyes gold-fired inside a ragged black wreath of mane.
Malaya’s heart purred and she heard a distant whisper inside her head.
The only good cage …
CHAPTER 16
AMBA
Horn approached her enclosure from upwind, as he always did, moving in a crouch, his bare feet avoiding loose sticks and fallen leaves—any sound that might betray his presence. He was shirtless, the curved blade of his karambit sheathed at the base of his spine. Dusk was falling, smoking the world, while a crescent moon rose through the pines.
Amba would just be coming awake, prowling the twilight.
The air rose, shuffling the leaves overhead. Horn could hear the moan of the island’s abandoned buildings, their broken windows sieving the wind, their chambers and porches clotted with the wrack of hurricanes and storm surges. Horn paused to look through a break in the trees, landward, where strings of headlights flickered in and out of the trees, following the coast road. Christ haunted that stretch of highway, the shoulders staked with hand-made crucifixes and plastic flowers, while chemical plants and pulp mills shone on the horizon. The singlewide he’d grown up in still lay along that road, vine-snarled, canted in the weeds like a derailed boxcar, subjected to storm after storm.
During his long nights in the dog box, Horn had transformed. He could hear the scream of tires in the night and the chug of shrimp boats through the marsh, some heavy-hulled with bales of marijuana or cocaine. Square grouper. He could feel the moon hanging high in the black sky, drawing the beast from his flesh, summoning the power from his throat. Black bristles sprouted from his adolescent cheeks and chin, as if drawn toward the moonlight that shafted down through the perforated box. If he was to be caged like a dog, he would become the most savage of the line.
A wolf.
He hardened his body against the world, punching the walls of juvenile detention cells and the fence posts of foster homes until his knuckles were calcified, cruel as sledges. He rolled fifty-pound dumbbells over his shins, month after month, hardening them like Louisville Sluggers—hard enough to shatter the bones of lesser men. He grew his chest beneath the iron bar of a weight bench. A juvie inmate performed his first tattoo, pricking the words across his back with guitar string and cigarette ash, swiping away the blood with a dishrag.
MAN IS TO MAN EITHER A GOD OR A WOLF
Horn would have no fear of cages, for he was made in one.
* * *
He circled upwind of Amba’s enclosure and knelt in the trees, watching. There was the giant cat-tree he’d built her of treated pine, branching with platforms and catwalks and treehouses of every kind—big enough to rival those of the Lost Boys or the Swiss Family Robinson. It sprang from a heavy understory of saw palmetto and holly and creeper vines, even a few stands of bamboo he’d planted for her. The walls of the enclosure were more than thirty feet high, the sky fenced against the acrobatics of her kind, draped with camouflage netting in case of snooping drones or satellites.
Horn squinted, trying to find her amid the bush. He never could. She would sense his approach, always, and nestle in one of her hides to watch. He knew her eyes were already upon him, moving across his skin, as if she could read the words tattooed there. He approached the fence.
When he whistled, she shot like a streak of fire from a bamboo thicket, straight for him, turning at the last second to run her long body against the fence, chuffing at him. He pushed his belly against the fence wire.
“Amba,” he said.
She was an Amur tiger, Panthera tigris altaica. The largest species in the world, evolved in the spruce forests of Siberia, the taiga. She was nearly six feet long and three hundred pounds. He’d raised her from cubhood, hand-feeding her, his hands slicked with the blood of her meals. He’d trained her for the flaming hoops of the circus. They performed for years together, rattling from town to town in the whirring caravan of animal cages and folded big tops and electric lights—a tent city that bloomed in fairgrounds across the nation, offering trapeze artists and tightrope walkers and other aerialists who seemed to float on the very gasps of the crowds.
There were the stunt acts, the performers who breathed fire or swallowed swords or hurled knives at daughters bound spread-eagle to spinning wheels. Strongmen who performed four-hundred-pound bench presses from beds of nails or tore phone books in half. Unicyclists who juggled chainsaws, contortionists who twisted themselves into human knots.
Then there were the exotic animal acts. Acrobatic elephants that moonwalked on wooden barrels, seals that bounced beach balls on their noses. Wolves trained to howl beneath the electric bulbs of the big top, as if summoning the bones of their ancestors from beneath the strip malls and parking lots of local townships. There was Horn, the sideshow wolfman and tiger tamer, who led his tigress through rings of fire with his thin wand, as if conducting a long banner of flame through the arena, and engaged her in the traditional mock battles of the act, fending off the big cat with only a chair. A final hug, burying his head in her mouth to show that their true relationship was love, which was true. He had never found in human companionship anything to match the warm white fur of her chest, the hug of her deadly paws.
Later, when the gates were closed and the children gone, Horn might be found in one of the smaller tents, bare-knuckled before the local champion, the pair of them circling inside a wire cage while the bettors roared on every side of them, shaking their crumpled bills. The local champion would soon be straining red-faced in an arm-bar or Kimura or triangle choke, tapping out his submission, or else slipping to sleep in the hard cradle of Horn’s arms. His specialty was the rear naked choke, known in Brazil as mata leão—the “lion-killer.”
They had traveled together—man and tiger and wolves—in a pair of tandem trailers, towed by an ancient snubnose semi with a sleeping cabinet behind the seats. A coffin sleeper, two feet wide, where Horn spent his nights after feeding and tending to the animals. They were free agents, taking their show from circus to circus, sometimes hiring out to train tigers for other acts. They performed until Horn had saved enough to move them all to this bankrupt island, which he defended from looters and treasure-hunters in r
eturn for this plot of land.
Their refuge from the world of men.
Amba slunk back and forth, rubbing her body against the fence. Her fur was fire-bright, like it hadn’t been for so long. Her hips swayed with power. A little more than a year ago, at only eleven years old, she’d begun to cough and sag at her midline. Her coat seemed to fade, her eyes dimming. Then one morning Horn had won their game—the first time ever. He’d found her lying on one of her platforms, unaware of his approach. She hardly rose at his whistle.
Cancer, said the vet. A tumor in one of her mammary glands.
In the last year, Horn had spent everything he had for her treatment, bringing her to a veterinary oncologist on the mainland for care. He’d sold the semi-truck and the trailers and the buggy he used to haul food and supplies around the compound. He’d spent his savings and his emergency fund and maxed out what little credit he had. He’d sold wolf-dog pups to buyers he didn’t like, who smelled wrong to him. Bearded men in dark parking lots, who’d scratched perfect answers on his questionnaire—too perfect, as if they’d taken this particular test before. After Mystic Tiger’s death, he sold the skin and bones and claws to a shadowy dealer at the local port, who would smuggle them to Asia on a transoceanic freighter or container ship, where the tiger’s parts could fetch a handsome sum on the black market.
Whatever it took.
Amba’s coat blazed newly before him, like a stoked bed of coals, her spine weaving and cracking along the fence. The breeze rose, fluttering the leaves, lifting an ammoniac sting into his nostrils. Her scent-marks. She was entering estrus, radiant with heat. The first time in months. Likely the last. She had sprayed around the enclosure, signaling her readiness to mate. Now she turned her gaze upon him. The gold flashed newly in her eyes, bright as coins. They cut through the panels and ink of his flesh, as they always had. Burning into his heart. She was demanding a last wish, he knew.
Horn bowed his head.
BOOK IV
CHAPTER 17
THE KING OF SAVANNAH
The yellow paw of Lion Gas hangs high over the truck stop, smearing out the stars. Big rigs snooze far beneath the luminous emblem, huddled in long parking lanes, while motorists pump gas under the bright lights or peruse the store aisles, snatching gummy fish and pork rinds and beef jerky from pegboard hooks. The mascot’s enclosure sits at the base of the sign, crowned in razor wire and spotlights.
Mosi stares out across the wire, watching the people come and go, as from a waterhole. He watches the wiggle of their toes on dashboards and the bumble of their rumps in sweatpants. How he longs to taste their meat, their blood dripping hot from his chin. He longs for prey besides the bald chickens that come tumbling through his feeding chute, so cold and bloodless they hurt his teeth.
He hasn’t roared in so long—not since that day on the riverbank, beneath the bloodied hull of the impala. He is alone here. He doesn’t have the company of other lions to swell his chest. A lion without a pride is nothing. He is empty and thin. He has no lionesses to hunt for him, to stalk so handsome through the bush grass and bring him antelope. His shoulders are bony and raw. His mane feels thin. A sign hangs across the top of this cage:
THE KING OF SAVANNAH
There’s no night here, when he should prowl beneath the stars. Only the white barrage of floodlights, which blind and expose him. He thinks of the dark belly of the ship that brought him to this shore, groaning through the swells of the sea. He rode inside a pinewood box with holes for him to breathe. His thirst in the box had never been so great. His tongue was a desert. The metal bowls, when they came clanging and slopping into his box, were too shallow to slake him. He could hear the squawk and scream of other beasts. Their anxiety was a stench. They were sick with fear, each a font of bile and defecation. His eye would float in the holes of his box, witnessing their agony. He could do nothing for those beasts, who deserved, at the least, the mercy of his teeth.
Still, he sometimes longs for that pinewood box. For darkness.
* * *
The yellow torch of the lion’s paw flickers against the sky—once, twice—then winks out. The whole bubble of light alongside the interstate shivers and bursts. Night floods over the place, as if leaping down from the hills, coursing over everything but the amber parking lights of semis and the odd pair of headlights swimming in the blackout.
Drivers stand amazed in the sudden darkness, night-blind, holding their pump guns like oversized pistols. Their mouths fall slack. Some wonder if this could be the end, the impact of a bomb or missile or meteorite. A returned Christ, beamed down from heaven at light speed, or the eruption of a supervolcano, ejecting the earth’s crust into the stratosphere. They wait for the aftershock, the blast wave or megatsunami or four horsemen ripping open the sky.
No one thinks to look in the direction of the enclosure, where a black vehicle has come rumbling from the service road, lightless, and parked behind the cage, the driver wearing a pair of green-lensed goggles that amplify starlight. They don’t see the figure that emerges to crouch at the edge of the fence and shoulder a rifle, nor the hiss of the dart through the iron bars.
* * *
Mosi leaps from his platform, wheeling to swat the offending hornet or scorpion or snake—whatever has just stung his rump. He’s still turning circles, his tail whirling after him in the darkness, when his hindquarters give out. He sits down clumsily on his flanks, staring about. His jaw sags. His tongue falls out. A black sleep is washing over him, drowning him, thick as blood in his throat.
This is not the darkness he wanted. To drown in this iron box, stung by an evil hornet. He wishes to die with his chin bloodied, the taste of a rival in his mouth, or else amid a pride of his own, his muzzle gray with age. He swells his chest, as he did that day on the riverbank.
He is Mosi, the black-maned, who should die with a roar—
He drops splay-pawed in the dirt, tranquilized.
* * *
Motorists are still staring up at the black heavens, gape-mouthed, as if waiting for the stars to turn back on. Truckers turn over in their sleeper cabs, unaware. A shift manager, in the dark of a back office, dials the power company. When the bucket truck arrives, the linemen will find the cutout fuses of the nearest transformer pulled open, their brass rings hanging down like grenade pins—killing power to the truck stop. The black vehicle will be miles gone, racing south through the night.
CHAPTER 18
TROOPER
They were still on the interstate, several miles shy of their exit, when blue lights splashed into the cab, the whoop-whoop of a siren. Malaya clenched the wheel, the leopard screaming awake over her heart.
“What should I do?”
“Pull over,” said Anse.
The rumble strip shuddered through the wheel. Malaya parked on the shoulder. She was thinking of cuffs and snares and cages.
“I can’t go to jail, Anse.”
The old jockey squinted in his door mirror, the flesh crinkling around his eyes.
“You won’t,” he said.
The trooper stepped out of his cruiser and stood a moment beside the door, tall and erect, smoothing his tie and leveling his campaign hat. Malaya could feel the pistol hard against her hip, concealed under her shirt. Her heart was thrashing against her ribs, wanting out. She could only catch shallow bits of breath. She stared straight ahead, wondering how far they would get if she punched the gas.
“I can’t go, Anse. I’ll die first.”
Now a hand on her forearm, firm and sure. She smelled the old jockey’s Marlboro breath, so much like her grandfather’s.
“You won’t go,” he said.
He reached behind the seat for his hat.
Meanwhile, Malaya watched the trooper’s approach, holding her breath. As trained, the man lifted his hand from his side, as if to palm the swell of the fender, and tapped the tailgate firmly with two fingers, marking the vehicle with his fingerprints. Malaya jerked at the touch. Then the man was standing at her windo
w with his flashlight out, long and black as a billy club. He rapped the handle against his own shoulder, his right hand palming the butt of his sidearm.
“You folks coming from the truck stop?”
Malaya wondered if the man could see the pounding of her chest. She opened her mouth, but Anse spoke first from behind her, his voice crackly and drawled.
“Said we wasn’t stopping but once this trip, and this’n here already needs her a pit stop. Bladder the size of a quail egg, I tell you.”
Malaya, still looking at the officer, took up the lie. She squeezed her knees together.
“Power was out,” she said.
The trooper didn’t seem to notice. He stood like a man at attention. A Boy Scout.
“You know why I pulled you over, ma’am?”
“Was I speeding?”
“No, ma’am. I just received a report that the King of Savannah has been stolen from his enclosure.”
“The truck stop lion?”
“That’s right. There’s a BOLO on suspicious vehicles in the vicinity.”
“Are we suspicious?”
The trooper leaned back, taking in the heavy body of the truck, the chrome exhaust stacks, the smoked windows of the bed cap. Then he looked at the occupants: Asian female, mid-twenties, black hooded sweatshirt. Caucasian male, late fifties, green outdoors shirt.
“License and registration,” he said.
* * *
They’d first discussed the operation in the butcher shed while Malaya disassembled a whitetail buck for tiger food. Anse was sitting on one of the battered deep freezers, clicking his bootheels against the side, railing on lion farms and canned hunts.