09 Lion Adventure

by Willard Price

  The flaps of the next tent were also loose - but that was because the lion’s roars had brought a man from that tent to join the rest who came out to see what all the roaring was about. Then the lion had plunged in to seize Basa’s father.

  But that didn’t explain why Hal’s tent flaps were open. A lion could not untie knots - then who had done this, and why?

  Chapter 7

  The sorehead

  Young Basa strode into the camp of the railway men and stood looking down upon his father.

  His black face seemed to become even blacker with grief and anger.

  Then he picked up the body, slung it over his powerful young shoulders, and, without a word to anyone, went off up the trail to his village.

  The men were having their breakfast around open-air fires. Soon they would be going to work on the tracks. Hal’s eye wandered over them and he wondered sadly which one of them would be taken today.

  Then, far down the campground beyond all the black workers he thought he saw a white face. Who could that be? Hal decided he would go down and say hello. He liked the Africans well enough but it would be pleasant to talk with someone of his own kind.

  He looked around for Roger but that young man had gone to the tent to take care of his cub.

  Hal strolled down through the campground. The stranger saw him coming and walked off rapidly along the tracks.

  Hal stopped short. It was plain that the fellow didn’t want to see him.

  Now Hal’s curiosity was really aroused. Perhaps the station master could tell him about the new arrival.

  In the station he found Tanga already at his desk, a cup of tea at his elbow.

  ‘I see we have a white visitor/ Hal said. ‘Caught a glimpse of him in the camp.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tanga. ‘He came in yesterday on the afternoon train.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘A white hunter. His name is Dugan.’

  ‘What does he want here?’

  Tanga shifted in his chair. ‘I don’t think that concerns you.’

  ‘But I think it does. If a man won’t stand and talk to me, that concerns me. What does he have against me?’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact, Mr Hunt … you took his job.’

  ‘How in the world did I do that? I don’t even know the fellow. I never saw him before in my life.’

  Tanga settled back and looked up at the ceiling. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any harm in telling you. About a month ago we began to have trouble with man-eaters. Dugan had helped us before,, so we called him in. He went gunning for the lions and he killed some but evidently not the right ones. We kept right on losing men. So that’s why I went to the warden and he recommended you. We fired Dugan. He’s very sore about it, I’m afraid. He came yesterday and wanted his job back.’

  ‘He’s welcome to it,’ Hal said promptly. ‘We’re not

  doing so well with it ourselves. You know there was another man killed last night.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But you’ve only been on the job two days. Anyhow, I refused to take him back. I thought he would get out of here on the night train. But he’s still hanging around. I think he means mischief. Look out for him. He’s hoping you will fail - and he’ll help you fail, if he can. He wouldn’t stop at anything.’

  Hal thought of the loose tent flaps; He was sure that neither he nor Roger could have left them open. Even a very smart lion couldn’t untie them. Perhaps this sorehead had done it.

  Hal said nothing about it to Tanga. After all, it was a serious matter - to accuse a man of attempted murder. He would just keep quiet and see what happened next.

  He went back to his tent.

  Roger was trying to give his cub a drink.

  He had placed a pan of water on the floor. Now he was pressing the cub’s nose down into the water.

  Hal laughed. ‘What are you trying to do - drown your cub?’

  ‘He must be thirsty. Why doesn’t he drink?’

  ‘Why does he have to be thirsty?’ Hal asked.

  ‘Because all animals are. Listen, don’t tell me about pets. I’ve had leopards and baboons and a baby elephant and a cheetah. They were all heavy drinkers.’

  ‘But you haven’t had a lion,’ Hal said. ‘Don’t you know a lion can go a week without water? You might almost think he’s a cousin to the camel.’

  ‘But this little chump isn’t old enough to catch antelopes.’

  ‘True. But Nature takes care of that. Until he’s old enough to hunt, his mother’s milk gives him both food and liquid.’

  ‘Funny he doesn’t like water.’

  ‘He loves water. Let go of him and see what he does.’

  Roger released the cub which immediately slapped its big flat front paws into the pan, splashing water in all directions. The hind paws followed. The paws were too large for the animal. They reminded Roger of snow-shoes, or big floppy fins on the feet of a skin-diver. The little beast would have to grow before he would catch up with the size of his paws. They went slap-slap-slap in the shallow water.

  ‘What are you going to call him?’ Hal asked.

  Roger watched his cub flopping about on those furry, over-sized pads, and said, ‘There’s only one name for him. Flop.’

  Flop flopped over on his back and waved all four snow-shoes in the air. He rolled about in the water with evident enjoyment.

  ‘Now there’s another funny thing,’ Roger said. ‘He won’t drink it but he likes to be in it. He’s crazy. Doesn’t he knows that cats don’t like to get wet?’

  ‘He doesn’t follow all the cat rules. A lion likes to play in the water and he’s a good swimmer.’

  Flop bounced out of the pan, climbed up on Roger’s knee, and whacked the boy’s face with one big, soaking-wet paw. The blow was almost hard enough to make Roger see stars.

  ‘Hey, cut that out.’ Roger wiped his face with the sleeve of his bush-jacket.

  ‘He’s just playing,’ Hal said. ‘You’ll have to get used to that if you want to make a pal of a lion. They love to play - but they don’t know their own strength.’

  Now the affectionate little beast was licking Roger’s hand. His tongue was like sandpaper. Three licks, and Roger was beginning to lose his skin. He withdrew his hand.

  ‘Before this monster eats me up,’ he said, ‘we’d better give it some food. How do we get some mother’s milk?’

  “This will have to do,’ Hal said. He took down a can of milk, opened it, and held it under Flop’s nose. The cub raised his nose in the air and said, ‘Ng-ng-ng.’

  ‘If I’m not mistaken,’ Hal said, ‘that’s lion language for “No”. Perhaps if we warm the milk he’ll think better of it’

  After the milk was warmed on the little camp stove, another problem arose. How to get the milk into the cub.

  Some was poured into a dish and placed before the animal. Flop sniffed it and apparently wanted it, but didn’t know how to get it. Roger pressed the cub’s mouth down into the milk. The cub jerked his head free, scattering drops of milk from his whiskers. He had not learned how to lap up liquid in cat fashion. He was used to sucking his dinner from his mother’s teats.

  Roger got a spoon. ‘If you’ll hold him,’ he said, ‘I can spoon the milk into his mouth.’

  That’s force-feeding,’ Hal said. ‘He should be fed every three hours. To feed him that way would take too much of our time - besides, no animal likes to be forced. We’ve got to give him an artificial mother. He’s used to sucking his dinner. Now how can we let him suck?’

  ‘If we had a piece of rubber tubing—’

  ‘But we haven’t.’

  ‘I know what.’ Roger said. ‘There’s an artificial mother right back of the tent.’

  He went out and came back in a moment with a stem of bamboo about a half inch in diameter. He cut it down to a length of a few inches and looked through it to make sure that it was not closed by any partition. He rounded off the upper end so that it would be comfortable in the cub’s mouth. Then he put one end in t
he little animal’s mouth and the other end in the milk.

  The little beast instinctively sucked and up came the milk. He clamped the hollow bamboo between his two front paws and settled down contently to his dinner.

  Roger saw that Flop was not gripping the tube with his toenails but with a claw a little farther up on the inside of each leg. ‘I didn’t know a lion had claws up there,’ Roger said. “They’re called dew-claws,’ said Hal. ‘What are they for? They’re too far up to touch the ground.’

  ‘And yet, they’re the best claws a lion has, and the most dangerous. On a full-grown lion they can be two inches long. They’re usually kept folded against the lion’s legs, but the lion can extend them at right angles. They are as sharp as razors and very strong. A lion can rip a man open with one stroke of these terrible hooks.’ ‘But the cub is using them to hold the tube.’ ‘Yes. And when he grows up he’ll use them to hold his meat while he eats it. They’re something like a man’s thumbs. Just as you couldn’t hold anything without your thumbs, a lion Would have trouble hanging on to anything without his dew-claws. So you see, the Hon is well armed. But when he closes his mouth to hide those terrific fangs of his, and draws up his claws, and folds in his dews-claws, he looks as if he wouldn’t hurt a fly.’ ‘Does he have any other concealed weapons.’ ‘One more. Feel the end of your cub’s tail.’ Roger did so. ‘Ouch!’ he exclaimed. ‘He’s got a needle there.’ It was hidden in the little tuft of black hair at

  end of the youngster’s tail. ‘What’s the idea of that?’

  ‘Just to protect his rear. The lion is a great tail-switcher. If an enemy comes up too close behind him it is apt to get punctured by that needle. It hurts like the sting of a hornet.’

  The kitten, finishing his milk, looked up and miaowed. It was hard to believe that this innocent little thing would become the king of beasts, the terror of the jungle. Hal reached down and rubbed the cat behind the ears. It responded as any house cat would, with a purr. The purr was like a deep note played on an organ.

  ‘I’ll show you another catty thing a lion does,’ Hal said. ‘Give me that bottle of after-shave lotion.’ ‘You’re not going to shave Flop.’ ‘Never fear.’ He took out his handkerchief and sprinkled some drops of lotion on it. He put the perfumed handkerchief on the ground under Flop’s nose.

  Flop flipped. The fragrance sent him into a complete tailspin. He rolled on the handkerchief, sniffing, moaning, and gurgling. He seemed to be chuckling with delight. He rubbed his cheeks into the sweet-smelling handkerchief.

  ‘Just like a cat with catnip,’ Roger said. ‘Exactly like a cat,’ Hal agreed. ‘He’d behave much the same way over catnip but he likes perfume better.’

  ‘What is there about perfume to send him into such a tizzy?’

  ‘Doesn’t it do the same to human beings - more or less? At least, they enjoy it. Funny thing - it doesn’t excite the girl lion so much. It’s the boy lion who really falls apart. And it isn’t true of all the big cats. The leopard or the tiger can take it or leave it. Perhaps the lion is more closely related than they are to the house cat.’

  It would have been pleasant to play with Flop all day, but there were more important things to be done.

  Leashing Flop to the leg of a bed and leaving him to enjoy his shaving lotion, they set out on their quest for man-eaters.

  Where should they look? The railway workers were scattered along three miles of track. It was impossible for the boys to see what was happening three miles away, or even one mile or a half mile off.

  In fact a lion might be lying in the grass only a few hundred yards distant and not be seen. A lion can flatten himself almost to the ground and remain perfectly still for long periods of time. His brown fur is like the brown grass all around him, and if he wears a patch of black it looks like a bush.

  The boys climbed to the roof of the station and used their binoculars.

  ‘It’s no good,’ Hal said. ‘We’re not high enough. A lion could be behind any one of those thorn bushes. Or behind that tall grass. Or behind an anthill.’

  They climbed down again. There seemed nothing to do but to start at one end and patrol the track to the other end of the three-mile stretch.

  They slowly walked the track, guns in hand, Hal keeping watch on one side and Roger on the other. As they went by the campground they happened to see Dugan come out of his tent. He also carried a gun. He stopped when he saw the boys and struck off in another direction.

  It was slow and careful work, examining every tuft of grass to be sure it was not a lion, asking the men along the way if they had seen anything, looking for the footprints of big cats.

  They had not been at it more than half an hour when a man came running down the track crying, ‘Simba!” The boys ran to meet him. The man fell to the ground, gasping, trying to get his breath back, and pointing down the track.

  ‘How far?’ Hal asked.

  ‘Five minutes fast.’ Africans did not measure distance in miles but in time. Five minutes fast meant the distance you could cover in that time if you went on the run.

  The boys ran. It was a good mile before they came upon a cluster of men looking at something on the ground They pressed through the crowd and found what they had dreaded to find - a dead man, victim of the claws and jaws of a lion.

  ‘Did you see the lion?’ Hal asked the foreman of the gang.

  ‘I saw,’ said the foreman. ‘A very great lion, brown on the sides, black as night on top.’

  It must be Black Mane, thought Hal.

  “Where were you?’ said the foreman bitterly. ‘You never here when we need you.’

  ‘We can’t be everywhere at the same time,’ Hal said.

  ‘But your man - he was near, but he did not come and shoot.’

  Hal was puzzled. ‘Our man? We have no man.’

  ‘Your Dugan man. He work for you, yes?’

  ‘No, he does not.’

  A chorus of angry voices greeted this statement. The

  ‘Lion.

  men plainly did not believe Hal. They blamed him for what ‘his man’ had done or failed to do.

  Why had Dugan not shot the lion? Why had he allowed it to take another victim?

  Probably out of spite. Spite because he hadn’t been hired. He wasn’t being paid to kill lions so why should he bother? It was a chance to make Hal and Roger look foolish. There they had been, the idiots, in the wrong place, while a man was being killed somewhere else. If the station master had any sense he would fire these two dumb-bells and take back Dugan. And to bring this about Dugan was willing to stand by and let a man be killed.

  The boys went back to report to Tanga. The station master looked very grim as Hal explained that Dugan had been on the scene while Hal and Roger were a mile away down the track.

  It wasn’t pleasant to admit another failure - and to admit that if the job had been Dugan’s the lion might now be dead.

  ‘Perhaps I was wrong in letting him go,’ said Tanga, as if thinking to himself. ‘I’ll have to report this to King Ku. He will not be pleased.’

  With heavy hearts, Hal and Roger came out of the station and loitered on the platform, wondering what to do now.

  ‘We ought to be where we could see that whole three miles of track,’ Hal said.

  To do that we’d have to be sitting up on a cloud,’ replied Roger bitterly.

  Hal looked at his brother thoughtfully. ‘You have an idea there. That’s what we’ll do - sit up on a cloud.’

  ‘Are you kidding?’

  ‘No, I’m not kidding. Come on. We’ll go get the Stork.’

  Chapter 8

  The balloon

  The Stork was the small aeroplane belonging to Mark Crosby, warden of the Tsavo animal reserve. Hal had flown it many times while helping Crosby clear out the poachers who had been slaughtering the wildlife of Tsavo.

  The Land-Rover made short work of the twenty miles to Crosby’s safari camp. The warden greeted the boys warmly.

  ‘Good to see you aga
in. How’s it going? How many man-eaters have you knocked off?’

  ‘Only one,’ Hal said. ‘In fact we’re doing so badly we expect to be fired at any moment.’

  ‘What seems to be the trouble?’

  ‘Too big a territory. While we’re patrolling one area, a lion kills a man somewhere else.’

  ‘But why do you leave your crew here? If you had your thirty men with you, they could spread out and cover the entire territory.’

  ‘I know,’ Hal said. ‘But King Ku won’t allow that. He says we must do the job alone.’

  ‘A pretty sure way to get you killed,’ Crosby said.

  ‘But why should he want to get us killed? We haven’t done anything to annoy him.’

  ‘You’re alive, and that annoys him. You’re white, and that annoys him. Don’t ask me why - I don’t know. It’s some secret having to do with his past. Perhaps you’ll learn what it is, if you live long enough. He’s a very strange and bitter man. His wife and children were murdered in the Mau Mau rebellion. Perhaps that may have something to do with it. But why he should pick on you I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, we’ll just have to make the best of it,’ Hal said. “The men are working on three miles of track. If we were up high enough we could watch the whole stretch. We wondered if you could lend us the Stork.’

  Crosby tapped the desk with his pencil as he thought this over.

  ‘Of course I can,’ he said finally. ‘But I’m not sure it’s just what you need. An aeroplane motor makes an infernal racket. It will scare off any man-eater. By the time you land and are ready to shoot, he’ll be gone. A helicopter would be better, but it’s noisy too. How about a balloon?’

  Hal laughed. ‘Where would we get a balloon?’

  ‘Easy enough. You’ve heard of Leal’s balloon safari?’

  Hal nodded. Stories about it had been running in the Nairobi and Mombasa papers. Leal, an Englishman, had been drifting over East Africa in a balloon, taking photographs of the animals. Used to looking at the ground, they rarely noticed the balloon, even when it hung only a hundred feet above them. It made no sound, and unless Leal and his two companions spoke there was nothing to disturb the animals grazing or resting or prowling beneath.