A Sparrow Falls

  Watching them, Marion felt a deep pervading delight, and it was a long time before she moved on again.

  She found the first batch of mushrooms a little further on, and she knelt to snap the stems off at the level of the earth and then hold the umbrella-shaped fleshy plant to her face and inhale the delicious musty odour, before laying it carefully, cap uppermost, in the basket so that grit and dirt would not lodge in the delicately fluted gills. She took two dozen mushrooms from this one patch, but she knew they would cook down to a fraction of their bulk.

  She went on, following the lip of the steep bank.

  Something hissed close by and her heart skipped again. Her first thought was of a snake, one of those thick bloated reptiles, with the chocolate and yellow markings and flat scaly heads, which blew so loudly that they were called puff-adders.

  She began moving backwards carefully staring into the clump of first growth wit-els from which the sound had come. She saw small movement, but it was some seconds before she realized what she was seeing.

  The lion cub was flat on its belly in the dappled shadow of the thicket, and its own dappled baby spots blended beautifully against the bed of dried leaves and leaf mould on which it lay.

  The cub had learned already the first lesson of concealment, absolute stillness; except for his two round fluffy ears. The ears flicked back and forth, signalling clearly every emotion and intention. He stared at Marion with wide round eyes that had not yet turned the ferocious yellow of full growth, but were still hazed with the bluish glaze of kittenhood. His whiskers bristled stiffly, and his ears signalled wildly conflicting messages.

  Flattening against the skull: ‘One step nearer and I’ll tear you to pieces.’

  Shooting out sideways: ‘One step nearer and I’ll die of fright.’

  Coming up and cupping forward: ‘What the hell are you anyway?’

  ‘Oh,’ exclaimed Marion. ‘You darling little thing.’ She set down the basket, and squatted. She extended one hand and made soft cooing noises.

  ‘There’s a darling. Are you all alone then, poor baby?’

  She moved forward slowly, still talking and cooing.

  ‘Nobody’s going to hurt you, baby.’

  The cub was uncertain, its ears rising into an attitude of curiosity and indecision as it stared at her.

  ‘Are you all alone then? You’ll make a lovely pet for my own baby, won’t you?’

  Closer and closer she edged, and the cub warned her with a half-hearted apologetic hiss.

  ‘What a cheeky darling we are,’ Marion smiled and squatted three feet from the cub.

  ‘How are we going to take you home?’ Marion asked. ‘Will you fit in the basket?’

  In the river bed, the lioness carried the second cub through the shallows, and was followed by one of the heroes of the litter, struggling along gamely through the thick white sand. However, when he reached the edge of the shallow stream and tested it with one paw, his newfound courage deserted him at the cold wet touch, and he sat down and wept bitterly.

  The lioness, by this time almost wild with distraction and frustration, turned back, and dropped her burden which immediately set off in clumsy gallop for the jessie thicket again, then she seized the weeping hero instead and trotted back through the stream and set off determinedly for the far bank.

  Her huge round pads made no sound in the soft earth as she came up the bank, carrying the cub.

  Marion heard the crackling spluttering explosion of sound behind her, and she whirled to her feet in one movement.

  The lioness crouched on the lip of the bank fifty yards away. It warned her again with that terrible sound.

  All that Marion saw were the eyes. They were a blazing yellow, a ferocious terrifying yellow — and she screamed, a wild high ringing, rising sound.

  The sound launched the lioness into her charge, and it came with an unbelievably fluid flowing speed that turned into a yellow rushing blur. She snaked in low, and the sand spurted beneath her paws, all claws fully extended, the lips drawn back in a fixed silent snarl, the teeth exposed, long and white and pointed.

  Marion turned to run, and had gone five paces when the lioness took her. She pulled her down with a swipe of a forepaw across the small of her back and five curved yellow claws cut deeply – four inches through skin and muscle, opening the abdominal cavity like a sabre cut, crushing the vertebrae and bursting both kidneys instantaneously.

  It was a blow that would have killed even a full-grown ox, and it hurled Marion twenty feet forward, but as she fell on her back, the lioness was on her again.

  The jaws were wide open, the long white fangs framed the deep wet pink cavern of tongue and throat. In an instant of incredibly heightened perception, Marion saw the smooth ridges of firm pink flesh that covered the arched roof of the lioness’ mouth in regular patterns, and she smelt the meaty stink of her breath.

  Marion lay twisted under the great yellow cat; she was still screaming and her lower body lay at an odd angle from the shattered spine, but she lifted both arms to protect her face.

  The lioness bit into the forearms, just below the elbows and the bone crunched sharply, shattering into slivers and splinters in the mangled flesh; both arms were severed almost through.

  Then the lioness seized Marion’s shoulder, and worried it until the long eye teeth meshed through broken bone and fat and tissue – and Marion kept screaming, twisting and writhing under the cat.

  The lioness took a long time to kill her, confused by her own anger and the unfamiliar taste and shape of the victim. She tore and bit and ripped for almost a minute before she found the throat.

  When the lioness stood up at last, her head and neck were a gory mask, her fur sticky and sodden with blood.

  Her tail still lashed from side to side in residual anger, but she licked her face with a long dextrous tongue and her lip curled at the sweet unfamiliar flavour. She wiped her face carefully with her paws before trotting back to her cub, and licking him also with long pink protective strokes.

  Marion’s broken torn body lay where she left it, until Pungushe’s wives came, a little before sundown.

  Mark and Pungushe crossed the river in darkness with the moonlight turning the sand-banks to ghostly grey, and the round white moon itself reflected perfectly in the still mirror-surface of the pool below the main camp. The turbulence of their fording shattered the image into a thousand points of light, like a crystal glass flung on to a stone floor.

  As they rode up the bank, they heard the death wail in the night, that terrible keening, the mourning of Zulu women. The men halted involuntarily, the sound striking dread into both of them.

  ‘Come!’ shouted Mark and kicked one foot from the stirrup. Pungushe grabbed the leather and swung off his feet as Mark lashed Trojan into a gallop and they tore up the hill.

  The fire that the women had lit threw a grotesque yellow wavering glow, and weird dancing shadows.

  The four women sat in a group around the long, karosswrapped bundle.

  None of them looked up as the men ran forward into the firelight.

  ‘Who is it?’ Mark demanded. ‘What has happened?’

  Pungushe seized his eldest wife by the shoulders, and shook her, trying to interrupt the hysteria of mourning, but Mark strode forward impatiently and lifted one end of the kaross.

  He stared for a moment, not understanding, not recognizing, then suddenly all colour fled from his face and he turned and ran into the darkness. There he fell to his knees and leaned forward to retch up the bitter bile of horror.

  Mark took Marion into Ladyburg, wrapped in a canvas buck-sheet, and strapped into the sidecar of the Ariel.

  He stayed for the funeral and for the grief and recriminations of her family.

  ‘If only you hadn’t taken her out there into the bush—’

  ‘If only you had stayed with her—’

  ‘If only—’

  On the third day he went back to Chaka’s Gate. Pungushe was waiting for him at the
ford of the river.

  They sat together in the sunlight under the cliffs, and when Mark gave Pungushe a cigarette, he broke off the cork tip carefully and they smoked in silence until Mark asked,

  ‘Have you read the sign, Pungushe?’

  ‘I have, Jamela.’

  ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘The lioness was moving her little ones, taking them one at a time across the river from the jessie bush.’ Slowly, accurately, Pungushe reconstructed the tragedy from the marks left in the earth which he had studied in Mark’s absence, and when he was finished speaking, they were silent again.

  ‘Where is she now?’ Mark asked quietly.

  ‘She has taken the little ones north, but slowly, and three days ago, the day after,’ Pungushe hesitated, ‘the day after the thing was done, she killed an impala ram, and the cubs ate a little with her. She begins now to wean them.’

  Mark stood up and they forded the river, climbing together slowly up through the forest to the cottage.

  While Pungushe waited on the front stoep, Mark went into the small deserted home. The wild flowers had died and wilted in their vases, giving the room a sad and dejected feeling. Mark began to gather up all Marion’s personal possessions, her clothing, her cheap but treasured jewellery, her combs and brushes, and the few hoarded pots of cosmetics. He packed them carefully into her largest suitcase to take to her sister, and when he was finished he carried the case out and locked it in the tool shed. It was too painful a reminder to keep in the house with him.

  Then he went back and changed out of his town clothes. He took the Mannlicher down from the rack and loaded it with brass cartridges from a fresh package. The casings of the cartridges were glistening yellow under their film of wax, the bullets soft-nosed for maximum shock at impact.

  When he went out on to the stoep carrying the rifle, Pungushe was still waiting.

  ‘Pungushe,’ he said. ‘We have work to do now.’

  The Zulu stood up slowly, and for a moment they stared at each other. Then Pungushe dropped his eyes and nodded.

  ‘Take the spoor,’ Mark commanded softly.

  They found where the lioness had killed the impala, but the scavengers of the bush had cleaned the area effectively. There were a few splinters of bone that had fallen out of the crushing jaws of the hyena, a little hair, pulled out in tufts, a shred of dried skin, and part of the skull with the twisted black horns still intact. But the spoor was cold. Wind and the trampling feet of the scavengers, the jackals, and hyena, the vultures and marabou storks, had wiped the sign.

  ‘She will keep going north,’ said Pungushe, and Mark did not ask how he knew that, for the Zulu could not have answered. He simply knew.

  They went slowly on up the valley, Pungushe scouting ahead of the mule, making wide tracks back and forth, casting carefully for the sign, and on the second day he cut the spoor.

  ‘She has turned now.’ Pungushe squatted over the pug marks, the big saucer-sized pads and the smaller myriad prints of the cubs.

  ‘I think she was going back towards the Usutu.’ He nodded over the spoor, touching it with the thin reed wand he carried as a tracking stick. ‘She was taking the little ones back, but now she has changed her mind. She has turned southwards, she must have passed close to where we camped last night. She is staying in the valley. It is her valley now, and she will not leave it.’

  ‘No,’ Mark nodded grimly. ‘She will not leave the valley again. Follow, Pungushe.’

  The lioness was moving slowly and the spoor ran hotter every hour. They found where she had hunted without success. Pungushe pointed out where she had stalked, and then the deep driving back claws had raked the earth as she leapt to the back of a full-grown zebra. Twenty paces further, she had fallen heavily, dislodged by the stallion’s wild plunging. She had struck shoulder first, Pungushe said, and the zebra had run free but bleeding from the long slash of her claws. The lioness had limped away, and lain under a thorn tree for a long time before rising and going back slowly to where she had left her cubs. Probably she had torn muscle and sinew in that fall.

  ‘When will we come up with her?’ Mark asked, his face a stony mask of vengeance.

  ‘Perhaps before sunset.’ But they lost two hours on a rocky ridge, and Pungushe had to cast widely and work with all his skill to cut the spoor again at the point where it doubled sharply and turned west towards the escarpment.

  Pungushe and Mark camped on her spoor with only a tiny fire for comfort and they lay directly on the earth. Mark did not sleep. He lay and watched the waning moon come up over the tree tops, but it was only when Pungushe spoke quietly that he realized that the Zulu also was sleepless.

  ‘The cubs are not weaned,’ he said. ‘But they will take a long time to die.’

  ‘No,’ Mark replied. ‘I will shoot them also.’

  Pungushe roused himself and took a little snuff, leaning on one elbow and staring into the coals of the fire.

  ‘She has tasted human blood,’ Mark said at last. Even in his grief and anger, he sensed Pungushe’s quiet disapproval and wanted to justify what he was about to do.

  ‘She did not feed,’ Pungushe stated. Mark felt his gorge rise and the bitter taste of it again as he remembered the terrible mutilation, but Pungushe was right, the lioness had not eaten any of that poor torn flesh.

  ‘Pungushe, she was my wife.’

  ‘Yes,’ Pungushe nodded. ‘That is so. Also it was her cub.’

  Mark considered the words, and felt for the first time a confusion of his own objects. The lioness had acted out of one of the oldest instincts of life, the urge to protect her young – but what were his motives?

  ‘I have to kill her, Pungushe,’ he said flatly, and there was some slimy obscene thing in his belly; it moved there for the first time, and he tried to deny its existence.

  Marion was dead. Sweet, loyal, dutiful Marion, who had been all that a man could ask for in a wife. She had died an unspeakable death – and now Mark was alone, or did the word ‘free’ come too readily to his tongue?

  Suddenly he had an image of a slim, dark lovely girl and a lusty naked little boy walking in the sunset at the edge of the sea.

  Guilt, that slimy thing, uncoiled in his belly and began to ripple and undulate like a serpent, and he could not crush it down.

  ‘She has to die,’ Mark repeated, and perhaps his own guilt could die in that same purging.

  ‘Very well,’ Pungushe agreed. ‘We will find her before noon tomorrow.’ He lay back and pulled his kaross over his head and his voice was muffled, the words almost lost. ‘Let us hurry now towards the great emptiness.’

  They found the lioness early the next morning. She had moved in close under the hills of the escarpment, and when the first heat of the day made the cubs flag and begin to trail disconsolately along behind her, she had selected an umbrella thorn with a flat-topped mass of foliage spreading from the straight trunk and she had lain in the shade on her side, exposing the soft creamy fur of her belly and the double row of flat black nipples.

  Now the cubs were almost satiated, only two of the greediest still suckled valiantly, their bellies bulging and the effort of swallowing almost too much.

  The indefatigable hunter of tails was now concentrating all his prowess on his mother’s long whip-lash with its fine black tuft of hair which she jerked out from under his nose at the very instant of each attack.

  The other three were fighting off sleep, with violent outbursts of undirected energy, succumbing slowly to drooping eyelids and strained bellies, until at last they lay in an untidy heap of fluff and fur.

  Mark was one hundred and twenty yards downwind. He lay belly down behind a small ant-heap, and it had taken almost an hour to work in this close. The umbrella thorn was set in an area of short open grassland, and he had been forced to stalk flat, tortoising forward on his elbows with the rifle held across the crook.

  ‘Can we get closer?’ Mark asked, his whisper merely a soft breath. The short stiff yellow gras
s was just high enough to screen the cat when she lay flat on her side.

  ‘Jamela, I could get close enough to touch her.’ He put the emphasis on the word ‘I’ and left the rest of it unstated.

  So they waited in the sun, another twenty minutes until at last the lioness lifted her head.

  Perhaps some deep sense of survival had warned her of the presence of the hunters. Her head came up in a flash of yellow movement, the extraordinary swiftness so characteristic of all the big cats, and she stared fixedly downwind, the sector of maximum danger.

  For long seconds she watched, and the wide yellow eyes were steady and unblinking. Sensing her concern, two of the cubs sat up sleepily and waited with her.

  Mark felt the lioness was looking directly at him, but he obeyed the law of absolute stillness. The first movement of lifting the Mannlicher would send her away in a blur of speed. So Mark waited while the seconds spun out. Then suddenly the lioness dropped her head and stretched out flat once again.

  ‘She is restless,’ warned Pungushe. ‘We can get no closer.’

  ‘I cannot shoot from here.’

  ‘We will wait,’ said Pungushe.

  All the cubs slept now, and the lioness dozed, but always all her senses were working, nostrils tasting carefully each breath of the wind for the taint of danger, the big round ears never still, flicking to the slightest sound of wind or branch, bird or animal.