Sean made no effort to rise to his feet. He rolled like a log, cushioning the rifle, flipping over three times, the maneuver that was second nature from his Scout training. Now he was lying alongside the lion, almost touching him. He thrust the rifle into his lower ribs, aiming upward, and fired. It needed only one of those 750-grain bullets.
The shot lifted the lion clear of Shadrach's body, tossing it lightly aside. The bullet tore out of his back between the shoulders and went straight on up into the sky.
Sean dropped the rifle and knelt over Shadrach, taking him in his arms, and looked down on the leg. The fangs had inflicted penetrating stiletto wounds. From hip to knee the black flesh was riddled.
'Matatu!' Sean snapped. 'In the Toyota. The medicine box.
Get it.' And the tracker vanished into the grass.
Riccardo crawled to Sean's side and looked at the leg. 'Sweet Mother Mary,' he said softly. 'It's the femoral.' Bright arterial blood was pumping out of the deepest wound in a jet, and Sean reached into it, thrusting his fingers into the hot flesh.
He got a grip on the slippery, rubbery, pulsing worm with thumb and forefinger and pinched with all his strength.
'Hurry, Matatu! Run, you little bugger, run!' he bellowed.
It was less than three hundred yards to the Toyota, and Matatu ran like a frightened fawn. He was back within minutes. Job was with him carrying the white chest with the red cross on its lid, and he opened it.
'In the instrument roll,' Sean told Job brusquely. 'Hemostats.'
Job passed him the stainless steel clamps, and Sean fastened them onto the ruptured artery and taped them against the thigh.
His hands were wet and bright with blood, but he and Job had done this work fifty times during the bush war, and his movements were swift and confident.
'Rig up a drip set,' he ordered Job. 'We'll give him a bag of Ringer's lactate to start with. Rig it.'
As he spoke he was screwing the nozzle onto a tube of Betadyne.
He slid the nozzle as deeply as it would go into one of the puncture wounds in Shadrach's thigh and squeezed the thick iodine paste into it until it forced itself out of the mouth of the wound like tobacco-yellow toothpaste. Shadrach lay without protest or any sign of pain, watching them as they worked, replying to Job in monosyllables when he spoke to him in Sindebele.
'Drip set is ready,' Job said.
Without a word Sean took the cannula out of his hands. Shadrach was his man, his responsibility. He would allow no one else to do this, not even Job. He twisted Shadrach's arm, exposing the inside of the elbow, and worked up a vein with a skilled milking motion. He hit it with the needle at the first attempt and nodded to Job to let the plasma flow.
'Hey, Shadrach!' Sean's grin was remarkably convincing as he laid a blood-smeared palm briefly against the Matabele's cheek. 'I think you poisoned that old lion good. He eats your leg and he's dead-poof! Like that!' Shadrach chuckled. It amazed Riccardo to hear it, even though he had fought and worked with tough men before. 'Give Shadrach one of your cigars, Capo,' Sean suggested, and he began to strap the leg with clean white tape from the medicine chest to stop the residual bleeding.
Once he had strapped the leg, he went over the rest of Shadrach's body quickly. He smeared Betadyne into all the rents and tears left by the lion's claws.
'We can't afford to overlook the merest scratch,' he grunted.
'That old lion has been feeding on putrid carcasses. His teeth and mouth are a reeking pit of infection, and there is rotten meat packed in the grooves of his claws. Gangrene kills most of the victims of a mauling.'
Still not satisfied, Sean injected a full ampulet of penicillin into the transfusion bag. That would swamp the body with antibiotic.
Sean nodded and stood up. It had taken him less than thirty minutes. Studying the bandages and the drip set Job was holding over Shadrach's supine form, Riccardo doubted a trained doctor Could have worked more swiftly or efficiently.
'I'm going to fetch the Toyota,' Sean told them. 'But I'll have to bring it around by way of the ford. That will take a little time, and it will be dark by the time I get back.' He could have sent Job to fetch the truck, but he wanted to get the girl to himself. 'There are spare blankets in the chest. Keep him wrapped and warm.' He looked down at Shadrach. 'Little scratch like that. I want you back at work pretty damn quick, otherwise I'll dock it off your wages.'
He picked up the.577 and strode back through the grass to the riverbank. As he trudged through the sandy watercourse, his anger at last came upon him, more powerful for being so long delayed.
Claudia was sitting alone in the front seat of the Toyota as he came up the bank. She Invoked forlorn and abandoned, but he felt no twinge of pity. She stared aghast at his blood-caked hands.
Sean placed the,.57 in the gun rack without looking at her, then spilled water from the jerry can over his hands and scrubbed them together, washing off most of the blood. He climbed into the driver's seat and started the Toyota, swung it in a tight circle, and sent it back along the track that followed the river downstream.
'Aren't you going to tell me what happened?' Claudia asked at last. She had meant to sound unrepentant and full of bravado, but it came out in a small subdued voice.
'All right,' Sean agreed. 'I'll tell you. Instead of a quick, merciful kill there was total chaos and confusion. The lioness charged us first. We shot her by mistake in the long grass. Not that we would have had much option anyway. She was coming all the way.' Sean switched on the headlights, for the sun was gone and the forest darkening. 'Okay, so now the lioness is dead. Her cubs are still unweaned, so they're goners, all three of them. They'll starve to death inside a week.'
'Oh no!' Claudia whispered.
'Then the lion charged after his mate. He caught us all ends up.
We weren't ready for him, and he got Shadrach down. He almost chewed his leg off. The bone is shattered from hip to knee. He may lose the whole leg, I don't know. Perhaps he'll get lucky and just end up with a permanent limp. Any way you look at it, he's not going to be a tracker anymore. I'll find him a job as a skinner or camp servant, but he's a Matabele warrior and menial work is going to break his heart.'
'I'm so sorry.'
'You're sorry?' Sean asked. His voice low and furious. 'Shadrach is my friend and my companion. He has saved my life more times than I can count, and I've done the same for him. We have fought a war together, we have slept under the same blanket, eaten from the same Plate, trekked ten thousand miles together in the heat and the dust and the rain. He is more than a friend. I have two brothers, same mother and father, but Shadrach means more to me than either of them. Now you tell me you're sorry. Well, thanks a lot, ducky. That's a great comfort.'
'You have every right to be angry. I understand. 'You understand?' he asked. 'You understand nothing. You are an arrogant ignoramus from a different hemisphere.
You are a citizen of the land of the quick fix, and you come and try your simplistic naive solutions here in Africa. You try to save a single animal from his destiny, and you end up by killing a female, sending her three cubs to lingering death, and condemning one Of the finest men you'll ever meet to the LIFE of a cripple.'
'What more can I sayT' she asked. 'I was wrong.'
'At this late hour your newfound humility is most touching.'
His low voice lashed her. 'Sure, you were wrong. Just as you and your people are wrong to try and starve an African nation of thirty million souls into acceptance of another one of your naive solutions. When the damage you have inflicted is beyond repair, Will you again say, 'I'm sorry, I was wrong' and walk away and leave my land and my people to bleed and suffer?'
'What can I do?'
'We have thirty days of safari remaining,' he said bitterly. 'I want you to keep out of my hair for that time. The only reason I don't cancel the show right now and send you packing back to your Eskimos and your human rights is that I just happen to think your father is a pretty fine man. From now on you are under sufferance. One more peep out of you and you are on the next plane back to Anchorage. Do I make myself clear?'
'Abundantly.' There was a trace of spirit in her tone once more.
Neither of them spoke again during the rough ride down to the ford and back up the far bank to the glade in which the bait tree stood.
By that time Job and Matatu had a fire going. The glow of the flames guided Sean to where Shadrach lay, and he climbed out of the Toyota and went to him immediately.
'How is the pain?' He squatted beside him.
'It is a little thing,' Shadrach replied, but Sean saw the lie in the gray tone of his skin and the sunken eyeballs, and he filled a disposable syringe from a glass ampule of morphine. He waited for the drug to take effect before they lifted Shadrach between them and laid him in the back of the truck.
Job and Matatu had skinned both lions while they waited, and they loaded the bundle of green salted skins onto the hood, where it would cool in the night wind.
'It's a hell of a lion,' Sean told
