Zoo

Chapter 13

MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Africa, twelve hours later, was actually sort of a letdown. Johannesburg, beyond the massive windows of the airport, was just a bunch of nondescript buildings; it could have been Cleveland.

An hour later, when we took off northbound for Botswana, my mood lifted considerably. The green-and-tan expanse of seemingly endless landscape looked the way the little kid in me wanted Africa to look. Hot, wild, secluded.

As we were beginning our final descent into Maun, I saw there were some modern buildings, but most of the structures were cinder-block and tin. Coming down the steps onto the tarmac, I saw that, beyond the flimsy chain-link fence along the airport’s perimeter, there were donkeys everywhere. There were also rondavels, the traditional African thatch-roofed round huts built of stone and cow dung. The feel of the place—the heat, the sweetish smell of manure and diesel, even the sharp, blinding yellow light—was pleasantly strange.

After I made it through customs, Abraham Bindix took off his tattered straw hat and greeted me with a bear hug inside the run-down terminal. Abraham was a boiler tank of a man. Broad-shouldered and blocky, the fiftyish, weather-beaten man reminded me a Sun Belt college football coach. His face was as hard and creased as an old work glove, with a mustache fading into the scruff on his cheeks. A shag carpet of chest hair burst from the unbuttoned neck of his sweat-dampened linen shirt. Some faded blue tattoos on the furry wine barrels he called his arms were reminders of his navy days. It was good to see his loopy, gap-toothed smile. The last time I’d seen him was in Paris. We’d sat at the hotel bar and gotten drunk as swine after I’d been booed off the convention stage.

He seemed heavier than I remembered him in Paris. He also seemed noticeably older, and a little slower on his feet. I wondered if he was ill.

“Thank you for coming, my friend, but I have bad news,” he said as I scooped up my bags from the pile of luggage beside the plane. I liked Abraham, but took him with a grain of salt. Like a lot of Afrikaners, he was crude as oil and casually racist in a way that can make a white American dude a touch uncomfortable. Still, there was something almost grandfatherly about him, something Papa Bear.

“Unfortunately, a problem has arisen,” he said. “A family thing. Is it possible for you to wait a day before I can take you up to the village near Zimbabwe?”

“Of course. What’s up, Abe? Can I help?” I said.

“No, no. It is a family thing,” he said. Abe had a warm, brassy honk of a voice, like a muted trumpet. “My little brother, Phillip, the pacifist, is the manager at a game-spotting lodge over in the bush near the Namibian border. I take rich American tourists out to kill animals, but he takes them out just to look at them, take pictures. Lions, actually—two huge prides of them that eat the Cape buffalo up there in the Okavango Delta.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Don’t know, man. His lodge has been out of radio contact for over twenty-four hours, and me mum is worried. It is probably nothing, but with all the craziness going on I need to make sure the wanker is okay.”

“So let’s head out,” I said. “You said the lodge has lions, right? Lions are what I just came eight thousand miles to see.”

My enthusiasm seemed to brighten Abe’s spirit.

“Right, man,” he said, slapping my shoulder. It hurt a little. “I knew you were a friend, Oz. I tried to get my trackers to come with me, but the superstitious boogies are still completely spooked by the slaughtered village we came across. The pagan bastards said they wanted nothing to do with lions until, quote, the spirits are calmer, unquote.”

Uncalm spirits; lions. I thought about my sinking feeling on the plane, the feeling of God’s wrath in the air. Then I dismissed it. I wadded up my uneasiness and tossed it over my shoulder.

“Which way to Okavango?” I said, hefting my camera case.

Chapter 14

INSTEAD OF HEADING out of the airport, Abe and I walked south, inside the terminal, and made a right into a narrow, dingy corridor.

“What are we doing? I thought we were going to your brother’s lodge,” I said.

“Right, man, we are. In the northern delta, there are no roads, only airstrips,” Abe explained. Walking, he dug a tin of chewing tobacco out of one of the pockets of his khaki utility vest, scooped some of it into his fingers, and put a wad under his lip. “We need to rent a plane.”

“Rent a plane?” I said. “I hope you know how to fly one, because I only know how to jump out of them.”

“That skill might come in handy,” Abe said. His jaw was working, moistening the chaw. He winked. “I have a license, but I have not flown in some time.”

We went through a door and walked right back out onto the tarmac beside the plane I’d just exited. I noticed they were a little more lax with security here on the Dark Continent. No one even asked me to take off my shoes.

We turned a corner into a hangar. A half-black, half-Asian man in a greasy fedora sat behind a desk eating some kind of barbecued meat with his fingers. Another African, who looked like a soldier or policeman, judging by his soiled gray uniform and gray beret, sat next to him and wore a flat black AK-47 over his shoulder. They both had their feet up and were watching a movie on a portable DVD player. I peeked over the policeman’s shoulder: it was Happy Gilmore, the Adam Sandler movie. They weren’t laughing. Granted, it wasn’t very funny, but they didn’t seem to get that it was a comedy.

Abe spent about ten minutes bellowing like a bull at the two of them in a language I soon learned was Setswana. In the end, Abraham, his face sweaty, red, and puffy with heat, fished around in the pouches of his utility vest and handed the guy at the desk a folded wad of bills. The man thumbed through them with hands that were still sticky from the meat he’d been eating, seemed satisfied, and directed us outside with a Mafia tough’s chin jerk that he’d probably learned from American movies.

We walked outside and down a lane between two rows of small bush planes. Abe threw open the door of a rust-flaked red-and-white Piper Super Cub that had cartoonishly oversize tundra tires and squeezed my bags behind the seats.

“Wait here, man,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

Abe went back into the hangar. When he returned a moment later, he was coming from the other end of the airport, riding in a battered Range Rover. Two dogs, sleek red-brown Rhodesian ridgebacks, tumbled out when he opened his door. They hopped into the plane as though they’d done so plenty of times before. Then Abe heaved two large gun cases from the truck and packed them into the plane as well.

He caught me looking at the guns.

“Better to have and not need than need and not have, right, man?” he said, giving my cheek an avuncular pinch.

Soon my ears were nestled in squishy radio headphones and we were taxiing onto the runway. On the other side of the airport’s dusty service road, I spotted a fenced field that had stones and strange striped tents in it.

“What’s that, Abe?” I shouted over the gathering roar of propeller chop, pointing.

“That’s a graveyard,” Abe shouted back. He opened the plane’s throttle and we began bouncing down the tarmac.

“So many dead from AIDS around here, they cannot dig fast enough. So they pile the coffins under tents. What’s the American joke about cemeteries?”

“People are dying to get in?” I offered.

“Right, man. That’s the one.” Abe gave me a sardonic smile. His teeth were jumbly-crooked and tobacco-stained. He pulled back the throttle and our tiny plane left terra firma. “Welcome to Africa, man.”

Chapter 15

EVEN WITH MY jet lag, the claustrophobic confinement of the plane, and a dog panting fragrantly in each ear, that thirty-minute plane ride was the most exhilarating of my life.

Flying over the Okavango Delta was like going back in time. I half expected to see dinosaurs walking around below us. There wasn’t a single building, not a house or even a rondavel, on the endless brown plain rippling along beneath us. I watched the shadow of the aircraft glide over white islands dotted between clear blue ribbons of water. On them were palm trees and giant lumps of earth that Abe told me were termite mounds.

Now that it was July—one of the winter months, Abe explained—the delta dried up and swelled to three times its normal size, attracting one of the greatest concentrations of wildlife on the planet. We flew over hippos, hyenas, a herd of massive Cape buffalo, horned and black, which Abe told me were considered by some professional hunters to be more dangerous than lions. There were river birds, seemingly in the millions, scattering from the dry marshes at the sound of our plane. The first humans we saw were a couple of African fishermen in a hand-cut dugout. Who needs the Discovery Channel? I thought.

“This is it,” Abe said a few minutes later, his voice crackling over my headphones. We lowered our speed and altitude as we banked down toward some thatched roofs beside the faint white scar of an airstrip. I was expecting the landing to be as bumpy as the takeoff, so I was surprised when Abe laid the Piper down as smooth as silk. I pulled off my headphones, and in the wake of the noise, the silence was almost ghostly. My ears rang a bit.

“That is funny,” Abe said as we climbed out of the plane and into the heat. “Not funny ha-ha.”

“What?” I said.

“The staff—when they see a plane landing, they are usually waiting here, clapping, singing their silly folk songs and holding a stiff drink and a hot towel. I do not see or hear anything. Do you? Not even any animals.”

He was right. The only sound was the thrumming drone of insects under the glaring sky. The thatch-roofed buildings in the distance, which we could see at the end of a dusty path lined with brittle brown reeds and papyrus, all seemed empty, deserted. A silvery band of light shimmered on the horizon, vague, shaking with heat.

Abe whistled and the two sleek red dogs broke into a trot, scouting ahead, heads scanning, their sense of smell going into overdrive. The camp we followed them into was as bustling as a graveyard. We searched all six platform tents, along with the dining area. We found clothes, luggage, safari gear, tourist stuff—pith helmets and khaki utility vests—open portmanteaus spewing socks and underwear onto unmade beds. But no tourists and no staff.

There was what looked like a shipping container—a giant red box of corrugated metal—behind the kitchen. Alongside it we found a Land Rover with two extra rows of raised seats to accommodate wildlife watchers.

Abe half coughed and half cursed in a language I didn’t recognize. He spat a jet of shit-brown tobacco juice into the grass and wiped his mouth with his shirt.

“Two of the trucks are missing. Besides the guides, there are another half dozen maids and cooks. This is very strange, Oz. Where the devil is everyone? Where’s my little brother? I have a bad feeling.”

Abe put his fingers to his lips and pierced the air with a whistle, and the dogs came running. He hopped into the Rover, found the keys, and started the engine. After we drove back to the plane and retrieved his rifles, we drove north from the camp over a badly rutted car path. Pebbles popped and crunched under the tires, and the car rattled and shuddered over the washboard-like waves in the road. When the car path petered out, we hit an even bumpier field of tall dry grass. Around a stand of ebony trees, some baby hyenas were wading in the shallow river water, fat gloves of reeking mud on their paws. I couldn’t help but gawk as though I were on safari, but if Abe noticed them or the family of giraffes drinking in the shallows a hundred feet south of them downriver, he didn’t say anything.

We were steering around a stand of fig trees when we finally saw people. A group of Africans stood milling around by a dock at the river’s edge. It was two men and a pudgy boy, all in chef’s whites, and they were preparing to get into some dugouts. Abe pulled hard on the wheel, piloted the Rover over to the men, and brought it to a jerky stop. He shouted something quick at them in Setswana. The men yelled something back. They seemed to be arguing. The conversation took a few minutes. At the end of it, the three kitchen workers reluctantly got out of the canoe and climbed into the back of the car. I turned around and looked at them. Their faces were stolid and blank, hard to read. They didn’t acknowledge me.

“What’s the story?” I said to Abe as we pulled away. Abe tucked another pinch of tobacco into his cheek.

“It’s worse than I thought, man. Two groups went out day before yesterday—twenty people, including my brother. Haven’t heard from them since. Not only that, they said lions were actually in the camp last night. Roaming around like stray kittens, picking at scraps. These bozos back there hid themselves in the shipping container. When they woke up, the radio transmitter had been broken, smashed somehow. Just now, they were going to try to go downstream to get help.”

“Why were you arguing?”

Abe took off his straw hat and wiped sweat off his sunburned brow. Abe perspired like a leaky faucet.

“I told them to come with us to help find the tourists and guides, but, like my trackers, they’re terrified. They said something is wrong with the lions. The same superstitious boogie shit. The gods are angry. There’s black magic about. Ooga booga booga!”

Behind us, the cooks started singing some sort of chant.

“Ah, here they go,” said Abe, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at them. “Ooh, ee, ooh ah ah, ting, tang, walla walla bing-bang!”

Abe stomped the brake and brought the Rover to a sudden stop. He hopped out, went into his bag in the back, and took out one of the hunting rifles. It was a Winchester Model 70 bored for a massive .458 cartridge. He loaded a magazine with the huge brass shells and slapped it home with a clack. He climbed up into the back, maneuvering around the men, bags, and dogs, and strapped it into the truck’s gun rack.

“You bozos want black magic? I’ll show you some black magic,” he called back at them as he revved the engine and threw the truck into gear.

Chapter 16

A LITTLE LESS than a mile northeast of the safari camp’s river dock, two massive male lions lounge on the highest rocks in their pride area. They lie on their stomachs, still as golden rugs, panting, catching the breeze. Their impassive amber eyes lazily scan the horizon.

Like dogs, but unlike humans, lions are unable to sweat through their skin. Their only effective means of thermoregulation is panting. The heavy breathing they are doing now, though, isn’t from the heat, or even from exertion.

It is from eating.

Beneath them, scattered throughout the thorny scrub of the forest glen, swarms of fat, shiny flies hover above the meat that lies rotting under the sun’s steady blaze. They tickle across the bones, collectively making a wavy droning noise like a cello holding a note in sustained vibrato. Human bodies—or, rather, human body parts—are strewn in the bloody grass. Rib cages and hip bones shine white as aspirin under the blinding sun.

The rest of the pride is arranged in a large, loose circle around the bones. Vultures hop around in the mess, their wings like shrugging shoulders, their necks like little worms, yanking rubber-snap strings of meat off the skeletons with their beaks. The lionesses and the cubs have eaten their fill, and are happily active now, tumbling around in the grass.

The two males are massive as golden hills. They are brothers, twins, almost identical, except now the older one is missing an eye, recently lost while taking over the pride. The brothers, having killed two of the former alpha males and driven off the third, have further established their dominance by devouring all their rivals’ cubs, four young females.

But the swell of power and dominance they felt when they took over was a feeble feeling compared to the killing of the two human groups.

A new feeling has overtaken the lions, a new understanding. One that changed their perception of humans from fellow predators—irritating, inconsequential animals to be ignored, mostly—into prey.

They saw them coming. Two of the smaller, swifter lionesses had climbed into a sausage tree above the tire trail and lain in wait. When the cars passed, the lionesses dropped in from above on the open metal boxes full of the pathetically weak mammals. Once those big naked monkeys were on their slow, idiotic feet, it had been a quick rout.

It wasn’t because the lions were particularly hungry. The humans had been nothing compared to the eighteen-hundred-pound Cape buffalo, the pride’s more typical prey. The cars had been like boxes full of snacks.

The two males slip off the rock, first one, then the other. They amble through the pride, heads held high, ears perked up, mouths closed, tails swishing from side to side. After a moment, the females begin to follow, heads held low.

As the two lions approach, a vulture standing on a woman’s face shrugs its shoulders and takes flight, flapping, awkward and sloppy as a big pigeon. The one-eyed lion nudges the meat with his paw. He holds it down and takes a bite, his jaw making a popping sound as his carnassial teeth efficiently peel meat off the bone.

After a moment’s chewing, he looks up and turns his remaining eye to the east. His ears swivel, his nostrils dilate. His sense of hearing is only slightly above average, but the sebaceous glands around his chin, lips, cheeks, and whiskers give him a powerful sense of smell.

He smells something. He glances at his brother, who is looking in the same direction now.

Humans, the two convey to each other with a glance, a growl. More humans.

The two males turn to the pride, changing their expressions and postures. They go through a repertoire of vocalizations, varying intensity and pitch, telling everyone what to do.

Chapter 17

A CHATTERING FLOCK of storks burst from a treetop as we drove through a field some three miles or so north of the camp. They were marabou storks, distinguished by their wiry white hair, featherless pink necks, and tuxedo plumage—carrion eaters often found with vultures around carcasses. Undertaker birds, they’re called. Abe grimaced up at them. He was projecting a cool facade, but I could tell he was worried, which made me worried.

Actually, I had already been worried.

Since we’d landed at the deserted camp, I’d found myself thinking about my first trip to Africa. It was a grad-school field trip to the famous rock beds of the Karoo desert region in South Africa, which showed one of the world’s clearest geological snapshots of the history of life.

What I kept thinking about was a layer of sediment from two hundred and fifty million years ago that was completely empty of fossils. The lack of fossils in the rock was evidence of the Permian–Triassic extinction event—P–Tr, in geology shorthand. P–Tr, or the Great Dying, was the biggest and baddest of Earth’s major extinction events. Ninety percent of all species on the planet rapidly perished. It took many millions of years for the earth’s biodiversity to recover. There have been five such major extinction events; statistically, we’re about due for one.

The K–T event, the one that killed the dinosaurs, was almost certainly caused by an asteroid impact. But we’re still not sure about P–Tr. Some theorize that the P–Tr extinction was caused by volcanic activity. Or maybe an asteroid, or cosmic radiation. But no one really knows exactly why almost all the animals, vegetation, and insects in the world suddenly died.

It was the mysterious nature of that ancient total global ecosystem collapse that made the present HAC activity so unsettling. An animal’s behavior is the result of millions of years of evolution, thousands upon thousands of generations of adaptation. This evolution happens in response to changes in the environment. The environment changes, and some animals adapt to it, some don’t. To suddenly observe such anomalous behavior in wildly different species of animals all over the world wasn’t just alarming, it was unprecedented.

I opened my camera case and began to ready my video camera. I clipped in the battery, polished the lens, strapped on the shoulder mount.

As we rolled deeper into the Okavango Delta in search of the missing tourists, I was suspecting more strongly that some kind of macro-level environmental disturbance was underway.

I’d clacked in a new mini DV tape and was switching on my pricey-ass Sony image stabilizer when there was a commotion behind me. Abe’s two Rhodesian ridgebacks started barking like hell. Then, in an instant, my camera was no longer in my hands and something hard and cold was pressed against my throat and collarbone.

One of the men in the back was holding something against my neck, which I guessed was a machete, as that was what the other man had against Abe’s neck.

Abe brought the truck to a careful stop and began speaking in Setswana to the man holding the machete to his throat. Abe’s negotiation skills seemed to be all that stood between me and a severed jugular. My heart was going like a jackhammer. I could feel every hair on my arms standing straight up. The man holding the machete to Abe’s throat kept shaking his head and gesturing back in the direction behind us. Abe kept talking. The man shook his head.

“No-no-no-no-no-no-no,” he said. “No, mon.”

The man lowered the machete in order to hop out of the car. He held the machete pointed at Abe, but was only half paying attention as he worked with the other hand to liberate the Winchester from the gun rack. Abe reached into the inner lining of his utility jacket and his hand came out holding a nasty little snub-nosed .38 Special. Abe put the pistol barrel between the man’s eyes: they crossed just as Curly’s do when Moe pokes him in the nose. The man took his hands off the rifle and lowered the machete.

Then the guy behind me removed the machete from my neck. The men and the teenager exchanged glances, shrugged as though they’d just lost a bet fair and square, and hopped out of the truck. Without another word to us, they started walking away, back in the direction we’d come from. The dogs growled and barked after them, but Abe whistled them silent. Abe was red-faced and shaking. At first I thought it was from fear, and then I realized it was mostly anger.

“Cowards!” Abe yelled back at them between his cupped hands. “Boogie shite-asses! Scoundrels!”

He spat brown juice out the window, wiped his face on his sleeve, cursed under his breath, and released the clutch.

“Superstitious traitorous idiot boogie sons of bitches,” he muttered, half to me and half to himself, maybe half to the dogs. “It’s just us now, gents.”

I leaned back in my seat and wiped sweat off my face as I closed my eyes. My pulse was still hammering when I turned and lifted the camera off the seat behind me.

Maybe Natalie had been right about my coming here to Africa, I thought. A cubicle in an air-conditioned office building wasn’t looking quite so terrible to me right about now.

Chapter 18

A COUPLE OF miles farther north, we came upon some salt flats forked by a river delta. The scenery beyond them was breathtaking. An endless patchwork of more grassland and salt flats ran as far as the eye could see. I could understand why rich European and American tourists came to the Okavango Delta for safaris. The landscape was spectacular.

The trail we’d been following passed through a ford in one of the river deltas.

“Jesus, are you sure—” was all I could get out before Abe impassively stomped the accelerator and plowed us headlong into swirling water the color of chocolate milk. The water came up to the truck’s door handles. I was expecting the motor to quit at any moment. I mentally prepared myself to go swimming. We got wet.

“You New Yorkers,” Abe said, pushing us through the flood with his hand on the clutch and his foot on the gas, getting us through it with a mix of horsepower and will. He jerked his hat brim at the snorkel on the side of the truck. “Got it handled, man. Leave it to Beaver.”

We slogged through to the other side and up the steep, muddy bank onto a plain of tall, light green grass, maybe about three or four acres wide. A path of tire tracks cut straight across it toward a lagoon that sparkled like silver, where a herd of seventy or so Cape buffalo were shouldering each other in a shallows.

“Look sharp,” Abe said, pointing to the herd. “We’re getting close now. Those are the buffalo the lions hunt.”

I almost dropped the video camera when Abe stomped the brake and brought us to an abrupt stop halfway to the lagoon. At the other end of the tall glade of faded grass, an open Land Rover exactly like ours, with the name of the safari company on the side, was parked by a sausage tree.

Abe took a pair of binoculars from one of his kit bags and stood up on his seat. He slowly swept the glasses over the grassy plain. Then he lowered the binoculars, draped the strap over his neck, sat back down, and drove cautiously across the clearing toward the empty truck.

We stopped beside the vehicle and got out. Something shiny caught Abe’s eye. He bent down to the ground and lifted something from the grass. I zoomed in on it with the camera.

It was a woman’s gold Cartier tank watch. It looked as out of place here in the African veldt as a shrunken head would have on a plate at the Four Seasons. The alligator strap was encrusted with blood.

We got back in the truck and kept bucking and rocking over the grass. We weren’t talking. There were clothes littering the ground around the empty truck and the trunk of the sausage tree, scattered among the grass and dwarf savanna shrubs. Blood-stiffened scraps of shirts, pants, a woman’s sneaker, a fanny pack. Bits of fabric blew across the fields. There was a piece of what looked like a Hawaiian shirt stuck in the tree, fluttering on a branch like a flag.

Abe looked up into the canopy of trees and then over at the Land Rover.

“Look, man,” he said, pointing. “See the rifle? It’s not even out of the rack. The safari guides who go out with the guests, they’re no superstitious pussies like our dear kooky friends back there. They’re professionals. This all must have happened in seconds. Too fast for them to get their guns.”

“Male lions will protect their pride from humans, but this looks like some sort of ambush,” I offered, trying to be helpful.

“And what did they do with the bodies?” Abe said. “Lions usually feed where they kill. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Chapter 19

STRETCHED FLAT IN the tall grass, the dominant one-eyed male lion crouches, waiting. Since hearing the distant grumble of the engine, he has been lying on the edge of the clearing about eighty feet to the east, just within charging range.

His powerful chest rises and falls under his almost strawberry blond mane. His dusky amber eyes narrow, focused on the distance. He opens his mouth slightly, whiskers tingling as he scents the dry wind.

Having hunted this pride area almost from birth, the ten-year-old male knows every inch of the terrain. At first, he’d lain in wait to the west, but moved when the wind shifted. A keen predator, he takes up a position downwind, so his scent won’t be detected by his prey.

He is waiting patiently for his prey to put its head down or face the other way, the optimum position for attack. Just a moment or two of distraction will give him enough time to charge. He will finish the stalk as he always does, by quickly knocking his prey off its feet and clamping his jaws on its throat.

He would have already attacked, except he is wary of people, unused to hunting them. He has been shot at several times before by hunters and game preserve rangers during his days of wandering, before he had joined his pride.

Without taking his eyes off the prey, the lion makes a low vocalization. It is answered by a soft growl, almost a purr, in the grass to his right, and then by another string of moans in the grass to his left.

In response to his call for a stalking attack, the two dozen lions at his back split into two groups, one to flank and herd, the other to wait in ambush.

The flanking lions begin skulking quickly, silently through the grass, using every scrap of cover. Their yellow and brown fur makes them all but invisible, tawny masses of grass-colored animals in the vegetation. They string themselves into a loose net around both the sausage tree and the prey, cutting off any chance of escape.

Chapter 20

ABE COCKED HIS head and whistled, and the dogs leaped from the truck and into the tall grass.

“Listen, man,” Abe said as he sighted through his rifle’s telescope. “If it comes up, the best way to kill a lion is a head shot, right between the eyes.”

“Thanks for the tip,” I said, continuing to film.

I lowered the camera a moment later when two sharp, loud dog whines rose in the air at the clearing’s edge. One right after the other.

Abe whistled for the dogs. Nothing happened.

He put his fingers to his lips, whistled louder. Silence.

“That’s not good,” he said.

Abe raised the Remington to his shoulder and pressed an eye to its sight. I swung my camera in the same direction and held my breath.

A lion appeared in the grass twenty yards to our east.

I had never seen a lion in the wild before. It is a beautiful and terrifying sight. The sheer bigness of the animal. It truly makes something spin in your soul, deep below the ribs.

I was still in a state of unprofessional awe when Abe pulled the trigger. The blast of the rifle so close to me was like a kick in the head. It left a mosquito whine in my left ear. In the place where the lion had been standing a moment before, there was nothing. It was as if he had disappeared.

Abe climbed back up into the Land Rover.

“Get your ass up here if you feel like staying alive, man.”

That sounded like a good idea to me. I slammed the door, and then there was motion from the other end of the clearing. A second male lion broke cover and stood up in the tall grass, stock-still, tail swishing. Watching us. There was something otherworldly and bleak about his implacable, amber-eyed gaze.

The lion roared and began moving toward us. Slowly at first. Then something triggered in him, and he tumbled into a charge, coming at us at breakneck speed. Abe pulled the trigger just as he began his leap. Another jolting crack of firepower in the air. I saw a fistful of brain fly out of the back of his head. He died in the air and slammed onto the ground in a tumble, rolling into the driver’s side of the truck, rocking it as though it were a cradle in the grass.

I kept filming as Abe kicked out the bullet casing. It pinged off the edge of the windshield with a sound like a wind chime. On the ground below, I noticed that the lion was still breathing.

Not for long. There was another whamming thud as Abe shot it right above the buttocks through the spine.

Abe replaced the three spent cartridges in the rifle’s magazine. When he was done, he lifted off his hat and swiped his brow as he looked around the clearing. Silence. No insects, no birds. The shadow of a high white cloud raced over us. I took my eye from the viewfinder for a moment and glanced at Abe beside me. He looked sick.

I panned the camera, following his gaze.

In the grass about thirty feet away, surrounding the truck, was a circle of tawny heads.

All the lions had manes. They were males. Two dozen male lions.

Abe was blinking, a finger to his open lips. He was so puzzled that confusion got the better of terror.

“Impossible,” he whispered. “All males?”

It didn’t make sense. Male lions just don’t do that. A pride of lions consists of a dozen or so related female lions and one, sometimes two, at most three or four males, if it’s an unusually large group. Adult male lions who aren’t part of a pride will hunt alone. Never—absolutely never—in the wild do male lions congregate in large numbers. It just doesn’t happen.

Except it was happening.

I kept rolling with the camera as the male lions began moving. They moved forward for a few steps, then stopped to allow the lion behind them to go forward. They seemed like trained soldiers, coordinated, choreographed, synchronized.

I expected Abe to stomp on the gas and get us the hell out of there. Instead, his mouth pinched into a hard set. Almost in a single fluid motion he raised the rifle to his shoulder, sighted, and fired. Off to the left, the head of the lion closest to the truck blew open and the animal slumped into the grass.

Abe was swinging his rifle around for the next one when the grass in front of the truck opened up and a golden blur streaked in front of the camera.

A paw caught Abraham in the face, and there was a cracking sound as he flipped out over the driver’s-side door.

Chapter 21

FOR A LONG—much too long—moment, all I could do was sit there in the passenger seat of the truck as if my ass had been nailed to it.

I was visited with the same sudden, gut-squeezing spike of fear I’d experienced when I first jumped out of a Black Hawk as an Army Ranger medic in the Battle of Fallujah. I’d stood there at the door like a dunce with his dick in his hand, unable to move. Okay, here we go. Here we go. Okay, now. Paralysis. Here we go. I even did the same thing I’d done that day as bullets sang past my confused, cotton-filled head.

Act, jackass! I mentally screamed at myself. Do something!

Abe’s gun was lying cockeyed across the driver’s seat next to me. I snatched it up and anchored the barrel on the driver’s-side door. The lion had Abe in his mouth, and was dragging him backward through the grass by the collar of his shirt.

The rifle kicked hard against my shoulder as I shot the lion in the head. I jumped out of the truck and ran the fifteen feet or so across the grass to where the dead lion lay and where Abe, his head pouring blood, was shakily climbing to his feet. My only goal at this point was to get us the hell out of there, get Abe to a doctor.

I draped his arm around me and we hobbled back to the truck. Abe was bigger than me and much heavier. It was slow going.

There was so much blood bursting from Abe’s head I couldn’t tell where the wounds were. I got him into the backseat of the truck, and I was trying to MacGyver a bandage out of his shirt when the truck rocked like a boat and almost tipped over. A lion had leaped onto the hood like a cat scrambling onto an armchair. He peered curiously through the windshield. His eyes were warm amber stones. They glowed like heat, blood, and honey.

I decided—if you want to call it that—the best place to be was under the steering wheel. I crawled into the front of the truck, toward the lion instead of away from it, a bit like a boxer leaning into a punch. I dropped under the steering wheel and squeezed myself in until I was crouching against the floorboard and clutching the gun. As I was waiting for my life to end, I reflected on the fact that the Rover was still running. I slammed my palm down on the gas pedal.

The engine roared in place, and nothing happened.

It wasn’t in gear.

I pounded the clutch with my elbow and reached up and toggled the stick shift back and forth until I heard something catch. I let out the clutch and gave it some more gas with my other hand.

The truck lurched backward. I’d managed to put it in reverse, which was fine with me. We were moving. I pressed the accelerator onto the muddy floorboard with my palm and held it there, and I felt the driverless truck rocking and fishtailing at random across the grass. My head whacked against the steering wheel and the metal door frame as the Rover went bumping backward over the field. On the hood above me, I could hear the lion snarling; his claws clicked and shrieked against the glass.

With the car still in motion, I unwound a little from the fetal position to see his front paws and his massive shaggy head peeking over the top of the windshield—he looked like one of those old “Kilroy was here” drawings—and I reached up and cut the wheel hard to the left. The lion roared as he slid, scrabbling for purchase, off the windshield and fell beside the car, yelping as the Rover thumped against him.

And then we were flying. The Rover went airborne, backward off the steep riverbank, and for a moment, we were in the air. While bracing for impact, I had a good long two seconds of quiet time to reflect on the situation my life was in, and in those seconds, I decided that I really couldn’t blame Natalie for dumping my ass. Then we hit the ground.

Chapter 22

ABE AND I both went sailing out of the Rover as it smashed backward into the riverbank a good ten feet below the sandy ridge. My body whumped into the muddy shore and the truck beside me tipped onto its side with a groan and a decisive crunch of metal, plastic, and glass.

I staggered to my feet, slapped mud from my face, and checked myself for injuries. I could feel bruises galore blooming all over my body, but nothing worse. The truck was still running, its engine panting, its back end submerged in muddy water. One sideways back wheel spun uselessly in the silt, stirring the muddy water.

Abe was in bad shape—as in probably dead. One of his legs was pinned beneath the sideways Rover, and his head was all wrong, almost perpendicular to his body. It looked like his neck had broken in the crash. He wasn’t breathing.

I checked his pulse and wasn’t surprised to find that he had none. Then I glanced up at the edge of the riverbank shelf we’d just been flung from. The heads of lions peered over it. A moment later they were spilling over its edge.

I backpedaled into the shallows of the river. There was one lion in particular—huge, bigger than the others, with a reddish mane and one eye. This one had it in for me. He came right for me.

I turned and dove deep into the river. Kicking as hard as I could, I swam as far out into the slow-moving muddy current as possible. This was a river in a time of drought—the water wasn’t cold and it wasn’t deep. It was warm, shallow, and dirty. I stood on my tiptoes in the middle of the river, and the water line was just below my head. I shook my hair, blinked water out of my eyes, spat, watched the shore. Abe’s body was surrounded by six or seven lions, their manes rustling against each other. They pawed and picked at him as less majestic animals would do. But the other one, the big lion, strode past the sideways Rover and dove into the water after me, panting like mad as he paddled in my direction.

I’d thought I was safe. But no.

Lions hate water. They’re not good swimmers—their dense, muscular bodies aren’t built for it. They’ll swim if necessary, to ford a river during the rainy season, for instance, but for a lion to chase prey into water is pretty much unheard-of.

I turned again and headed toward a sandy spit of land in the middle of the river.

Ten paces from the shore of the islet I saw a long black box bobbing in the water, drifting like a chunk of wood in the lazy current. Flotsam from the overturned Rover upstream. I splashed toward it, thinking I could maybe use it as a makeshift life preserver.

It was a life preserver, in fact: one of the gun cases Abe had brought. I snatched it from the water and slogged for the shore.

Stumbling, hurt, tired, with the gun case under my arm, I fought my way toward the reedy islet and felt the embankment rise under my heavy feet. I had no plan. I was beyond thinking. Ashore, I fell to my knees in the sucking reedy mud like a sinner in church, popped the clasps, thwack-thwack, and retrieved a flat-black bolt-action Mauser 98, a truly badass piece of machinery that had a barrel gauge like a plumbing pipe.

What had Abraham said? I thought as I slung the bandolier over my shoulder and filled the magazine to its limit. Better to have it and not need it.

Walking slowly backward onto the islet, I took aim at the giant cat that was paddling toward me in the river like a dog. He was mere feet away, emerging from the river, shaking off, flinging a thousand twinkling beads of water from his mane. I squared up the rifle, aimed between his eyes, and squeezed the trigger. The gun butt rocketed against my shoulder and the lion went down before me like a sack of potatoes, tumbling in a sopping heap into the river mud. PETA, forgive me. It was a beautiful creature, but it was also a very big, beautiful creature that was trying to kill me.

I turned my eyes back to the riverbank. I watched in disbelief as the lions loosed Abe’s corpse from underneath the truck and hauled him back up the steep, sandy embankment.

Chapter 23

I SAT FOR a long time on the shore of the river island, staring at the spot on the opposite riverbank where the lions had carried off Abe’s body. I didn’t think they would come back for me, but I kept the rifle in my lap with the safety off as I sat on the muddy islet, reflected on what had just happened, caught my breath, and collected my wits.

Beside me, the lion I’d just killed lay on his side, sinking into the loose mud, his back legs in the river, tail floating, blood darkening the grass and eddying in the brown water.

Time to assess the situation. Okay, Oz, here’s the 411: you’re lost and alone in the African bush without any supplies. This is a situation that needs to be addressed, quickly. But every time I tried to start figuring out what to do next, my mind would wander. I couldn’t stop thinking about what had just happened.

The more I thought about it, the less sense it made.

Lions are textbook examples of social mammals. Their pride structure, especially when it comes to group hunting, is one of the best-known and most well-documented social organizations in zoology. Lions live in prides, and female lions do the hunting. Nomad male lions will hunt alone, but male lions never hunt together in groups.

Except now, all that was out the window. I’d never even heard of mass male group hunting in lions before, let alone witnessed it. Also: why were these lions carrying off their kills? And why no females? Female lions are better at hunting, anyway. That’s one reason why they do most of it for the pride—their lighter, more agile bodies are better built for it. Where the hell were the girls? I hadn’t seen a lioness all day.

Such bizarre behavior in these lions wasn’t just curious, it was mind-blowing. These lions were doing things that lions just did not do. What I’d just seen contradicted everything I knew about the behavior of this apex predator. Why?

This is to say nothing of the fact that lions are almost never actually harmful to humans. What’s the point in hunting a human? We don’t have a lot of meat on us. The way those lions had come after us, it was as if it were personal.

I knelt and cupped some river water in my palm, splashed my face. I would have to save my confusion for a time when I was in a more comfortable position. For now, I had to snap out of it. Ponder later. I needed to do something to fix my current predicament, stat.

Shifting the rifle in my lap, I patted a rectangular lump in the pocket of my wet khakis. It was my iPhone, which I’d jailbroken the day before so it would work in Africa. Ha-ha. I shook it off: bubbles wobbled under the screen and water dribbled from the battery compartment. So much for calling for help. In any case I wouldn’t have gotten coverage out in the remote African bush. Sure as hell not with AT&T.

I chucked the now-useless chunk of sleek Apple design over my shoulder and saw two huge, gray lumps the size of oil tanks float past me in the river. I stilled as two river hippos swam past.

Hippos are herbivores, of course—but they’re enormous and aggressively territorial animals. They’ll kill without hesitation when they feel their territory is being invaded. They’re actually some of the most dangerous animals you could encounter around here. I held my breath until the two malevolent tugboats disappeared around the bend in the channel.

Chapter 24

I HELD THE rifle and the bullets high in one hand to keep them dry and waded back into the river.

I emerged beside the sideways Land Rover with my eyes on the rim of the riverbank where I’d last seen the lions. All I had to call a plan was this: get back to the safari camp where Abe and I had landed, figure something out from there. Brilliant, wasn’t it?

I searched the crashed truck for my things: I’d left my bigger bag back at the camp and taken a small canvas backpack with me. There it was, one strap stuck on the busted gearshift. I disentangled it and shouldered the pack. As I gave the truck another once-over, I spotted something curious. In the backseat, on the ground, was a little pinpoint of glowing red light.

I knelt in the silt and retrieved my Sony camcorder. I’d forgotten about it. I mean, I’d had a lot on my plate for the last hour or so. The thing was splattered with mud and the lens was scratched half to hell, but not only was it still working, it was still on.

I stopped the recording, rewound it, and watched the footage on the view screen. After the crash, the camera had lain on its side in the mud and had accidentally filmed the rest of the attack. No, it hadn’t been a nightmare. The lions filled the screen, manes flaring and eyes burning as they swarmed the Rover. It was a mess of snouts and teeth and paws.

Thing was—adversity aside, Abe’s death aside—I had actually done it. I’d gotten what I’d come to Africa for.

Here was video evidence of inexplicable, hyperaggressive, aberrant animal behavior.

The footage was incendiary. This footage had the power to change the conversation. This was a cute story to tell at a Molotov cocktail party. The scientific community wouldn’t be able to wrap their minds around this footage. Or be able to explain it.

It wouldn’t be just the scientists, either, I thought. My gears were turning in double time now. The world would have to listen—they would have to start to realize that some sort of widespread environmental disaster was already underway.

Your first job now, Oz: survive long enough to get this thing back to civilization. That means not getting eaten. That means getting the hell out of here, now-ish.

I powered off the camera and zipped it up in the backpack. I checked the clip in the Mauser. Four rounds left. Bad news.

It didn’t matter. I’d have to figure it out. This was bigger than me. I needed to make it out of here with this tape so the world would know what was happening. Ten-hut, Oz. Let’s rock.

I glanced up at the sky: vultures were dropping to earth from their gyres. Back on the river islet where the dead lion lay, a peppering of flies already tickled the carcass, the sound of their wings reverberating in the air. A couple of marabou storks pranced daintily around the lion, piercing its flesh with their beaks now and then. They jostled for real estate with a smattering of African white-backed vultures. Speckles of blood flew as their rosy wrinkled heads bobbed up and down to beat the band, their beaks ripping delicate threads of tissue from the body and catching them in their throats.

Ah, the circle of life. The rivers flow into the sea and yet the sea is never full and all that. Death becomes a meal ticket. Death was the modus operandi out here in the African bush.

Now if I could only avoid becoming part of this regularly scheduled programming: I had to get back to humanity with an important message.

Chapter 25

BACK UP ON the tall grass clearing where we’d been attacked, I hunched down and watched the other Land Rover, parked beneath the sausage tree, for a time.

I listened carefully. Nothing. The wind hushed the grass in rippling waves. Birds reeled in circles high overhead in a punishingly empty blue sky. I guessed it to be late afternoon. I debated going back to see if the truck was still working. Had the keys still been in it? I couldn’t remember. What with all those lions leaping for my throat, I’d forgotten to check. Though it was a nice day, I definitely would have preferred to drive. A wide expanse of grassland the length of a football field stretched flat between me and the parked truck, which seemed deserted.

But it was almost too quiet.

At last I decided against it. It was too risky. It would be foolish to go toward the lions. Though they were nowhere to be seen, that didn’t mean anything. This was their neighborhood, and besides, there was no way to predict their unstable behavior. They could be on their way back right now. I knew I had to go in the other direction, on foot, back toward the camp.

I kept as low as I could as I skirted the glade. I found the rutted tire trail we’d driven in on and began following it back to the safari camp. Glumly I glanced up at the sun, which was starting to descend toward the salt flats on the horizon. It would be dark in a few hours. I wasn’t looking forward to that.

I picked up my pace. The camp was only about five miles away, but I was looking at five miles through a zoo without cages, where some of the animals seemed to have gone schizoid.

The sun dried my clothes to a crust and then I got soaked again as I waded back through the river ford. I was hot and exhausted and starting to get thirsty, but decided not to drink the water for fear of parasites.

I walked for an hour or so before I spotted the river dock where we’d picked up the Botswanans at the other end of a grassy field. They and their canoe were gone. After almost getting eaten, I didn’t blame them for pissing off. They’d known how wrong things were in the environment. How important it was to get out while there still was a chance.

I headed toward the dock to see if there might be another boat. That’s when I noticed a sudden movement in the trees off to my right. Though there was no breeze, the trees seemed to be waving—undulating—ever so slightly. They also seemed to glisten, as if they were slathered in oil.

I felt something crawl up my ankle.

It was an ant. And not just any ant. It was a Dorylus: an African driver ant. By its badass mandibles, I knew it was a soldier. Some indigenous tribes actually use the driver-ant soldiers themselves as makeshift sutures: their bite is so strong that putting one of them on each side of a gash will hold it together.

That’s what was covering everything: the trees, the grass, the ground. Millions upon millions of driver ants swarmed through the field in a loose black column. It had to be at least a mile long and six feet wide. The ants were the size of a baby’s fingers and the color of red wine.

I flicked off the bug and squashed it under the heel of my boot.

Now, I love animals as much as the next biologist. But I do not like bugs. They don’t do it for me. My subcortex says: Ick. Get ’em off me. I’d always known that entomology was not my bag. And the Dorylus is an especially nasty customer.

The frenzied column of ants connected two dark masses in the field. I realized they were Cape buffalo calves. My guess was they’d wandered into the path of the ants and been overwhelmed. Already dead, with most of their hides stripped, they were now in the process of being consumed by the living sea of bugs.

The Dorylus, or siafu, as it is called by the Bantu, can sometimes have colonies of fifty or sixty million. Like a foraging army, the colonies live on the march, attacking anything they come into contact with, including animals and sometimes children. Death often results from asphyxiation—when the flood of bugs crawls down the victim’s throat. I cringed as I looked at the shiny, squirming black carpet extending into the distance. It was truly incredible.

Then I turned away and went to the river.

Chapter 26

I HAD JUST made it back to the trail when I heard a scream. It was hard to make out over the wind and splashing water, but it was definitely a human scream, coming from the direction of the river dock.

Apparently I was not alone out here.

I heard it again, and then once more as I ran back across the field, away from the ants. It sounded like a woman. I remembered the bloody clothes from the massacred animal-spotting safari and picked up my pace.

I arrived at the end of the dock and stopped short at the edge of the riverbank. There was a white woman with dark hair clinging to a large rock in the middle of the river. What the hell she was doing up there was a mystery. She was wearing khaki pants, but was barefoot. Her clothes were soaked flat against her skin. She clung to the pinnacle of the rock, scrambling for balance with her feet and hands.

I cupped my hands and shouted across the water: “Can you move?”

In retrospect it was a strange thing to say.

She glanced over at me, seeing me for the first time. The look she gave me was as if she’d never seen a person before. I didn’t know whether she knew English or not. Then she let loose another scream, pointing upriver, to my right.

I followed the direction of her point with my eyes and saw what looked like a fifteen-foot-long clump of grayish mud appear on the surface.

It wasn’t mud. This thing had more teeth than the average mud clump.

It was a Nile crocodile: the largest and most aggressive species of crocodile in Africa. As I watched, its scaly, spiny, and very powerful tail flicked, and it began floating out into the middle of the stream toward the woman clinging to the rock. I didn’t know how the hell she’d managed to get herself into this situation, but I ordered myself to help her out of it.

I had four rounds left. Make them count, Oz.

I dropped to one knee and lined up the Mauser’s sights with the crocodile’s paddle-shaped head. I balanced the barrel against my arm, held my breath, and pulled the trigger.

The gun cracked and kicked hard into my shoulder, and I saw a splash in the water in front of the crocodile. I’d missed.

I sighted again and squeezed off two more shots. There was no splash. I’d nailed the son of a bitch, twice. I couldn’t see where, but I’d heard bullets hitting meat.

But it didn’t die. That would have been too easy. All it did was turn toward me with a quick sideways jerk of its surfboard-size head, as if I’d tapped it on the shoulder.

I blasted one more bullet at it and got the sucker right on the crown of its head. That did the trick. It stared out from the muck a moment, then sank and flopped over, belly-up, in the river.

I looked to my right again: a second crocodile, racing downriver in our direction.

Then I noticed the rest of them. In a lagoon some distance upriver was a bask of at least four crocodiles, and another three sunning themselves on the shore. No wonder they were riled up. It looked like the woman had entered a nesting area.

I aimed at the next approaching croc. It was coming at us like an animated hunk of driftwood. I pulled the trigger.

On nothing. I’d spent my last round, and the gun clicked on an empty chamber.

Chapter 27

HMM. THE CROCODILES glided through the water toward the woman while I sat on the bank with an unloaded gun. A lightbulb appeared over my head, and I threw down the gun.

I cupped my hands to my mouth and shouted across the water: “Be right back!”

I turned tail and began running back the way I’d come, into the field behind me.

I peeled off my wet shirt as I ran into thrashing brown grass. Just to clarify: I was about to dive into a horde of army ants with my shirt off. I ran through the glittering black carpet, feeling ants crunch under my boots with each step, to the corpse of the Cape buffalo calf. With my wet shirt I slapped ants from its gnarled, stiffened hooves, grabbed the body by the leg, and began dragging it back toward the river as fast as I could.

The ants went mad. A softly clicking, chattering swarm of ruby-dark ants followed after me. I could see the column shift and darken as millions of insects got new marching orders to deal with the intruder. I saw the message spread through the colony, borne on pheromones from one pair of antennae to the next. The only advantage I had was my legs.

The calf was lighter than I’d expected, as it had already been hollowed out some by the ants. The ants scampered up my arms and I swatted them off as best I could. I had ten or fifteen bites throbbing on my arms and chest by the time I made it back to the river dock. The pain was no big deal—it was only like being shot repeatedly with a staple gun.

The black swirling column had fallen a long way behind me by the time I arrived back at the riverbank.

Two crocodiles were swimming circles around the woman on the rock. I ran out onto the creaking wooden dock with the buffalo calf.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Dinnertime! Here!”

And I heaved the buffalo calf into the river. It splooshed into the slow muddy current below me like a fat kid doing a cannonball.

One of the crocodiles turned when it saw the heap of floating meat. A bird in hand is better than one on top of a rock, he probably thought. But the other one lingered, swimming a languid circle around the woman.

I snatched up the rifle and heaved it by its barrel at the crocodile. The butt of the rifle splashed next to its tail. Then it, too, turned and went toward the buffalo calf, following the other crocodile, who was now ripping into the dead meat. Confused ants stippled the thrashing water around them, flailing crazily on the surface of the river as the two crocodiles tore apart the carcass.

I ran along the shore until I was opposite the dark-haired woman. “Swim to me!” I shouted. “You have to swim to me now!”

She shook her head and closed her eyes, hugging the rock tighter.

“It’s okay. You have to. You’re running out of time. It’s your only chance!”

She looked at me for a moment. She looked at the crocodiles, not far upriver. She climbed down into the water and pushed herself away from the rock.

She wasn’t a good swimmer. Granted, conditions weren’t ideal. Her arms slapped the water and her feet flailed. She seemed to take a day to paddle across the twenty-odd feet of calm water to the bank.

“Come on! Come on!” I said, my eyes flicking back and forth between her and the crocodiles.

I almost had to stifle the urge to clap when she finally arrived on shore. She stumbled when she tried to climb up the steep embankment onto the clearing, and fell to her knees in the mud.

“No, no! You’ve got it. Come on, take my hand.”

I was lying flat on my belly, reaching my hand down to her. And then I felt a tickling cloud of insect legs skittering up my bare back.

“Hurry! Hurry!”

My backside was already flaming with pain.

The woman grasped my hand and I nearly ripped her arm off dragging her to her feet, up the embankment, and onto the clearing.

“Move!” I screamed, yanking her into a run with one hand as I slapped at myself with the other.

The ants were everywhere. On my neck, in my hair, my ears. I spat one out that had crawled into my mouth. The sound that involuntarily rose out of me was what I might call a shrill shriek of revulsion, like a woman standing on a chair screaming at a mouse.

I didn’t stop running until I tripped over the tire tracks and fell to the ground. Clear of the pulsing red-black column, I threw off my backpack and rolled over in the dust as though I were on fire, spitting and slapping at myself. I very literally had ants in my pants. With panicky, fumbling fingers I jerked at my boot laces and kicked off my boots. I tore off my pants and leaped out of them, yelping as I hopped up and down, flapping my pants as though they were a flag, ants flying out of the legs like flung pebbles.

After swiping them all off my legs, I thumbed the waist of my boxers for the most vital check of all. Clear.

“Thank God!”

Ant-free now, I squeezed my feet back into my unlaced boots and went about stomping the little bastards as they tried to scatter.

“Not so tough without your friends, are you?” I screamed at them, hopping like a crazed leprechaun, doing a little ant-killing jig in the dust. “Die! Die! Die!”

When the last ants scampered away, I caught my breath and inspected my arms, my legs, my chest, and back. My flesh was pebbled with welts, welts on top of welts, each about as red and juicy-looking as a maraschino cherry.

Suddenly, as though shaken from a dream, I remembered the woman. I turned and looked at her up close for the first time. She was petite—tiny as a child, with slender, birdlike bones. Even covered in river mud, she was undeniably good-looking—olive skin, bitumen-black hair slightly dusted with premature gray, sharp brown eyes, and high, distinct cheekbones.

“You saved my life,” she said softly. She was still gazing somewhere into the middle distance. Her English had an elegant European lilt, what I thought was a French accent—vowels in the front of her mouth, consonants brushed with feathers. She hugged her knees, her body a seesaw anchored on her tailbone, rocking back and forth in the dirt. She definitely wasn’t all there yet, but the lights were coming on.

Then I recalled I wasn’t wearing pants. I slapped them into the dirt to knock any stray ants out of them and worried them on over my boots. I checked my camera in the backpack to make sure all was fine and sat down on a rock to lace up my boots.

“You saved my life,” she said again, more lucid now.

“Actually,” I said, grabbing her hand to pull her up, “I’m not done.”

Chapter 28

WE HALF JOGGED the rest of the way back to the camp. It took us a little over an hour. In silence, the woman followed, still somewhat out to lunch in her brain, off somewhere else. It was late afternoon now, verging on gloaming, what photographers call the golden hour. The sinking African sun was huge above the darkening horizon, hanging there like a ball of burning blood. Bats had come out, flittering, swooping, and diving to catch insects. The world was beginning to chatter with twilight noises.

“Find some dry clothes and get changed,” I said, guiding her into the first of the camp’s platform tents. “We’re not out of danger yet. I’m going to need your help barricading this place before nightfall.”

After I left her, the first thing I did was look for another gun. I couldn’t find one, not in any of the other tents or the storage container. Not anywhere.

So I went to the next item on my priority list. I headed straight for the camp’s centrally located bar and dining area and cracked the seal on a bottle of twelve-year-old Glenlivet—for medicinal reasons. I poured some on my smarting arms and legs and took a swig.

I was trickling Scotch down my back when I heard the unmistakable mumbling drone of a plane. Thank God. I ran out onto the little road that led to the airstrip and waved my arms as a single-engine plane buzzed low over the camp.

The plane waggled its wings in response as it flew past. It cut a wide arc around the camp and came circling back. As it roared overhead again, something fell from its window and landed in the reeds beside the airstrip. I searched thrashingly in the reeds and found it: it was a note crumpled around a stone.

“Staff informed us of situation. Need to check on camp farther upriver,” the note said. “Back in twenty minutes.”

I jogged back to the bar. Maybe we weren’t dead after all.

I’d switched the Glenlivet for a bottle of Veuve Clicquot when the woman came in carrying a bag. She was wearing fresh khakis and a faded white polo, but she was still filthy, scratched up, hair bedraggled, muddy, wet.

“Was that a plane?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said from behind the bar, unwinding the wire cage around the cork. “They saw us and dropped a note saying they’ll be back soon.” I thumbed out the cork. It popped and hit the drum-tight inner wall of the tent. The bottle smoked and white foam cascaded over my fingers like a science-fair volcano. I slurped Champagne off my wrist and took a swig.

“Vive la being out of here in twenty minutes,” I said, offering her the bottle.

“Twenty minutes?” she said, eyes brightening with panic. “But we need to get out of here now!”

I looked at her hands: they were shaking like a machine about to break. I put the bottle on the bar and walked around to her.

“It’s okay,” I said. “We’re going to be okay, Miss…”

“My name is Chloe. Chloe Tousignant,” she said. She slumped and gripped the counter with one hand. She began to look sick, the color draining from her face.

“Listen, Chloe,” I said, guiding her onto one of the bar stools. Her thin shoulders were shaking. I tried to rub them, but the muscles under her skin were so tensely knotted it was like massaging sponge rubber.

“You’ve been through hell, but you’re okay now. I promise you. Nothing’s going to happen now.”

She didn’t reply. Her color wasn’t getting better.

“Come on, Chloe,” I said. “Stay with me. Can you talk to me? Who are you? Were you with the safari that was attacked? Were you on vacation?”

“No, I’m not a tourist. I’m a scientist. Population ecology.” The words came out of her in a rapid, piqued flutter. Talking seemed to help, at least. “Our group came from the École Polytechnique in Paris.”

That’s an impressive institution. École Polytechnique is basically the French MIT. Female biologists I knew usually didn’t look like ballerinas. They tended to favor Morrissey T-shirts and combat boots.

“Have you seen anyone else?” Chloe said. “I was with two colleagues, Jean Angone and Arthur Maxwell.”

“No, I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re the only other person I’ve seen, besides some Botswanan cooks who threatened us with machetes and the guy I came in with, and he’s dead.”

She shook her head and bit her lip as she stared, glassy-eyed, at the floor.

“Why were you here?” I said. “A field trip?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “We were collecting data on migratory birds at the Moremi Game Reserve. We came here to the delta two days ago. The lions attacked at dusk the day before last. They fell from a tree. The guide died first, and then everyone ran. I don’t know how I escaped. I fled across the water and spent the night in a tree. When I heard your truck, I climbed down and headed for the sound. I was wading back across the river when I saw the crocodiles, and climbed onto that rock, and then just stayed there waiting for them to go…”

She closed her eyes and took a shivery breath. When she opened them again, I suddenly realized I’d been wrong about her. She wasn’t just good-looking. There was something else, something austere and regal about her face. She was beautiful.

“And you are?” she said. “An American reporter? A documentarian?”

“My name is Jackson Oz,” I said. “I came here to try to document aberrant behavior in lions. I got a tip that the lions in Botswana were acting weird from a guy I know—well, knew—Abe Bindix, who guides safaris here. Or did. His brother ran this camp, but he’d been out of contact for days, and we came to check on him. We were searching for you when the lions attacked us today. I escaped, but Abe died. There was nothing I could do.”

Before I knew what was happening, Chloe softly took my hand in hers. She leaned forward and gave me a soft kiss on both cheeks.

“Thank you so much for what you did,” she said, starting to tear up as she continued to hold my hand. “I was so tired. I was in despair. If you hadn’t come along right then, I’m not sure if—I don’t know if I would have lived.”

“Well, you’re here now,” I said. I found myself wanting another brush of her lips. I squeezed her hand back, swiped the Champagne bottle from the bar, and offered it to her. “You made it. We both did.”

“So you’re not a documentarian. Who—I mean, what are you?” she asked.

“I’m actually a scientist, too. A biologist.”

“From Columbia University?”

“Yes,” I said. “How’d you know?”

She took a swig of Champagne.

“It was written on your underwear.”

Chapter 29

“JACKSON OZ. COLUMBIA University,” Chloe said. To my great irritation, I felt my face reddening. “I thought I knew all the names from Columbia. Do you know—er…” She put a thin finger to thin lips and her eyes turned up, trying to think of a name. “Michael Shrift?”

“Mike was my adviser,” I said.

“Oh, so you are—er—a student?” Chloe said.

I liked her accent. This woman somehow made being confused sexy.

“Well, actually, I dropped out,” I said.

She gave me a cockeyed glance, the needle of her WTF-ometer twitching.

“You dropped out? Um…let me guess. You have a blog.”

“Yeah,” I said, brightening. “Do you read my blog?”

“No,” she said, taking another sip from the Champagne bottle. “It was just a guess. But I will now. Since you saved my life.”

I didn’t like the faint note of sarcasm in her voice. When things aren’t going your way, change the conversation.

“What was your population study about?”

“Over the last few years, there has been a big change in some migratory bird populations,” Chloe said as she shifted the bottle to her other hand and looked at the label. “Changing very rapidly. We do not know why.”

“So you’re saying what?” I said. “Birds are dying?”

“No,” Chloe said, picking at the foil on the bottle with her thumbnail. “It’s just the opposite. Bird populations are increasing at incredible rates. Exponential. It is very, very strange.”

I thought about that. Like frogs, birds are often indicator species—animals whose population stability is a good measure of the stability of an ecosystem. Changes in the environment affect them quickly. Did this have something to do with HAC? I wondered.

“Tree nesters?” I said raising an eyebrow.

“Yes, and shrub and ground nesters as well,” she said. “The phenomena are so unprecedented that many of the faculty in Paris refuse to believe it. That’s why my colleagues and I came here. To gather data. I think something very, very wrong is happening to the environment.”

“So do I,” I said, talking fast now, getting excited. “It’s not just the birds. There’s been a massive outbreak of animal attacks on human beings over the last three years. The lions that killed your friends and mine, that wasn’t just an isolated incident. Human beings are being increasingly attacked by animals. There’s something that’s gone completely haywire with the lions in this area. And other species, too. I think there’s something badly wrong with the environment that’s changing their behavior.”

I rooted around in my backpack for the camera and set it on the bar.

“Look. This happened this afternoon.”

Her face betrayed shock as she watched the footage.

“Oh, my God! That can’t be right. I was so busy running for my life, I hadn’t noticed. The lions were all male? How can that be? That has never happened before.”

She shook her head at the screen and looked up at me with dinner-plate eyes.

“You need to show this, Jackson,” she said. “People must see this.”

“They will, Chloe.” We began to hear the low thrum of a plane engine in the distance. “And please. Call me Oz.”

Chapter 30

SIX HOURS LATER, wearing my good shoes and scratching one of those maraschino-cherry ant stings below my ear, I went clattering down the back stairs of Riley’s—Maun’s largest, and as far as I knew only, hotel.

Dropping my packed bags beside the scuffed brass rail of the outdoor hotel bar, I looked around for Chloe, whom I was supposed to meet for a quick drink before my midnight flight out of Botswana.

I did a double take when I spotted her talking on her cell phone, her luggage bunched beneath her feet at the bar stool. We had both been so bitten, bloody, and dirty we’d looked like mud idols when we came out of the bush a few hours before, but now, in a pale yellow dress with her hair still damp from the shower, Chloe was stunning.

I was struck by how happy I was to see her. Besides her obvious assets, I couldn’t get over the toughness, the dogged will to live that this tiny slip of a woman had shown in surviving the trials she’d been through over the last few days. Meeting her had been one of the only good things to come out of this whole situation. That and the footage I had caught.

It was late, and there was almost no one in the bar: a group of tourists keeping quietly to themselves in one corner, a couple of gruff-looking drunk men at one table, and a piano player at a baby grand striking notes that tinkled over the steady sploosh of a fountain in the middle of the enclosure. The marble bowl of the fountain was lit from below, and the water flashed veins of blue-green light.

I turned away from Chloe when a tall, gaunt, red-haired man walked into the bar. It was Robinson Van der Hulst, Abraham’s business partner and the pilot who’d found Chloe and me and flown us out of the bush.

“What’s the word, Robinson?” I said as we shook hands. “Are the authorities collecting the lions for autopsies?”

Robinson shook his head regretfully and looked over his shoulder.

“The government game rangers are so busy they won’t even help me retrieve the bodies. There’s a lot going on, Mr. Oz, none of it good. For one thing, yours wasn’t the only attack today.”

Robinson glanced over his shoulder again.

“The whole delta is in chaos, man,” he said. “Two other camps were attacked by lions and another two have been out of radio contact for twelve hours.”

I blinked at him. The animal crisis that I’d been trying to convince people was coming for years seemed to have arrived full-blown in a single day.

“I even heard that the largest camp in the delta, Camp Eden, was attacked by jackals, of all things.”

“Jackals?”

The implausibilities kept compounding, one on top of another. Jackals are basically coyotes. They occupy the same niche in the ecosystem. Once in a blue moon you’ll hear about a jackal making off with a baby or something like that, but it’s so rare that if it happens, it makes the news. Jackals don’t attack adult humans. They just don’t. Jackal attacks on humans are so rare that there isn’t even any data on them. Feral dogs, wolves, dingoes, and so on might attack people now and then, but even those attacks usually occur because the animals are rabid.

That thought clicked on another lightbulb over my head.

“Listen—do you think there’s any chance these attacks might have something to do with a virus? Like a massive outbreak of rabies? Robinson, you have to ask the authorities again. Hell, you have to tell them. The bodies of the lions, the jackals, all these animals need to be collected and studied. We need to do autopsies, tests for rabies—yesterday.”

“You don’t understand, Mr. Oz,” Robinson said, shaking his head at me. “The authorities here aren’t scientists. They’re politicians. Which in Africa means they’re thugs. Believe me, they’re not in a listening mood right now. There must be close to a hundred people missing, and they’re panicking. It’s so bad, I hear they’re going to issue an evacuation order for the entire delta. I’ve heard rumors the military is on its way.”

At that moment, we saw a pickup truck roar up beside the hotel and come to a squealing, jerky halt. The smoky diesel engine of the parked truck hammered and chugged. A middle-aged African in a crisply ironed white shirt got out of the passenger door and marched into the bar. His head was roughly the size and shape of a basketball. Two young soldiers carrying AK-47s hopped out of the truck bed and filed in behind him. There was an immediate and palpable tension in the bar. The two drunk men at the nearby table quit talking.

“That’s Assistant Superintendent Mokgwathi,” Robinson whispered to me. “Maun’s top cop. What now?”

The piano player stopped playing, and the vacuum of silence was louder than the music. The fountain splashed, glass clinked behind the bar.

“I must speak to a Mr. Oz,” Mokgwathi said to the room in a deep and musically sweet African accent. “A Mr. Jackson Oz.”

My legs twitched, and I was about to step forward when Robinson squeezed my shoulder and kept a vise grip on it. Chloe’s eyes flashed at me from the bar and quickly looked away. Robinson didn’t let go until the policemen, getting nothing from the room but vacant looks, pivoted on their jackboots and left the bar.

“What’s up?” I said. “Why would they be looking for me?”

“Do you have your plane ticket?” he said.

I nodded.

“Good,” Robinson said, grabbing my bags and jerking his head in the direction of the street. “My truck’s around the corner. It’s time to get you to the airport and onto your plane.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Someone in the hotel must have seen your camera and alerted the police,” he said. “Tourism is big business here, man. One of the only businesses. If word gets out that animals have gone bonkers and are killing tourists, that’s bad news for Botswana’s GDP, isn’t it? This is very dangerous for you.”

“What is dangerous?” Chloe said. She’d watched the episode with the cops over the rim of her drink and now stood beside us with her bags.

“I’ll tell you on the way to the airport,” I said, shouldering her carry-on as I led her toward the street.

Chapter 31

AT THE AIRPORT, all the seats were taken in the Air Botswana waiting area. The terminal was filled to capacity, crowded with tourists coming in from evacuated safari camps.

The air buzzed with fear and nervous excitement. The tourists looked scared and confused, though I was glad to see that many of them were texting or talking on their cell phones. With the threat of a government cover-up looming, I hoped word of this craziness was already leaking to the press.

It took no small amount of persistence, as well as a folded hundred-dollar bill, and then another, to snag Chloe a seat on the midnight flight to Johannesburg with me. From there, we’d be going our separate ways. I was headed back to the US, I hoped for a press conference at which I would show the lion footage. Chloe needed to return to Paris.

I was glad I’d decided to leave the camcorder with Robinson when the airport scanners pulled me out of the security line for a more thorough search. I held my breath as the inspectors tossed my bags and wanded me. They missed the DVR tape I’d hidden in my pants, taped against the inside of my thigh. No TSA-style pat-downs out here, thank God.

As I was standing by the window at the gate, looking out onto the runway, my stomach dropped like an anchor when what looked like a military cargo plane blasted in. It was thick and snub-nosed, painted brown. Was the Botswanan military really crazy enough to try to quarantine this thing? I didn’t want to find out.

Things were changing right in front of my eyes, I realized. Whatever this phenomenon was, it was spreading, getting stronger, catching hold. The jittery feeling of a rising crisis was in the air, like the feeling before a hurricane.

But I was convinced HAC wasn’t a local problem. It was a global one. Governments and military forces have enough trouble dealing with large-scale problems one at a time. How were they going to be able to assist everyone everywhere, all at once? This problem would call for an unheard-of amount of global cooperation. And I didn’t see it happening yet.

“So you really think this thing is real, Oz?” Chloe said. Her eyes were focused out the window. Outside on the rough tarmac, soldiers spilled from the plane, Trojan Horse–style. “All around the world, animals suddenly attacking humans for no reason? And not other animals? I mean—how can that be? Why? Why now? It sounds—er—completely crazy.”

“I don’t know how or why, Chloe,” I said. “All I know is that bird populations don’t just double in the course of several years, and lions don’t just suddenly, radically, inexplicably change their hunting behaviors. Something very weird is going on.”

The temporary cell phone I’d bought in Maun that day rang as we were standing in line to board the plane. It was a voice mail from Gail Quinn, a former professor of mine at Columbia. It was good news. She’d shaken some trees and managed to arrange a meeting about HAC with Nate Gardner, the senior senator from New York.

“What is it?” Chloe said when I hung up, smiling. We were on the small passenger plane, hunching under the low ceiling.

“Good news. I have a meeting with one of the most prominent leaders in Congress about all this. With the videotape, I might have a real shot at getting the US government to help.”

A depressing thought hit me as I was stowing my bag in the overhead. What if Senator Gardner reacted to me the same way Chloe initially had? Since I dropped out of Columbia before I received my doctorate, what if he thought I was just some wacko blogger, spinning Internet conspiracy theories between naps on my mother’s couch? Sometimes I forgot to step back and look at how nut-jobby I could seem.

“Hey, I have a crazy idea,” I said as I sat down next to her. “Because I’m crazy. Chloe, I know you have a lot to do after all this, but would it be possible for you to come with me?”

“What?” she said. “Go with you to the US?”

“You’re right,” I said, facing forward. “Like I said, it’s crazy. Forget about it.”

“No, wait,” Chloe said. “I mean why? Why do you want me to come?”

“Well, your credentials, for one thing,” I said. “Your degree. The École Polytechnique. You’re a credible expert. Even better, a credible European expert who’s seen and experienced the same things I have. I’m concerned that the senator might initially react to me the way you did. He’ll think I’m a crackpot. He’ll probably look at me like I’m wearing a tinfoil hat. But if you’re there with me…”

She raised an eyebrow.

“But please,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll figure it out.”

I took out my phone and pretended to play with it. Out of my peripheral vision, I picked up her aquiline nose doing a little crinkling thing as she squinted at me.

She leaned back in her seat as she let out a deep breath.

“It isn’t a choice,” she said as the plane began to taxi. “There really is some sort of environmental disaster happening. What kind of biologist would I be if I didn’t do everything I could to solve this? Besides, you saved my life. I owe you a favor. So I’ll go. On one condition.”

“Anything.”

“I hate flying. Can I just—er—hold your hand as we take off?”

I smiled as I slipped her fine-boned hand in mine.

“Twist my arm,” I said.

Chapter 32

THE BROADWAY LOCAL clatters past on the elevated subway track when Natalie Shaw arrives at the door of Oz’s building.

It’s just past five a.m., still dark, though the sky is beginning to turn blue, and the steel-shuttered Harlem streets are empty. New York City actually does sleep after all, she thinks. The backs of her knees and armpits are misty with sweat in the already warm predawn summer air. She yawns as she keys herself into the dingy lobby. She’s stopping by on her way home from the hospital, having just put in a thirty-hour shift, and she’s half dead on her feet.

Trudging up the building’s coffin-width stairwell, she still doesn’t know why she’s doing this. She pretty much broke up with Oz in her e-mail, and told him to find someone else to look in on Attila. It’s the fact that he hasn’t gotten back to her. Annoyed as that makes her, she can’t help but wonder if maybe he never got the message, and now Attila is starving or something.

Getting closer to Oz’s apartment, she doesn’t have to wait long to find out that that’s not the case. She can hear Attila by the time she gets to the third floor. Christ, she can actually smell the damn thing as she climbs onto the fifth-floor landing. She’s baffled by the fact that Oz’s neighbors haven’t petitioned to kick him out of the building.

But then again, she put up with him for a long time, didn’t she? I’d do anything for love, she thinks, but I won’t do that. What? Take a detour home after a thirty-hour shift to go clean up chimp shit? Well, apparently I will do that. Except it’s not for love; you already broke up with the bastard. To hell with the chimp—you’re a chump.

In and out, she thinks, fishing Oz’s keys from the pocket of her turquoise hospital scrubs. Five minutes. Feed the monkey, clean the monkey—maybe—then get the hell out.

Attila goes apeshit as she comes in. Natalie winces as she approaches, and the chimp goes berserk with shrieking. It’s a piercing, nails-on-chalkboard EEE-EEEE-EEEE sound, the edge of it like a pocketknife slicing her eardrum.

“Nice to see you too, asshole,” Natalie says, lifting the pooper-scooper as she unlatches the door of his cage. “Your face could make a freight train take a dirt road, did you know that? Anyway. Lucky me is here to gather your droppings.”

She bags her rubber gloves along with the crap before coming back with the food. Tangerines, a stack of Fig Newtons, and a pound of deli roast beef. Not to mention the goddamn applesauce with the crushed-up vitamins and Zoloft. All of it on a tray. Surprised it wasn’t silver. Oz takes better care of this chimp than he took care of her.

“Bon appétit, monsieur.” Natalie sets down the tray and latches the cage again. “Breakfast is served. Don’t choke on it.”

Her hand is on the doorknob when she hears a noisy thump come from Attila’s direction.

“Ugh. What now?”

She hurries back into Attila’s room. She stops short in the doorway.

Attila is on the floor of the cage, the food scattered pell-mell all around him. He’s lying facedown, his hands under his chest. He isn’t moving.

What in the hell? Did he have a heart attack or something? That’s all we need, she thinks, undoing the latch. To have the thing die on her before Oz comes home.

She bends down, nudges him, tries to turn him over. Attila spins around and wipes a reeking handful of shit across the shirt of her scrubs. He shrieks and smears it down her chest and onto her pants. Then he jumps back into the corner of the room, pant-hooting, howling, “EEE-EEE-EEEEEEAHHHH!”

Natalie stands, looking down at herself in disgust.

“You evil little bastard!” she shouts at the chimp.

Then Attila quits screaming. He shuts his mouth, and with his sweet, expressive brown eyes he gives her a cold, quizzical look that makes her begin to slowly back away.

Chapter 33

HOT, GLARING LIGHT bores through the diamond-shaped spaces between the links of Attila’s cage as he lies, unmoving, on the cluttered floor of his room, all alone again.

Slowly, he rises to his feet and crosses the hallway into Oz’s bedroom. He yanks out the drawers of the dresser. After upending the drawers, he ransacks the closet, hooting and screeching as he tosses jeans and shirts across the floor.

Then he pisses over everything. He drenches the clothes and continues on to the bed, training the hot yellow stream on the pillow.

That done, he snatches the fire-engine-red hat from a bedpost and knuckle-walks into the hallway bathroom. The wall bolts of the sink creak as he pulls his weight onto it.

He looks at himself in the mirror and positions the red hat on his own head at a rakish angle. He crouches on the edge of the sink, opposable toes gripping the porcelain rim, staring at himself.

Attila sits blank-faced on the sink, motionless and tense, as he stares into his own glassy brown eyes, his rubbery, masklike face. Attila is confused, becoming more agitated by the moment. Something strange and awful is stirring in his soul. He feels alienated by his own reflection.

From the moment Natalie arrived, Attila had detected an odd, unsettling smell—a mixture of the apricot scent of her shampoo, her minty deodorant, even the slight acrid whiff of nail polish on her toes. There was something queasy, bad, sickening about the combination of smells on her. All those grubby odors mingled with the worst smell of all—the scent of her, her resentment of him, her disgust. He smelled that. He had smelled her contempt.

That’s why he had tricked her.

Attila returns to his cage. From the corner he retrieves what looks like a children’s toy tablet. It is a PECS—a Picture Exchange Communication System—a talking touch-screen laptop designed to help teach language to autistic children, which Oz has used in his experiments with Attila.

On the screen are rows of pictures, things that Attila might want, such as bananas, peanuts, balls, and dolls. Also scattered among the columns are pictures of faces displaying various expressions.

Again and again, Attila presses the picture representing himself, and then the face in the lower right-hand corner of the grid.

“Attila, angry!” says the chipper, computerized female voice to the empty apartment. “Attila, angry!”